American Writers

Loose Talk: On Richard Ford

The two primary modes or tendencies in Richard Ford's fiction are juxtaposed most prominently in The Sportswriter and Rock Springs, published in 1986 and 1987, respectively. Rock Springs is a collection of short stories set in the Western United States, in and around Great Falls, Montana in particular. The stories in the book evoke the relative desolation of this landscape where the prairie meets the mountains, reflecting the desolation in the lives of many of the characters. Although few of the stories rely heavily on plot in any melodramatic way, most of them do emphasize incident and event, related in a generally brisk, translucent prose. Early in his career, Ford was often linked to minimalism (he was friends with Carver and Tobias Wolff), and Rock Springs, which gathers together the short stories he wrote before publishing The Sportswriter, comes closer than any of other Ford's other books to showing why such a connection might have been made, even though his subsequent books reveal him to be a very different sort of writer.

That different sort of writer makes his presence felt in The Sportswriter. Here the subject and the manner ultimately most closely associated with Richard Ford's fiction appears for the first time, to be developed further and at great length in the two subsequent novels in what came to be (for now) a trilogy about the protagonist of The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land. The setting of these novels is the American suburbs (specifically New Jersey, but each of them could easily take place in some other middle-class suburb), which is also evoked in its own contrasting particulars (whether the suburban environment reflects a desolation of its own sort is perhaps open to interpretation, although certainly narrator/protagonist Frank Bascombe would deny it). The greatest contrast between this writer and the writer who wrote the stories collected in Rock Springs is that in the Bascombe trilogy incident and event recede in importance, acting not as the these novels' main focus of interest but instead as the occasional links between Frank Bascombe's rhetorical digressions, his choral commentary on events, as well as his frequent flashbacks, requiring our attention more than the plot itself.

Although both of these writers are realists, the first writer, whose work can also be found in the 1990 novel Wildlife, as well as, to a lesser extent, in Ford's first two novels, A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck, did seem to be participating in the revival of realism post-postmodernism that prominently included the minimalists, and if Rock Springs does not now seem appropriately categorized as minimalism, it still does share with the minimalism of such writers as Carver, Wolff, Bobbie Ann Mason, or Mary Robison the seemingly deliberate attempt not merely to return to realism after the anti-realism of postmodernism, but to fashion a particular sort of realism that responded to the perceived excesses of postmodern experimentation by evoking a new simplicity of form and style.

The stories in Rock Springs, like those of Carver or Robison, offer the reader a narrative, but not much dramatic action. Most of them are a kind of retrospective slice-of-life in which a first-narrator recalls a signal moment from the past, one that represents a life-changing or -defining episode or in some cases perhaps even approaches being an emblematic moment in American life more generally. Often the story features an adult looking back on his youth (all of the narrators and protagonists are male), recounting a series of events in a more or less dispassionate manner, although the events seldom take on the burden of an imposed "plot." A man remembers going hunting with his mother's boyfriend ("Communist"). Another relates the experience of returning home with his father and encountering his mother's lover still in the house ("Great Falls"). In "Children," the narrator recalls going fishing with his Indian friend and a young prostitute.

Some of the stories certainly depict characters in extreme or unusual situations. In "Sweethearts," a man and his girlfriend drive her ex-husband to prison, where he will be serving time for robbery. In what may be the most conventionally "dramatic" story, "Optimists," again a man returns to his youth and tells us of the day his father killed a man, although this occurs halfway through the story, which concludes with a flash-forward to the present day and the narrator's chance encounter with his mother, whom he has not seen in fifteen years. This story also illustrates the way in which many of the stories come to a poetically pointed conclusion, giving them a sense of emotional completeness somewhat similar to the way Carver's stories work:

And she bent down and kissed my cheek through the open window and touched my face with both her hands, held me for a moment that seemed like a long time before she turned away, finally, and left me there alone.

The best-known story in the book, the title story, is justly esteemed as a representative example of the sort of neorealism that increasingly began to shift the paradigm away from literary postmodernism during the 1980s. It is a particularly skillful performance, and as the first story in the book it establishes the dominant tone sustained by the rest of the stories and as well introduces us to the prevailing strategies they employ. This story especially might have reminded readers of Carver, as its narrator is the sort of socially marginal male character featured in so many of his stories. The unnamed narrator begins as he and his daughter and his girlfriend are driving through Wyoming: "Edna and I had started down from Kalispell, heading for Tampa-St. Pete where I still had friends from the old days who wouldn't turn me in to the police." The narrator is more a hapless figure than a dangerous fugitive, and the story really only reinforces his haplessness as Edna decides while they are stopping over in Rock Springs that she is going to leave him. The story concludes with the narrator wondering

what would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the window of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn? Would you think he was trying to get his head cleared? Would you think he was trying to get ready for a day when trouble would come down on him? Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him? Would you think he had a daughter? Would you think he was anybody like you?

At this stage in Ford's career he seems most interested in characters waiting for trouble to come down, a condition that gains most resonance in these stories set in the American West. Although he will return to this setting in two subsequent novels, the disreputable outsider who may not be so different from us is replaced in The Sportswriter by Frank Bascombe, a putative Everyman character who may be representative of the American middle class in his obsession with the circumstances of his situation, but is surely unusual in his ability to dilate on them over the course of three long books. Many would no doubt consider the three books in the Bascombe trilogy to be "voice"-centered books, an impression created not just by Bascombe's role as first-person narrator but also by his remarkable passivity as a character. But what really most distinguishes Frank Bascombe is the sheer verbosity of his discourse, his inclination to explain and qualify, resulting in a prose that is indeed very far from the minimalism of Carver or Wolff.

All three of these books can give the impression they are about nothing in particular, but they are more like a collection of serial narratives interrupted for great periods of time by the narrator's need to enlarge upon context and motive and to offer his wisdom about living in the American suburbs. One can turn to almost any random page in any of the books and find such disquisitions, but early on in The Sportswriter this rhetorical tendency starts to assert itself. Bascombe tells us about a group he has joined called "the Divorced Men's Club," and before he can go on to relate the events of a recent meeting, he must provide us with some reflections on his membership in the group:

Though there's another reason I don't leave the club. And that is that none of the five of us is the type to be in a club for divorced men--none of us in act even seems to belong in a place like Haddam--given our particular circumstances. And yet we are there each time,as full of dread an timidness as conscripts to a firing squad, doing what we can to be as chatt6 and polite as Rotarians--ending nights, wherever we are, talking about life and sports and business, hunched over our solemn knees, some holding  red-ended cigarettes as the boat heads into the lighted dock, or before last call at the Press Box Bar on Walnut Street, all doing our best for each other and for non-confessional personal experience. Actually we hardly know each other and sometimes can barely keep the ball moving before a drink arrives. Likewise there have been times when I couldn't wait to get away and promised myself never to come back. . . .

Bascombe is never content simply to narrate his experiences but seems compelled to explain himself. It's never made clear how exactly Bascombe has come to write the accounts we are reading, but he clearly enough takes the opportunity to chronicle his life more to ponder his actions and muse over their implications than to focus directly on these actions as story. That Bascombe is a sportswriter--at least in the first novel--perhaps explains his facility with language (as does his earlier, aborted career as a writer of fiction), but it is also otherwise at odds with the expository, highly discursive kind of narrative that dominates each of these novels. Here, the Richard Ford who created the relatively spare stories of Rock Springs has been replaced by one who at most embeds "story" in his character's extended monologue, which is so leisurely paced as to make the novels seem formless aside from the continuation of that monologue.

What makes Frank Bascombe's endless soliloquy even harder to take is that Frank is himself such a passive, indistinct character that ultimately he doesn't have much of a presence in these novels except through his inescapable narrative voice. He interacts with various other characters over the course of each novel--the members of the Divorced Men's Club, clients to whom he is trying to sell a home (after giving up sportswriting and becoming a real estate agent), his troubled son--but his own role is so severely circumscribed that he almost disappears as a participant in the events he relates. Perhaps this is the continued influence of the vocation of sportswriting, as Frank deliberately restricts himself to describing the actions of his "subjects" and in a sense interviewing them, recording their conversations with him. (At times Frank does indeed deflect questions about himself or his own views in order to elicit further talk from the subjects, as if he is taking on the role of psychoanalyst as well, prompting his patients to "dig deeper.") In many ways Frank Bascombe seems missing from his own life. One might argue that this is a condition to which the author wants explicitly to call our attention, but three novels' worth of absent protagonist would seem to be a little far to go in making such a point.

The combined effect of Frank Bascombe's blankness as a character and his prolixity as a narrator is that these three novels in which he is featured cumulatively leave the impression we are proceeding through a series of Scenes from Suburban Life, with Frank Bascombe as our guide, but it's never quite clear what is supposed to be holding these scenes together aside from the fact they ostensibly involve Frank Bascombe and he presumably finds them important. Individual episodes sometimes have dramatic interest and emotional resonance (Bascombe's trip with his son to the Baseball Hall of Fame, for example), but they are constantly muted by the return to Bascombe's discursive mode and the lack of any noticeable change in his impassive narrative manner as a consequence of the experiences these episodes represent. Bascombe frequently declares his allegiance to the suburbs, yet his account does little either to defend or critique suburban life, which is presented as a collection of mostly impersonal, undifferentiated activities.

The Bascombe trilogy is, of course, frequently compared to John Updike's Rabbit novels as a portrait of American life over the course of succeeding decades and of its male protagonist's advance into middle age. The comparison is not ultimately in Ford's favor, however, and not only because no one of the Bascombe books can match Rabbit, Run, or even Rabbit is Rich, in either its narrative power or the quality of its prose. Rabbit, Run was not conceived as the first installment of a series that would chronicle postwar American life and the changes in its culture but as the story of its protagonist's existential crisis, a crisis that is occurring, at least retrospectively, at a time when American middle-class values are about to be profoundly challenged and, ultimately, transformed. No doubt it seemed a potentially fruitful idea subsequently for Updike to take Rabbit Angstrom through those changes as they eventually announced themselves, and if not all of the books succeed equally well in balancing the continued focus on Rabbit as an emblematic figure and social observation, as a whole the series does offer both a compelling character and a convincing evocation of the American cultural milieu in the second half of the 20th century.

Taken together, The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land really do neither. The portrayal of their main character is static and colorless, the setting perfunctory. Future readers of this trilogy will surely find neither a memorable character in conflict with himself or his surroundings nor an enlightening perspective on suburban culture in the late 20th/early 21st centuries. It's hard to imagine many would want to follow a narrator-protagonist such as Frank Bascombe, who has so little interest in examining his own inner life but also can't muster anything more than the most superficial examination of others and of their social context, through three novels, even if The Sportswriter presents some mild interest as a period piece. While one finds Bascombe "saying" a lot (indeed, going on and on and on in saying it), he can't be accused finally of "saying something" about suburbia as a significant feature of American civilization. Bascombe frequently avers that he is defending suburban life, but his account of it in these three novels neither champions nor attacks it. The suburb is just a place where some things happen in relation to Frank Bascombe.

Immediately after The Sportswriter, Ford seemed to return to the Western milieu and to the sort of characters found in Rock Springs in his 1990 novel, Wildlife. Indeed, this novel seems like an extended version of the stories from Rock Springs focusing on a troubled family, such as "Great Falls" or "Optimists." Wildlife, set in Great Falls in 1960, tells the story of the breakup of the Brinson family through the first-person account offered by the son and only child, Joe. During the few weeks in which the story takes place, Joe's mother takes up with another man, and his father, a golf pro, loses his job and then volunteers to help fight an out-of-control forest fire. Upon his return, he discovers his wife's liaison and half-heartedly attempts to burn down the other man's house. Despite these events, the narrator concludes his chronicle of them by informing us that his parents shortly afterward began living together again, something about which Joe concedes "there is still much to it that I myself, their only son, cannot fully claim to understand."

Perhaps Joe's failure to "understand" his parent's actions explains why, unlike Frank Bascombe, he spends little time in purely expository rumination and instead focuses on simply relating what happened and reproducing conversations through dialogue. The story is in fact rather crisply told, and the narrator's broader uncertainty about the behavior of his parents, and the motives behind it, gives the novel a kind of elegiac tone, preserving a sense of mystery about that behavior that makes the family dysfunction portrayed in Wildlife seem a more perplexing, and thus even more disturbing, affliction. If all of Ford's fiction can broadly be categorized as "realism," only Rock Springs and Wildlife seem really to trust it as a self-sufficient mode of narrative construction, the realism of character and setting achieved through the unencumbered narration of events presented as of intrinsic interest, needing no rhetorical embellishment of the kind Frank Bascombe insists on providing. The realism of the Bascombe trilogy seems taken for granted, as if the setting and events are a mere convenience enabling Frank's digression-laden recitation of them.

Ford's most recent novel, Canada, at first seems a return to the narrative-centered realism of Wildlife and Rock Springs. Set again on the Western plains in the early 1960s, and again narrated retrospectively by a man looking back at the dysfunction that tore apart his family, Part One tells the inherently dramatic story of how narrator Dell Parsons's parents became bank robbers, of their eventual capture after botching the one robbery they attempt (in North Dakota), and of Dell and his sister's meetings with their parents in prison after they have been arrested. This section of the book moves along reasonably well, but even it is interspersed with the narrator's reflections in a way that is uncomfortably reminiscent of Frank Bascombe:

I've always believed that how our mother looked must've played a part in the way she changed and became tranquil while we waited for my father to come home and take life where it would go. How she looked--her size (the same height as Shirley Temple when she was fifteen), her appearance (rarely smiling, bespectacled, her studious Jewish foreignness) her visible disposition (skeptical, sharp-witted, self-defending, frequently distant)--had always seemed to be involved in everything she thought or said, as if her appearance created her whole self. This may be true of anyone. But everything about her distinguished her in any of the places our family ever lived--which wouldn't have been true in Poland or Israel or even New York or Chicago, where plenty of people looked and acted like her. . . .

This tendency becomes even more pronounced in Part Two, in which, at his mother's request, Dell is driven by a friend of the family across the border into Saskatchewan, where he is to live for a while with the friend's brother. The brother turns out to be a rather sinister figure, apparently a murderer, although by the time this is established conclusively readers expecting Canada to sustain the dramatic momentum established, however inconsistently, in Part One have surely concluded at the least that the novel's second half will not follow up on the first half's emphasis on narrative. The revelations of Arthur Remlinger's true nature and nefarious deeds occur at such a glacial pace and amid such expository ramblings that it's hard to either be surprised or ultimately care very much when indeed it turns out he is a murderer. If this section is meant to build up suspense or a sense of foreboding on behalf of the already victimized Dell Parsons, it fails miserably. The two sections go together so badly, in fact, it's as if they cancel each other out: Part One makes Part Two seem aesthetically inert if not just redundant, while Part Two makes Part One seem an incomplete if extended fragment, or an already sufficiently realized work that has been yoked to another for reasons that remain unclear.

At best, the sojourn in Saskatchewan seems merely to reinforce the most obvious theme of the story of Dell's parents as bank robbers, as Dell grapples with the unpredictable, destructive behavior of those adults who are supposed to be looking out for him and becomes more aware of human weakness. At worst (at least for the reader), it allows Dell to indulge in such prolonged stretches of tedium as when he reproduces what Charley Quarters, who works for Remlinger, tells him is "the whole story of Arthur Remlinger." It turns out that Remlinger is indeed a bad man, but since we could know that without the benefit of this pace-killing flashback, and since Remlinger is neither "bad" in a particularly interesting way, nor is finally a very interesting character, this added-on piece of extended exposition only further diverts interest from a narrative that has already lost its way on the spacious prairies of Saskatchewan. It also further diverts interest from Dell himself as a character, here without the compensatory interest of the story of bankrobbing parents he tells in the novel's fist half.

To be fair, none of the narrators in these Montana-based works really have interest as protagonists aside from their role as observer and passive participant in the story related. In this way they are indeed similar to Frank Bascombe, but in this case the narrator's penchant for the same kind of rhetorical excess as Bascombe makes him that much less dynamic once the family drama has concluded and his personal drama must serve as the focus of concern. It as if Bascombe himself has been transplanted into the persona of Dell Parsons. Although Dell's circumstances are more elemental, his story more metaphysically charged, he bears the same sort of dispassionate relationship to the world he observes, conveyed through the same sort of bloated discourse. His weakness as both character and narrative presence is exacerbated by the disappearance in the novel's second half of his sister, Berner, a fellow sufferer through the family trauma who has already taken off on her own when Dell is removed to Canada. She does return in the novel's final, very brief, section, where we learn that Dell subsequently had little contact with her and that she has suffered the consequences of her parents' acts more acutely than Dell. Somehow it seems likely that the story of how Berner's life was changed by the events chronicled in Canada would be more interesting than what Dell tells us of his encounter with Arthur Remlinger, but that story unfortunately remains out of frame, unnarrated.

In his review of the novel, Sean O'Hagan claimed that it "marks a distinct shift in style. . .from the dense, discursive sentences that characterise the Frank Bascombe trilogy," such that "the writing is leaner, tighter and less concerned with the inner significance of everyday things." This is a view that can be maintained only if one forgets Rock Springs (in which the writing really is "leaner") or ignores the "shift" in Canada itself from the ostensibly similar style of its first half to the more "discursive" second half. Andre Dubus III was certainly correct to note that in Canada, as well as the Bascombe books, "what actually happens in the story feels secondary," although when he further declares that plot is "at best equal. . .to the language itself," he is certainly implying that the language represents an aesthetic achievement making plot to a degree superfluous, a satisfactory substitute for plot. This is exactly where Ford goes wrong, in my opinion, both in the Bascombe trilogy and in Canada. Contrary to Dubus III, I find the loose, meandering language of these books only calls attention to the lack of plot (as well as character), which proves to be a deadly combination. Realism doesn't need plot to realize its ambition to plausibly represent reality, but it does need something beyond endless talk about reality.

Darkness and Light: On A.M. Homes

The books that brought A.M. Homes her initial notoriety (and her work did become rather notorious), the story collection The Safety of Objects (1990) and the novel The End of Alice (1996) are clearly designed to provoke, especially in their choice of subjects. The first story in The Safety of Objects, "Adults Alone," chronicles the increasing degradations of a married couple who take advantage of the temporary absence of their children to behave very badly indeed (including buying and smoking crack). In "Looking for Johnny," a young boy is kidnapped by a pedophile only to be released when he turns out to be too annoying. "Slumber Party" and "A Real Doll" are disquieting accounts of pre-pubescent sexuality that evoke an atmosphere of equal parts innocence and menace. The End of Alice, of course, picks up the themes of predation and adolescent sexuality in its story of a child killer and his prison correspondence with an adult woman who confesses to her own desire for a young boy.

If much of this early fiction is disturbing in its content, it is also carefully crafted. The stories are narratively efficient, well-paced and skillfully structured, they make canny use of point of view, and are crisply written. Homes's style has at various times been called "minimalist," but the relative economy and transparency of style in Home's fiction is less an attempt to simplify language for its own sake than it is the result of her emphasis on plot--not so much in the sense she creates the "well-made story" but in that the stories in The Safety of Objects (as well as the later collection Things You Should Know) mostly focus on event, on what the characters do. There's not much psychological probing in these stories; in fact, the unsettling overtones in a story like "Adults Alone" are produced by the withholding of access to the characters' psychological states, leaving us to wonder what must be going through their minds as they act out in their newly found freedom from responsibility. The lack of "poetic" affectation in Home's prose style keeps our attention centered on the actions that, at the same time, we must ourselves attempt to understand absent any more directly provided psychological motivation.

The End of Alice is not structured as a linear narrative, although there certainly is some "development" in the protagonist's situation and state of mind from the beginning of the novel to its conclusion, nor is there a single "plot" aside from the visible stages in this development. Instead, the novel parcels out the actions in three separate, alternating stories-- of the aging pedophile and his experiences in prison, of the young woman and her attempts to seduce the young object of her desire, and, ultimately, of the narrator's encounter with "Alice," the twelve year-old girl for whose murder the narrator was convicted. As in the short stories, however, the intertwining plots in The End of Alice are presented with all due attention to dramatic effect, to their potential for mystery and suspense. Even though the first-person narrative allows for some degree of discursive meandering, this is done primarily in the service of character creation, as it draws us, unwillingly perhaps, closer to the "human" side of an otherwise monstrous character.

The narrator never exactly comes to seem a likable character, but that we must suspend our judgment of him until his chronicle is complete, and must inevitably accept that he is both a human being and a monster, is surely the most immediate reason The End of Alice is a disconcerting book to read, even before we can assimilate the often abhorrent events the narrator relates. Homes manages this atmospheric balance very well, sustaining the intrepid reader's forebearance until the narrator finally arrives at his moment of reckoning at the novel's conclusion. This is not the only aesthetic success Homes achieves through her use of the pedophile narrator, however. That he does come to acknowledge the reality of his crime only at the very end of the novel means that, at least in retrospect (although the reader will have suspected as much all along), the narrator's entire account must be distrusted, that he is an unreliable narrator of the most radical sort. It is possible that everything he has told us--about his female correspondent and her trysts with the young boy, about his own past, perhaps even about his ongoing experiences in the prison--is a fiction of his own making. It has always seemed possible, even probable, that his narration of the young lady's actions has been an embellishment of her letters, the details largely provided by the narrator's imagination, but ultimately we can't really be sure of the existence of either the girl or the letters.

It seems unlikely that Homes would expect this most radical reading of her narrator's unreliability, but the character she has created and the story she wants to tell require that she exploit the potential for dramatic irony and the inherent uncertainties and possibilities for deception (including self-deception) implicit in the use of first-person narration to the fullest, and thus nothing prevents us from regarding the entire narrative, the narrator's "confession" as a whole, as fictional not just in the sense that it has been invented by the novelist but as the character's own fiction, contrived by him during the time of its telling. At the very least, this possibility ought to prompt those who recoil from this novel's depiction of a child killer and his mentally unbalanced fan to consider that what Homes is offering us is not so much a sensational story about unspeakable acts but an extended verbal portrait of a diseased mind, one that avoids the conventional strategies of "psychological realism"--"exploring" consciousness through the "free indirect" mode--by letting the character speak to us directly, but also creating the possibility we might need to read his words skeptically, assuming he might not exactly be speaking the truth. Taken this way, should we really be surprised the novel confronts us with a morally compromised character whose account of himself reflects his morally degraded state?

I would not contend that The End of Alice is really an ingenious work of metafiction that is more about the processes and implications of fiction-making than child sexual abuse or prison life. However, to read the book as at least partially metafictional does not reduce it to literary game-playing, nor does it lessen the novel's visceral impact. The insights into the mind and habits of a child rapist/murderder are just as sound, the juxtaposition of his story and that of his correspondent is just as chilling, and the voice Homes has provided her sociopathic narrator is just as creepily seductive whether we accept his recital of the "facts" as literal or whether we assume he is dissembling. Further, regarding the pedophile narrator as also an author of fiction if anything only makes the novel more provocative. If as the story of a notorious child killer it forces us to confront the reality that such people exist, on its second level as implied metafiction it asks us to consider the creation of such a story in the first place--what is more disturbing, the actions of a sociopathic child molester and murderer, or the imagination of the writer who finds it must be extended to this sort of character? The subject of The End of Alice may seem extreme, but isn't the literary imagination itself drawn to extremity? Isn't it the job of the literary imagination to inhabit human experiences about which we might prefer not to know?

Homes's later novels certainly depict characters themselves in extremity, but they represent a shift away from both the thematic concerns and the formal assumptions of The End of Alice. These novels drop the metafictional frame and concentrate solely on the often extravagant actions and frenetic events in which they become embroiled. They are more straightforwardly comic in tone (although the comedy is never very far away from terror), and where Alice is tightly and rather intricately structured, they are much looser, resolutely more linear, essentially picaresque narratives in which one thing follows another. They retreat to the suburbs as their setting, where anomie and negligence prevail rather than radical evil. They are still clearly intended to provoke, but more through their absurdist humor than through metaphysical and psychosexual inquiry.

The first of these novels, Music For Torching (1999), takes the married couple of "Adults Alone" and follows them as they engage in more bad behavior, including setting their own home on fire. The narrative of their actions is not exactly surreal, although the reader does have to accept that both the characters and the situation are at such a point of maximum disorder that practically anything might happen. Generally this makes the novel seem suspended precariously between farce and tragedy, a delicate act that is somewhat undone by the decidedly grave event at the novel's conclusion. This version of black humor elevates this novel (as well as Homes's subsequent novels) beyond suburban social satire, although some satirical elements are inevitably present. Too much is at stake, and there is simultaneously so little indication that the behavior and milieu depicted are open to amelioration through mockery, for us to rest safe in the more comforting assumptions of satire. The relentless progression of the story, here and in the subsequent novels, toward disarray and confusion creates an impression that the fate endured by the characters is simply a consequence of being alive and human.

Music for Torching is the first of Homes's novels to incorporate what in a later interview she described as "an everything but the kitchen sink" strategy, "where you're constantly adding something on top" of what came before, in order to keep the narrative "moving forward." Homes further contends that this is "reflective of what many people's lives are like," but certainly Homes concentrates on that period in her characters' lives in which the succession of events is almost unceasingly calamitous, whereby the kitchen sink is eventually filled with mostly muck and debris. Somewhat similar to the way the Naturalist novel sends its characters on a trajectory of inevitable disaster, these novels chronicle what seem inescapably unhappy experiences. In this way, they are still clearly intended to disturb, but they rely less on disturbing images, situations, or psychologically questionable characters and more on plot itself for this effect.

This Book Will Save Your Life( 2007) and Homes's most recent novel, May We Be Forgiven, perhaps enact this strategy even more emphatically, in a way that makes them to a degree seem continuous with each other. Both books focus on a middle-aged male protagonist who suddenly seems to lost control of his heretofore stable life. This Book Will Save Your Life begins with its protagonist, Richard Novak, a wealthy player of the stock market, looking out his window as if seeing what is outside it for the first time, realizing that "Everything today is not the same, and yet it is exactly the same and it can never be the same again." Almost simultaneously he has acquired a mysterious, crippling pain throughout his body and he has noticed a sinkhole forming in his yard. He has been shaken out of his expectation that everything will continue to be "exactly the same," and his sense that "it can never be the same again" is confirmed continuously as he now begins a journey in the world he has previously kept safely on the other side of that window glass.

The journey takes place very much in a serial, picaresque fashion, the story moving relentlessly ahead, with seemingly little regard for workshop notions of "arc" or narrative shapeliness. The events depicted aren't exactly random, as clearly, at least in the initial stages of Novak's odyssey, Homes is subjecting him to the forces of disorder, as if after avoiding his share of bad fortune for so long, he is now encountering it all at once. Eventually forced to leave his home because the sinkhole continues to grow larger, Novak becomes a kind of involuntary picaro making his way through a Los Angeles he almost literally has never seen before. Eventually he winds up in a beach house in Malibu, where another natural disaster overtakes him at the end of the novel, but along the way he does encounter--in this case, more or less randomly--a group of characters, including the owner of a doughnut shop, an alienated housewife, and a famous writer (although Novak does not know he is famous), who, as he gets to know them, do begin not just to help him accomodate himself to his new reality but to act as the catalysts for his transformation into a more aware and charitable human being. He also begins to repair his relationship with his son, with whom he has had little constructive contact since his divorce.

Novak's tentative redemption is certainly tempered by the novel's portrayal of Los Angeles as a strange and synthetic place itself hardly supportive of human happiness, its indifference epitomized by the near-apocalyptic mudslide that sweeps Novak into the sea in the novel's concluding scene. Still, This Book Will Save Your Life winds up being much more affirming of the possibility for real human connection, of the existence of sincere, non-exploitive human emotion, than her previous work would have prepared us to expect. This quality is, however, sufficiently modulated by the persisting sense things could still spiral out of control without warning that the novel doesn't seem sentimental or the affirmation forced.

Nonetheless, This Book Will Save Your Life received mixed reviews at best, while some outright pronounced the novel a failure. Ron Charles dismissed it as a "tepid satire," criticizing the novel's narrative as one in which the protagonist "meanders through a series of chance encounters," both misunderstanding its ambition and failing to appreciate its picaresque strategy. If its intent was indeed primarily satirical, one might with cause find it rather tepid in its force, but Homes is not a satirist, however much her fiction takes present attitudes and social arrangements as the superficial patina overlaying setting and incident. Homes seems most interested in the more elemental impulses motivating her characters, the expressions of which work themselves out in the specific milieu in which the characters find themselves. Likewise, one could say the narrative "meanders," but of course this finally to say merely that a picaresque narrative, after all an old and venerable form, is one that by design meanders.

One could more with more justice claim that the most recent novel, May We Be Forgiven, simply repeats the strategy and many of the themes of This Book Will Save Your Life. Again a picaresque story focusing on the simultaneous disintegration and renewal of a middle-aged man's suddenly eventful life, it doesn't finally provide any new variation on the strategy employed successfully by its predecessor, although if anything the first half of May We Be Forgiven is more harrowing in its chronicle of protagonist Harold Silver's plunge into chaos than the parallel account of Richard Novak's less radical change in circumstances. Silver commits adultery with his brother's wife, and is caught in bed with her by the brother, who kills his wife but spares Silver. This leads to the end of Silver's own marriage, and Silver's misfortune culminates in the loss of his job as a history professor (specializing in Richard Nixon). Along the way he also has to deal with the legal and financial consequences of brother George's act, which eventually become very bizarre indeed.

George's children have become orphans, so Silver must also begin caring for them, something he is completely unprepared to do. Suffice it to say that it is Silver's experiences with the children that begin to lead him on the path to reintegration not unlike the one followed by Richard Novak, except that in this case Homes doesn't quite avoid sentimentality and the impression that Silver is being force marched on the way to deliverance so that the novel and its "vision" might be appropriately balanced between the horrors of the novel's first half and the possibility for hope in alternatives increasingly communicated in the second. Silver also acquires an additional family of friends who at first are strangers to him, similar to Novak's chance encounters with people to whom he becomes attached, and while some of these characters and the circumstances in which Silver meets them are "quirky" in a pleasing enough way,his motley collection of acquaintances is so transparently transformed into an "alternative family" the effect at best simply falls flat, at worst is such an implausible solution to the existential dilemma faced by such characters as Harold Silver and Richard Novak it's a little hard to believe Homes expects it to be taken seriously. At times Silver's reshuffling of priorities becomes almost embarrassingly trite, as in the extended sequence in which he takes his now virtually adopted children to South Africa and engages in good works on behalf of the local population.

The extreme contrast between the darkness that envelops Silver's life in the first part of May We Be Forgiven and the light that has come into it by the end of the novel is an even more pronounced development of the affirmative impulse introduced in This Book Will Save Your Life. But where the qualified optimism implied by Richard Novak's awakening to life outside his privileged sanctuary seems aesthetically well-calibrated, if decidedly a break from the bleaker vision expressed in her earlier fiction, in May We Be Forgiven, Harold Silver's transformation is both unconvincing and aesthetically unjustified, as if the picaresque must inevitably culminate in "growth" or otherwise lead to a hopeful conclusion. The first book might have been taken as a fuller exploration of the "everything but the kitchen sink" approach begun with Music for Torching, but May We Be Forgiven seems both superfluous and a repudiation of the bracing, clear-eyed chronicles of human depravity to be found in The Safety of Objects and The End of Alice.

In this way the new novel is a rather ominous portent. On the one hand, that Homes might be interested in pursing the further possibilities of her version of the picaresque form is commendable, as this is a form whose potential is greatly underrated. On the other, if she has now seized upon it as the vehicle for conveying a new, and ultimately sentimental, version of a fallen world now amenable to reform through good intentions and a positive attitude, I, for one, don't think she'll any longer have anything very inspired to contribute to American fiction.

Aimee Bender

In a review of Aimee Bender's Willful Creatures,  CL Bledsoe concludes that "Bender is that most daring of writers, who will take any risk, regardless of the consequences." I couldn't disagree more. I've read The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures, and I don't think she takes any risks at all. Her stories display only a kind of surrealistic whimsy that I, for one, find mostly cloying.

Take, for example, "Ironhead," a story from Willful Creatures that Bledsoe singles out for discussion, claiming it is a story in which Bender "portray[s] even the oddest characters not simply as running gags, but with emotional depth." It is hard for me to find the "emotional depth" in passages like this, which to the contrary exhibit only a cartoon-like sentimentality: "The ironhead turned out to be a very gentle boy. He played quietly on the his own in the daytime with clay and dirt, and contrary to expectations, he preferred wearing ragged messy clothes with wrinkles. His mother tried once to smooth down his outfits with her own, separated iron, but when the child saw what was his head, standing by itself, with steam exhaling from the flat silver base just like his breath, he shrieked a tinny scream and matching steam streamed from his chin as it did when he was particularly upset. The pumpkinhead mother quickly put the iron away; she understood; she imagined it was much the way she felt when one of her humanhead friends offered her a piece of seaonal pie on Thanksgiving." This is as much "emotional" portrayal of these characters as we get; the rest of the story continues to wring equally asinine changes on an already dopy idea. Once we've registered the unbeguiling notion that a boy has been born with an iron for a head, the story has little to offer. It continues to rely on faux-naive phrasing ("a very gently boy," "played quietly") and an altogther formulaic plot--the iron-headed boy dies, of course, leaving everyone very sad. I suppose one could characterize the story as a "running gag," but then the gag would need to be funny in the first place.

Or take "The End of the Line," in which a "big man" goes to a pet store "to buy himself a little man to keep him company." Nothing in this story (Bledsoe calls it a "surreal parable") is other than predictable and smarmy, once one allows for its tepidly surrealistic premise. "After about the third week. . .the big man took to torturing the little man." The little man contemplates his escape but is unable to accomplish it. The big man sets the little man free, but decides to follow the little man as he drives away in a "small blue bus"--he "just wanted to see where they lived." A (literally) little girl looks up at the "giant" who has found them and wonders at the "size of the pity that kept unbuckling in her heart."

For a "parable" like this to work, in my opinion, it either has to implicitly examine the structural and thematic assumptions of the parable itself  (in the process reconfiguring the possibilities of the form) or it has to manifest some stylistic vigor to compensate for the formulaic nature of parables and fables. Kafka, Borges, Calvino, and Barthleme, for example, are writers able to carry out such tasks, but Bender's stories do neither. Plot exists to reveal the mawkishly cute characters and situations (cute even in their occasional freakishness), but is otherwise so conventional as to be simply perfunctory. And her style is even less interesting, usually just an excuse to "shock" the reader with a seemingly outlandish situation that is really just silly:

The motherfucker arrived at the West Coast from the Midwest. He took a train, and met women of every size and shape in different cities--Tina with the straight-ahead knees in Milwaukee, Annie with the caustic laugh in Chicage, Betsy's lopsided cleavage in Bismark, crazy Heddie in Butte, that lion tamer in Vegas, the smart farm girl from Bakersfield. Finally, he dismounted for good at Union Station in Lost Angeles.

"I fuck mothers," he said to anyone who asked him. "And I do it well."

One could imagine a writer like, say, Stanley Elkin, taking this set-up and running with it, transforming it through his inimitable style and comic imagination into an extended fiction full of narrative ingenuity and aesthetic delight. But in Bender's rendering it becomes an utterly straight-faced account of a man with a quaintly unconventional sexual proclivity who is given to such statements as "Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can't fit under the sky, too large."

I do not mean to single out CL Bledsoe's review for criticism. It has become common for reviewers to identify Bender as a risk-taker, her fiction as an example of what passes for "innovative" writing among the graduates of the better MFA programs. (Bledsoe even comes close to accurately describing Bender's fiction when she calls it "like a rich dessert," except that, for me at least, it is more like sugar overload.) But calling such work innovative or experimental simply because it distorts ordinary reality in some fairy tale-ish sort of way doesn't really do the cause of experimental fiction much good. Experimental fiction challenges the formal constraints imposed by past practices; it does not seek out alternative methods in order, finally, to just tell the same old stories in only superficially different ways. Bender's fiction accepts those constraints and relates decidedly familiar stories dressed up in gaudy but cheap disguises.

Mary Gaitskill

I read Mary Gaitskill's Veronica hoping to have confirmed the judgment that she is "one of the most transgressive American writers working today," as one review put it. I should have known better. Words like "transgressive" and "subversive" are used so promiscuously to describe any fiction that threatens to "critique" reigning norms, just as "innovative" is used reflexively to describe any work that doesn't obediently proceed in the narrative direction prescribed by Freytag's Triangle, that normally I just disregard their invocation as so much boilerplate. Having read in a number of places, however, that Gaitskill was a truly transgressive and unconventional writer, I decided to see what Veronica had to offer.

No doubt I should not take out on Gaitskill my impatience with such critical inflation, but I don't think she's done much to discourage the idea she's a "daring" writer. As it turns out, the attempted transgressions in this novel are entirely transgressions of sexual morality or propriety. In the milieu in which its characters move--the fashion industry, AIDS-frightened New York City in the 1980s--there's lots of sex, much of it exploitative and unhealthy. Apparently we're to be taken aback by passages such as this one:

. . . Alain looked up and smiled. "Do you like [the haircut]?" I asked. He stood and said of course he liked it, it had been his idea. Then he jumped on me.

I say "jumped" because he was quick, but he wasn't rough. He was strong and excessive, like certain sweet tastes--like grocery pie. But he was also precise. It was so good that when it was over, I felt torn open. Being torn open felt like love to me; I thought it must have felt the same to him. I knew he had a girlfriend and that he lived with her. But I was still shocked when he kissed me and sent me home. . . .

Frankly, the idea that the fashion world is full of sexual predators and encourages a sadomasochistic attitude toward sex doesn't come as much of a shock to me. If you really want a disturbing portrayal of the way in which women are inculcated into a kind of reflexive sadomasochism, read Elfriede Jelinek, whose fiction truly transgresses modern myths about sex and romantic love without relying on the superficial adornments of the sociological "expose." Ultimately, all of the characters in Veronica (maybe especially the title character, who is not the novel's protagonist but whose fate is a sort of cautionary supplement to the protagonist's story) seem to have been assigned their roles in a kind of retrospective account of the hedonistic 1980s, but none of them rise above the highly schematic requirements of these roles. They're types, duly chosen to represent various attitudes and excesses of the era:

I wanted something to happen, but I didn't know what. I didn't have the ambition to be an important person or a star. My ambition was to live like music. I didn't think of it that way, but that's what I wanted; it seemed like that's what everybody wanted. I remember people walking around like they were wrapped in an invisible gauze of songs, one running into the next--songs about sex, pain, injustice, love, triumph, each song bursting with ideal characters that popped out and fell back as the person walked down the street or rode the bus.

In his review of the novel, Benjamin Strong writes that "If Veronica has a weakness, it's that it sometimes feels more like a document of the last decade than the current one." Frankly, I'd have just as much trouble with a novel that seems to be a "document" of the current moment as with one that "documents" a previous epoch, but Strong does make a relevant point: Veronica, published in 2005, already seems dated, an evocation of a period and of characters that come off as mere historical curiosities. Francine Prose also describes Veronica as essentially a period piece--"Gaitskill may be, among contemporary authors, the one best-suited to capture, on the page, a period when the marriage of sex and death was such an extraordinarily close one"--but claims to have found reading the book unsettling, "like biting into a nightmare-inducing, virally loaded madeleine. Halfway through, you may find yourself remembering things you'd forgotten about a moment in time when half your friends were dying young, and when you feared that anyone who had ever had sex (including, of course, yourself) was doomed to a premature and hideous demise."

It's telling that for Prose what is "nightmarish" about reading Veronica involves "remembering things you'd forgotten about a moment in time. . . ." What the novel offers is an opportunity to "remember," to recollect from a perspective of relative safety a "moment in time," even if the memories are full of doom and foreboding. But the memories themselves, the effect of being transported back to this time when one realized sex and death could be so nearly aligned, are what is "nightmare-inducing" about the book. Neither its prose, its formal ingenuity, nor even its specific imagery is responsible for its allegedly profound impact. Its status as "document," as a reminder of how traumatic the "AIDS era" was for those who lived through it, remains its primary virtue.

Gaitskill is not a bad writer, but her occasional stylistic flourishes ("her eyes gave off the cold glow of an eel whipping through water") cannot bring its first-person narrator Alison to life as anything other than a stock figure (the unlucky victim of her times) or compensate for the ulitmately bland and unengaging memoir-like structure Gaitskill employs as a way of narrating Alison's life and times. Prose claims that Veronica places no. . .strain on our memory. It creates an atmosphere, provokes a response, and suffuses us with an emotion that we can easily, all too easily, summon up." She means this  as a compliment and apparently believes this makes the novel "unconventional," since we are not requried to revisit the narrative, "searching for some forgotten plot turn, some event or aspect of character." I don't myself find this strategy very unconventional; if anything, it's just a way of reinforcing the cheap appeal to established iconographic images, our cultural memory of the 80s. At best, it's the kind of "newness" that, as I argued in the previous post, is more interested in the sociopolitical than the literary.

I managed to finish Veronica, but if I hadn't decided it might serve as the subject of a post discussing the use of fiction for "captur[ing], on the page, a period," I probably would not have made it through the second half of the novel, which seems especially rote and uninspired. Once I understood Veronica was mostly an excuse for summoning up its chosen "period," I expected it to unfold in a more or less predictable fashion (pun intended). It did.

Jeffrey Eugenides

"Point of view" is an element of fiction that, it seems to me, is often invoked but seldom really appreciated. In our haste to get to the "story," or to ascertain what the work in question has "to say," we acknowledge that the narrative is presented in "third-person" or "first-person," but don't appropriately consider how both of these modes of presentation--as well as their many subtle if less recognized variations--affect the terms of our encounter with both the story told and what is said. This goes well beyond the usual distinctions made between "reliable" and "unreliable" narrators (although this distinction remains important), "omniscience" and "central consciousness," or stories told by the main character and those told by a secondary observer. My reading experiences convince me that point of view is not simply a flourish added to the underlying "content" of fiction, nor a way of establishing "voice," not just a way of providing stability while the story unfolds, but fundamentally conditions our perception of all of the other "elements" of fiction we otherwise might think take precedence: plot, character, setting, etc.

The centrality of point of view in determining the nature of the fictional "world" we are entering in a particular work of fiction became only more obvious to me while reading Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, a novel I had not previously read because I had assumed, mistakenly I must now say, it was written primarily to become a movie, as is the case with so much current "literary fiction." I both admired and enjoyed the novel, and mostly for the same reason. I admired the way in which Eugenides was able to maintain his experiment in first-person plural narration--"we" rather than "I" as the origin of the narrator's voice--and I enjoyed the collective invocation of the Lisbon sisters and the story of their early deaths that the narrative embodies. Much of what I enjoyed in the novel--the detached view of the sisters, the baffled way in which the stand-in narrator attempts to comprehend both the sisters' behavior and the love-trance induced in him and his confederates by their charms, the ultimate mystery of the sisters' decision to do themselves in--have been singled out by some reviewers and commentators as flaws, however, and it does seem to me that this results from an unwillingness to allow the novel's adopted point of view to create the sort of effects it is most naturally inclined to produce.

It is true that we don't ever really get very close to the Lisbon sisters, so that as characters, indeed, as the ostensible protagonists of the story, they don't quite come into focus as much as we might like. They remain wispy, uncertain figures in a novel that inevitably leads us to seek more definition, more certainty. We are just as bewildered by the Lisbon sisters, and just as unclear about what might be going on in that house across the street--the perspective we are forced to assume--as the narrator, but this is not a problem with "characterization." Since there is no satisfactory answer to the question "Why?"--not even the narrator's assiduous efforts to compile "evidence" and interview the Lisbon parents can provide such an answer--or since Eugenides wants to suggest that getting to "know" the Lisbon sisters by taking us inside their heads will leave us no more enlightened, their role as characters in this novel is necessarily limited to the external observations given. To complain about this is to deny the novel its enabling source of expression in the inquiring "we".

It is tempting to say that the narrator(s) become the main characters, but this isn't quite right either. Only occasionally does one of the boys emerge from behind the verbal curtain to assume an active role vis-a-vis one of the sisters--most notably "Trip Fontane," who attempts to court Lux Lisbon--and the narrator's role ultimately is really to testify to the enduring spell cast by the sisters, to give us access to them through a concerted act of memory from which they have never departed:

Our own knowledge of Cecilia kept growing after her death, too, with the same unnatural persistence. Though she had spoken only rarely and had had no real friends, everybody possessed his own vivid memories of Cecilia. Some of us had held her for five minutes as a baby while Mrs. Lisbon ran back into the house to get her purse. Some of us had played in the sandbox with her, fighting over a shovel, or had exposed ourselves to her behind the mulberry tree that grew like deformed flesh through the chain link fence. We had stood in line with her for smallpox vaccinations, had held polio sugar cubes under out tongues with her, had taught her to jump rope, to light snakes, had stopped her from picking her scabs on numerous occasions, and had cautioned her against touching her mouth to the drinking fountain at Three Mile Park. A few of us had fallen in love with her, but had kept it to ourselves, knowing that she was the weird sister.

The Virgin Suicides could thus be called a novel without conventional characters (the closest to a rounded, "sympathetic" character might be Mr. Lisbon, who almost becomes compelling in his cluelessness) and, since the sisters' fate is more or less known from the beginning, not much plot aside from the filling-in of details. If plot and character are what you must have, these no doubt must seem to be irremediable deficiencies, but the narrative method Eugenides employs invites us to cultivate a different relationship with the characters, one that emphasizes wonder over intimacy, and assume a more relaxed attitude toward plot, one that allows for meditation on what happened, not just a serial record of what did happen. The point of view in The Virgin Suicides works to shape a particular kind of fictional space, one that accentuates distance and concealment. Narrating it from some other perspective would have produced a wholly different, in my opinion much more ordinary novel.

Many readers and critics approach The Virgin Suicides for its thematic implications, its depiction of stifling suburbia, a morally unhinged middle class, the decline of the industrial Midwest, etc., but I think even these concerns gain the prominence they do because of the way the narrative is related to us. The near-mythic quality the story takes on, its rendition of decline-and-fall, the implication of the whole community in the unfolding of its collective trauma provide the tale of the Lisbon suicides a heightened drama that substitutes for the lesser drama of mere plot and gives the tale a kind of allegorical resonance. A less well-calibrated narrative strategy would not have accomplished the same effect.

Arthur Phillips

Partisans of "experimental" fiction (I am one) frequently make unequivocal distinctions between a properly experimental and a "conventional" work: The experimental work is formally or stylistically unlike anything that has come before--satisfying Ezra Pound's injunction to "make it new"--while the conventional work merely recapitulates, perhaps with modest variation, an already existing form or style.

If the goal is to identify the truly original, this distinction makes sense, however much it seems to some readers an overly rigid standard or just unnecessary--if a work of literature provides some kind of aesthetic satisfaction (if it's merely "a good read"), what difference does it make if it can be called original or not? In my opinion formal and stylistic innovation is important in maintaining the aesthetic potential of fiction. Without it, fiction becomes just a routinized "entertainment" medium that at best appeals to readers willing to settle for routine entertainment but that at worst itself implicitly denies that fiction has any potential to be "art" except through the skill required to master the moves involved in joining together the familiar elements--plot, character, setting--associated with it as an inherited form. I would not deny that this can be done more or less skillfully (and that the result can be more or less entertaining), but surely it is artistic originality that at the very least introduces a fresh perspective on what might be possible in a particular aesthetic form, and surely this is as true of fiction as of any other of the arts.

Perhaps, however, those of us who would defend experimental fiction against its frequent enough detractors (who usually either do prefer the familiar over the fresh or conveniently judge all literary experiments to be failed experiments) do, wittingly or unwittingly, too quickly discount the value of a work's capacity to "entertain," at least if "entertaining" is defined as that quality of the work that sustains attention, makes the reader feel the reading experience is worth the time spent. I have always thought the greatest experimental fiction precisely manages to both find original means of expression and make that expression entertaining, even traditionally "enjoyable." The fiction of Gilbert Sorrentino, for example, has always seemed to me wildly entertaining, even if it is dedicated first of all to discarding all the conventional ways of providing entertainment through narrative fiction. The same is true of the fiction (and the plays) of Samuel Beckett, if the reader can reconcile the at times farcical premises and occurrences with the bleak view of human existence Beckett presents.

There is also perhaps a middle ground between "experimental" and "conventional" in fiction where writers are able to follow up on (in a sense further experiment with) strategies and techniques first introduced by previous innovative writers, in some cases precisely employing those techniques in a more obvious attempt to turn them to the purposes of familiar literary pleasures. Although some practices that were at one time more daring--fragmented narrative or the move toward "psychological realism" among modernist writers such as Joyce and Woolf, for example--have inevitably become so assimilated as to no longer seem exceptional, others can still be used to credible effect by skillful writers seeking to avoid the most conventionalized assumptions about writing novels or stories. While the results couldn't be called experimental other than in this second-order sense, such works are certainly more adventurous than the great majority of what gets called literary fiction, and might even help convince some readers that more adventurous approaches to both the writing and reading of fiction could have their merits.

One such work is Arthur Phillips's The Tragedy of Arthur. Describable as parody or pastiche, or a combination of the two, the novel actually avoids taking on a structure readers immediately recognize as that of a novel, instead assuming the form of an "introduction" to a putatively newly-discovered play by Shakespeare, along with the text of the play. The introduction hardly exhibits the characteristics of an ordinary scholarly introduction, itself proceeding more as the memoir of "Arthur Phillips," in whose possession the play resides, and as such often satirizes the now-ubiquitous memoir form. The structure is highly reminiscent of Nabokov's Pale Fire, which Phillips has himself acknowledged, although most of the "story" occurs in the memoir itself rather than in the footnotes to the play (which do, however, add another layer of commentary on both the text and its origins.) Whereas Pale Fire works by forcing the reader to read carefully both the poem Nabokov has written and attributed to "John Shade" and the scholarly apparatus that purports to explicate it in order to extract the "real" story its narrator/editor wants to tell (which turns out to be quite an entertaining if outlandish one), The Tragedy of Arthur puts fewer burdens on the reader (at least explicitly); the fictional memoir, humorously tangential as a critical preface to Shakespeare, offers a narrative complete in itself, while the fabricated play could ostensibly also be read separately.

However lightly Phillips executes the formal manipulation, The Tragedy of Arthur is not an ordinary reading experience. It holds in balance several sources of aesthetic tension the reader must still reckon with, tensions left deliberately unresolved. Besides the obvious unresolved question (unresolved within the fictional framework) of whether "The Tragedy of Arthur" is real or fraudulent Shakespeare, we are left to contemplate how much of the story of "Arthur Phillips" is autobiographical and how much invented, which Arthur's life story--pere, fils, or protagonist of the play--is characterized as "tragedy," and whether we are to consider "The Tragedy of Arthur" as "good" Shakespeare, even if it is forged.

It may finally be the aesthetic triumph of this novel that all of these questions remain unanswered, or that they must be answered by individual readers. Although it seems most likely that the con man Arthur Sr. did indeed forge the play, the possibility it is genuine (again, within the fictional framework of the novel) is not foreclosed, as it is not beyond possibility that a "lost" Shakespeare play could one day be found. (At least two plays attributed to Shakespeare are known to be lost.) Moreover, even if it is forged, what does it say about Phillips Sr., something close to a common criminal as portrayed in the novel, that he could nevertheless channel Shakespeare's spirit well enough to produce a plausible simulation? (What does it say about Shakespeare?) (What does it say about Shakespeare that the novelist Arthur Phillips could produce such a simulation? About Arthur Phillips?) That it probably is forged additionally allows us to appreciate Phillips's satire of the "expertise" we assume Shakespeareans possess: their "authentication" of the play is clearly enough part wishful thinking, part craven service to a publisher interested in the project only for the money that might be made.

Phillips invites us to consider his "memoir" authentic as well (much of the information provided seems verifiably true), but ultimately it has to be taken as at least as much a fabrication as "The Tragedy of Arthur," however much Phillips uses real names and seemingly draws on the particulars of his own life and upbringing. Like the play, the introductory memoir has a surface plausibility as "the real thing," but we would be ill-advised to accept it as more than that. It works to reinforce formally what Sam Sacks in his excellent review of the novel called its theme of "the ambiguity of fraud" and in the process reminds us that all memoir is subject to this ambiguity, when it isn't manifestly fraudulent. Fiction, of course, is by definition a "fraud," but it explicitly announces itself as such, and one could say that The Tragedy of Arthur is as much as anything else a playful challenge to our tendencies to read fiction as disguised memoir and to the recent turn to memoir as a more reliable narrative source of literal truth. Readers of fiction will have to be content with the "ambiguity" that accompanies the fraud of fiction.

Such ambiguity (and playfulness) is carried through in the juxtaposition of Arthurs: Arthur the narrator, Arthur his father, Arthur the protagonist of the putative Shakespeare play, and Arthur Phillips, the author of The Tragedy of Arthur. Arthur the younger suffers the tragedy of a broken relationship with his father, Arthur the elder a similar tragedy in his loss of family, but also in the foreshortening of his own life's possibilities through his own mistakes, while King Arthur undergoes the tragedy that often befalls the royal heroes of Shakespeare's tragedies. The "tragedy" of the title perhaps then belongs equally to each, although one might ask whether Arthur Sr.'s forgery might actually represent a final triumph, a successful effort to breathe the same air as his hero Shakespeare, an effort strong enough it has fooled some into regarding it as genuine. The Tragedy of Arthur must represent a triumph for Arthur Phillips as well, a triumph of literary creation that, if it doesn't equal that of Shakespeare, or of Nabokov, is impressive enough and in its ingenuity subtly mocks any sense of "tragedy" involved in the novel's ostensible subject.

Thus finally the question of whether "The Tragedy of Arthur" as forged by either "Arthur Phillips" or Arthur Phillips is credible as Shakespeare is mostly beside the point. Certainly it is credible enough to pass as a claimant to authorship by Shakespeare, and that it be good enough to provoke the controversy depicted is as good as it needs to be. Phillips has undeniably immersed himself in Elizabethan language and culture as rendered by Shakespeare, and part of the fun in reading the play is coming upon those kinds of constructions one always finds puzzling in Shakespeare skillfully approximated. ("When they would have your guts to stuff their pudding-bags.") In my view, what Phillips has done most adeptly with the play is to fully integrate it within the concerns and the structure of the novel as a whole, and critics who have emphasized the mere fact of its presence or who suggest it is in itself the focal point of the novel have conveyed a distorted impression of its actual achievement.

Because The Tragedy of Arthur so emphatically foregrounds form, readers are not as likely to appreciate through it what in Phillips's previous novels seemed to me his strongest talent as a novelist, his facility as a prose stylist. This is on display most conspicuously in Prague, his first novel, and The Song Is You, the novel immediately preceding The Tragedy of Arthur. Although both of these novels feature (for American fiction) somewhat unconventional situations--a group of American expatriates in central Europe, an aging director of television commercials becoming obsessed with a young pop singer--neither of them could be said to be plot-driven. Both appeal through fluency of style. This is especially true of The Song is You (although ultimately Prague is probably the better novel because it seems less hermetically caught in the consciousness of a single protagonist), which intrepidly if eloquently articulates the increasingly rejuvenated mental life of its protagonist as he both surveys his life and pursues his new interest in a beguiling singer and in music in general.

The Irish girl performed that night. The crowd was larger, challenging the bar's legal capacity, and Julian thought she had changed in the last weeks, maybe even developed. She was slightly more coherent as a performer, as a projector of an idea and an image. The previous gig, something had distracted and dislocated her, as when color newsprint is misaligned and an unholy yellow aura floats a fractioned inch above the bright red body of a funny-pages dog. It had been perhaps the bass player's mistakes, or, if the hipster snob was to be credited, the seductively whispering approach of success. No matter: she was clearer tonight, even if he could still see her strive, from one song to the next, for an array of effects: the casually ironic urban girl, the junkie on the make, the desperate Irish lass whose love was lost to the Troubles, the degenerate schoolgirl, the lover by the fire with skin as velvet succulent as rose-petal flesh. . . .

With The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips shows that as a novelist he has formidable control of both form and language. This was to an extent evident as well in The Egyptologist and in the Jamesian manipulations of point of view in Angelica, but Arthur confirms he is not an ordinary novelist rehearsing the same workshop-imposed conventions. I do not necessarily expect a new Arthur Phillips novel to revitalize the avant-garde, but I have come to expect it will exist outside the mold to which too many novels reflexively conform, formally and stylistically. His novels may lag behind Nabokov or Beckett or Sorrentino in adventurousness, but they do perhaps make some readers aware that more adventurous approaches are possible, and can even bring pleasure.

Max Apple

Max Apple's debut, the short story collection The Oranging of America, was published in 1976, and in retrospect seems a kind of transitional work between the energetic postmodern comedy represented by, say, Stanley Elkin and the sort of "minimalism" practiced by a writer like Bobbie Ann Mason, whose fiction was widely noted for its references to the various brand names and other cultural artifacts of contemporary American popular culture. Apple's fiction, both in The Oranging of America and his 1978 novel, Zip, shared the comic perspective of Elkin's fiction, although in a somewhat more muted, less astringent way, but it also signalled some paring-down of postmodern excess, an affinity with the minimalists and their implicit critique of maximalist postmodernism, their return to quieter forms of storytelling.

To some extent, we have been deprived of the opportunity to witness Apple's further development of this hybrid mode of fiction. Since Zip, he has published only two other works of fiction, the 1984 collection Free Agents and a second novel, The Propheteers. Free Agents was actually an even stronger set of stories than The Oranging of America (with its famous title story about motel magnate Howard Johnson), more adventurous, less tied to conventional narrative. (Oranging was innovative in terms of subject matter, but not so much in the narrative forms employed.) It includes several stories that provocatively blur the lines between fiction and autobiography, employing "Max Apple" as their protagonists, while some of the other stories, such as "An Offering" and "Post-Modernism," are humorously unconventional in form (the former is an initial stock offering for "Max Apple, Inc.," which markets Max Apple's "private fantasies" through "stories, novels, and essays fit for mass consumption"), what might be considered kinder, gentler versions of postmodernism--which the latter story describes as the effort to compensate for the fact that writers "are stuck with beginnings, middles, and ends, and constantly praying that the muse will send us a well-rounded, lifelike character." The Propheteers, on the other hand, is in my view a weak novel expanding on the story "Walt and Will" from Free Agents and to me inferior to the story and its more typically Applesque concision and concentrated humor.

Thus we now have The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories (Johns Hopkins University Press), Apple's first book of fiction in over twenty years. In many ways it certainly seems of a piece with Apple's previous work. His signature low-aggression comedy remains mostly intact, although it now seems less a variant of postmodernism than a kind of benevolent satire that registers the odd and the peculiar in human behavior, the strange turns taken in people's lives, without presuming to correct human folly or critique social convention. Neither is American culture skewered or subverted, even though the stories in The Jew of Home Depot also continue Apple's focus on shopping-mall America, on characters who want to meet Yao Ming, who own an auto salvage company, sell Star Wars swords, industrial equipment, have inherited a package goods store, work at Home Depot. These characters go about their daily business with utter sincerity, their activities and occupations assumed to be normal and ordinary, even if in the context of the stories related they seem unavoidably if amusingly off-center.

This slightly off-kilter tone is usually established at the beginning of an Apple story, as in "Stepdaughters":

My wife sits beside me on our new leather couch. Strength is between us. "Who would have ever thought of this," Helen says. "I worried about boys, not about male hormones."

Our family life had been serene and moving toward joyful until Stephanie began shot-putting. Her eight-pound steel ball is now hammering all three of us. Stephanie is training for the state meet; Helen is fighting for her daughter's female body, and perhaps her soul. I am stepfather number three trying to stay on the sidelines.

The conceit of stepdaughter-as-shot-putter is carried through the story in this same matter-of-fact style as the stepfather comes to feel by the end of story some solidarity with his goal-driven stepdaughter:

When she opens her eyes I am standing across the room imitating her stance. Stephanie laughs. "At least take off your tie," she says. "Nobody shot-puts in a tie."

Even before I begin my arm feels sore. My legs are fifty--I remember the insurance company table. I feel the cholesterol, the blood pressure, the statistical saga of a tired body that must gear itself up each day for a 150-pound throw against the darkness. Yet, I feel as filled with hope and prayer as she is.

Steph and I point our left feet at one another like swordsman in a Douglas Fairbanks movie.

"On three," she says. And we begin.

This conclusion full of "hope and prayer" seems to me to represent, on the other hand, a perceptible shift in Apple's fiction toward a more unambiguously affirmative outlook on the world, a tendency to accentuate possibility and purpose. Certainly Apple's fiction has never been a slough of Beckettian despond, but the stories in The Jew of Home Depot do seem more generally optimistic, even celebratory. In "Proton Decay" and Sized Up" (the latter perhaps being the best story in the collection), the male protagonists wind up, in however unorthodox a fashion, looking forward to the marriages they have (presumably) arranged for themselves, while in "Peace," a businessman stuck with unsellable merchandise for which he has paid all the money he has is rescued when for the "International Day of Peace" a religious assemblage purchases the Star Wars swords, "freshly stamped 'Turn Star Wars into plougshares.'" Even "The Jew of Home Depot," which ends with an apparent murder and with the protagonist's alienation from his Orthodox Jewish background, has really chronicled his ultimate recognition of honest human desire.

Which is not to say these stories avoid grim realities or turn away from pain and suffering. A soldier about to be shipped to Iraq plays a role in "House of the Lowered," "Talker" involves a man raising his brain-damaged daughter, while both "Strawberry Shortcake" and "Adventures in Dementia" depict a son's struggle to care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. The comedy in these stories, while not entirely abandoned, is notably dampened; their placement at the end of the volume additionally gives it a kind of sobriety we don't really find in his previous books. The stories in those books certainly were examples of what Robert Scholes called "fabulation" in contemporary fiction, but the stories in The Jew of Home Depot seem to intensify this quality in Apple's fiction, although one could ask whether the corresponding loss of comedic subtlety is really a fair trade.

Also contributing to a perceived narrowing of focus in Apple's fiction is the fact that of the thirteen stories in the book, nine of them are narrated in the third-person, yet another departure from Apple's previous practice. Both of the earlier collections as well as Zip featured agreeable first-person narrators whose accounts of their experience, like that of the narrator of "Stepdaughters," added through their deadpan, slightly befuddled delivery an element that can't easily be approximated in a third-person narrative. And while Apple avoids facile "psychological realism"--the emphasis in these stories remains resolutely on what happens, not on how what happens is filtered through consciousness--the shift to third-person storytelling further suggests, to me at least, a less adventurous approach to the writing of fiction than might have been expected from Max Apple, especially after such an extended period of time during which to refresh one's sense of fiction's aesthetic possibilities.

It isn't that the book Apple has produced lacks all appeal. It is a diverting enough collection of stories. However, too many of them could have been written by other, ordinarily talented writers, and I had not previously thought of Max Apple as an ordinary talent.

Justin Taylor

Justin Taylor's The Gospel of Anarchy has received mixed reviews at best, and the most common complaint against has been that it is flawed in what is usually called "character development." Steve Almond asserts that its characters "seem more like mouthpieces than genuine people. We learn little about them beyond their half-baked dogma, and the point of view shifts frequently." Brain Evenson criticizes Taylor for merely "creating character images that contrast from scene to scene, allowing these unexplained changes to do the work of character development." Carolyn Kellogg regards its mode of narration as "a distancing agent, seeding a ubiquitous narrative skepticism."

While I would agree that The Gospel of Anarchy is a disappointing first novel, I don't think its main problem lies in a failure to create vivid characters. Indeed, since the novel is largely about the way its characters are willing to subsume their identities to the tenets of a burgeoning sect (some might say cult), or at least to find their identities in the formation of a collective, it seems very strange to fault it because it lacks distinct characters beyond the "half-baked dogma" they embrace. Similarly, since these characters are precisely trying to "distance" themselves from society at large, it's a curious response to them that finds "a distancing agent" inappropriate.

Furthermore, the injunction to develop "round" characters seems quite a reactionary expectation of a young writer, who may or may not find this a desirable goal, as is Almond's further pronouncements that novels "depend on rising action" in which "conflicts. . .have to be dramatized" and finding The Gospel of Anarchy wanting in fulfilling these hoary requirements. There's nothing in The Gospel of Anarchy that suggests Justin Taylor wants it to be judged as an "experimental" novel, but it nevertheless seems pretty dogmatic in its own right to demand it provide "sympathetic" characters, a fixed point of view, and adherence to Freytag's triangle to be judged acceptable.

If The Gospel of Anarchy is not particularly audacious in form or style, Taylor is clearly a skilled enough writer, and the "shifts" in point of view help maintain interest in the story, however much the story is unfortunately all too predictable, the outcome of its depiction of a failed punk commune implicit in its origins in youthful naivete, rigidity of belief, and in the narratives of failed utopias that precede it (I often thought in particular of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance while reading The Gospel of Anarchy.) Taylor's first book, the story collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, was widely praised for its portrayal of disenchanted youth, but part of the trouble with The Gospel of Anarchy is that it ultimately leaves the impression it began as one of those highly compacted stories and has been stretched beyond its capacity to bear the burden of both invoking its characters' spiritual ennui and depicting their attempts to re-enchant the world they've inherited.

The biggest problem with The Gospel of Anarchy, however, is that it is stretched to bear that burden in such a relentlessly earnest way its author seems not to be aware he is telling on overly familiar tale whose outcome is foreordained.  In his review of the novel, Joe Coscarelli complains there is too much "ambiguity as to whether [Taylor] means to mock his characters or endorse their anti-capitalist paradise," but actually whatever ambiguity there might be on this point is really all there is to maintain any interest in the story. Ultimately it doesn't really matter: the narrative seems designed to establish that the beliefs motivating the characters in their attempt to create an "anti-capitalist paradise" are precisely the sort of beliefs such characters in such a place and at such a time would hold--or did hold. Whether we are to find them compelling or ridiculous isn't finally what's at stake, although most readers will probably find themselves considering that question.

The novel begins well, with a portrait of its ostensible protagonist (the focus soon shifts away from him and settles on "Fishgut," a haven for the disaffected and the dropouts of the college town of Gainesville, Florida) in a state of extreme apathetic discontent, listlessly sorting through online porn while trying to decide whether to finish his education at the University of Florida. This character, David, meets up with an old friend who has fallen even farther into discontent, and who at the moment is engaged in a systematic act of dumpster-diving on behalf of his fellow residents of Fishgut. These episodes are fairly bracing, offering a vivid depiction of generational alienation, but they are not so freshly conceived or rendered to really seem shocking.

As if recognizing that such sketches of dissatisfaction and implicit despair can go only so far, Taylor devotes the rest of the novel to sketches of his characters attempting to ameliorate their despair. This is not an unreasonable or illegitimate thing to do, but the vehicle for this attempt, a hybrid ideology combining elements of anarchism, existentialism, and Christianity the group's de facto leader, Kate, calls "Anarchristianity," is not nearly as interesting as she--and perhaps Taylor--thinks it is. Apart from some scenes depicting David's sexual escapades with Kate and Kate's girlfriend, Liz, escapades that are themselves meant to represent a living-out of important tenets of the creed, most of the novel is taken up with an exposition of "anarchristianity" as inspired, at least retroactively, by a Fishgut resident named Parker, long since departed. While this part of the novel has some interest as an account of how religious sects (ultimately religion itself) get started, on the whole The Gospel of Anarchy doesn't give enough emphasis to this subject, either formally or thematically, to rescue it from the tedium that sets in when Parker and his "wisdom" become the novel's center of attention.

By the time we get to several pages of excerpts from the "holy book" concocted by Kate and David from some unorganized journals left behind by Parker, we've already been so immersed in the awkward hybrid of politics and religion that is anarchristianity it is very difficult to read these pages with the degree of interest Taylor clearly enough intends them to have.  If the writings themselves were more lively, their ideas more provocative, we might still concede their importance to the novel, but instead we are given passages such as this:

Faith is the power by which we leap over the unbridgeable chasm, burst through the wall of the asymptote, realize Heaven on Earth. Grace is us granted that power, the fuel injected into faith's engine, the energy generated from its burning up.

Even if we could determine what such a claim is really supposed to mean, it's likely it would turn out to be just as banal as it seems. In my opinion, these pages act to finally bring down the novel as an aesthetic achievement. However much notions like this might appeal to susceptible twentysomethings, they're neither so vitally expressed we want to carefully consider them, nor so obviously ludicrous we know that satire is intended. They're just boring, and the eyes glaze while reading this collection of jottings.

It seems to me that Justin Taylor is too concerned in The Gospel of Anarchy with "capturing" his generation, with "saying something" about that generation's search for solutions to what they perceive as the problems of modern existence. This search is certainly a universal enough phenomenon, but unfortunately the novel essentially offers the same account of it as previous generations of literary seekers. Is fitting this particular kind of quest narrative to the changing if superficial particulars of each succeeding generation's social circumstances a worthwhile goal for the novelist? I tend to think not.

Ben Marcus

(This review was originally published in Full Stop.)

It was perhaps inevitable that Ben Marcus’s fiction would come to seem more conventional following on his first book, The Age of Wire and String (1995), which could be taken either as a collection of short pieces employing a common subject and method or as a novel, and which surely qualifies as “experimental” in any intelligible definition of the word as it applies to the writing of fiction. It is an utterly singular work, requiring the reader to put aside all assumptions about the role of narrative, character, and setting in fiction. Not only does this book (considered either as a whole or in its parts) eschew all of these elements, but it almost seems to invent a form in which they could have no role; in this work they are notions as strange in their application to the “world” the book describes as the devices it does use no doubt seem to readers who assume “narrative” and “fiction” are essentially synonymous terms. Its own first words proclaim it “a catalog of the life project as prosecuted in the Age of Wire and String and beyond,” and the most satisfying reading of The Age of Wire and String allows it to resolve the uncertainties of this self-characterization as it will.

Notable American Women (2002), Marcus’s next book, could hardly be called a conventional novel, but it does begin in a recognizable situation (family dysfunction), introduces relatively recognizable characters (the family of “Ben Marcus”), and tells a story of sorts (the story of how “Ben Marcus” is instructed in the tenets of the “Silentist” movement, which is dedicated to the achievement of complete silence). This novel could be called a narrative rather than a “catalog,” although it is a highly fragmented one that moves freely back and forth through time. Given the outrageous premise, this is not a novel of “realism,” however it never crosses over into outright fantasy. Instead, it works allegorically, using the outrageous premise to render the Marcus family drama more emphatically, to convert the apparently autobiographical elements of this drama into emblematic, if absurdist, melodrama.

The allegorical mode is again Marcus’s chosen method in his latest novel, The Flame Alphabet, although now it is more a straightforward sort of allegory absent the explicit autobiographical focus on the experiences of “Ben Marcus” (however wary we should be of identifying this character literally with the biographical author) to be found in both The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women. Indeed, The Flame Alphabet more or less takes the form of a post-apocalyptic narrative, but where most such narratives represent the political or cultural tendencies that have led to the dire conditions they portray (ultimately they are to be taken as stories about the present even though they are set in the post-apocalyptic future, the future representing present conditions taken to their logically destructive extreme), The Flame Alphabet posits a more metaphysical source of affliction. Here, Marcus brings together motifs and themes that are treated more obliquely or more partially in his previous books, most obviously the notion that human beings have a vexed relationship with language, that language as a human attribute may finally do more harm than good, and that in our struggle to control language, to use it in ways that foster communication or expression, more often than not, we fail. In The Flame Alphabet, the danger we court in our careless and frequently hurtful uses of language has been literalized in the form of a “language toxicity,” a plague whereby adults are sickened by, and presumably eventually die from, the words spoken by children (in the later stages, by all forms of language).

Prominent in the struggle to control language would be, of course, the struggle of the writer to induce it into satisfying rhetorical and aesthetic forms, to invoke it in a way that affirms human potential. The Flame Alphabet could be interpreted as a fable about this struggle, substituting a more subtle kind of metafiction for the blatant self-reflexivity of the previous books and their invocation of “Ben Marcus.” The narrator not only chronicles the toll the “language toxicity” takes on his own family, but also tries to find a cure with increasing desperation, experimenting with a new alphabet to address the fact that

the alphabet as we knew it was too complex, soaked in meaning, stimulating the brain to produce a chemical that was obviously fatal. In its parts, in combination, our lettering system triggered a nasty reaction. If the alphabet could be thinned out, shaved down, to trick the brain somehow, perhaps we could still deploy this new set of symbols, or even a single symbol, the kind you hold in your hand and reshape for different meanings, for modest, emergency-only communications.

To do so, the narrator surveys linguistic history to determine if any of its historical “scripts” might be free of the taint modern language can no longer conceal, an effort which ultimately fails, although at the novel’s close a serum is developed that makes it possible for the human race to temporarily survive. The implication clearly enough seems to be that language will never be safe for human production or consumption, that its effects will always be beyond our abilities to anticipate or understand them. It is an odd theme for a novelist, unless we are to regard The Flame Alphabet as an instance of the struggle with language that provisionally succeeds, manages in its verbal ingenuity a momentary stay against the confusion that language itself breeds. Perhaps the book itself, in its achieved coherence, stands as the author’s own temporary victory in the struggle, as a tentative affirmation of the human. Some readers might find that it does effectively wrestle meaning from chaos, but surely by leaning so hard on its allegorical plot and its rather loudly announced themes, it does so in a disappointingly obvious and heavy-handed way.

The post-apocalyptic genre has become such a recognizable vehicle for writers wishing to convey a message, to “say something” about the state of humanity, that it is to me somewhat surprising that a self-confessed experimental writer such as Ben Marcus would turn to its narrative formula in the first place. Yet another tale of the twilight of the human race, however much it does avoid the usual social and political commentary to which such narratives can often be reduced, The Flame Alphabet doesn’t seem like a noteworthy contribution to the further development of innovative fiction. It merely leaves us with the impression that “experiment” in fiction has been reduced to a vaguely futuristic story illustrating strange ideas about language.

Further, Marcus’s own skill with language implicitly threatens to undermine these ideas:

. . .in Wisconsin there were early adopters. A fiendish strain of childless adults who consumed the toxic language on purpose, as a drug, destroying themselves under the flood of child speech. They stormed areas high in children, falling drunk inside cones of sound. They gorged themselves on the fence line of playgrounds where voice clouds blew hard enough to trigger a reaction, sharing exposure sites with each other by code. Later these people were found dried out in parks, on the road, collapsed and hardening in their homes. They were found with the slightly smaller faces we would routinely see on victims in only a few weeks.

Such a passage as this is both imaginative and exact. It succinctly captures the actions described through figurations that show impressive command of the resources of language. There is also a deadpan humor here that further confirms Marcus as a writer able to use words skillfully and with sensitivity to their effects. It doesn’t really suggest through its own formal or stylistic choices that this meaning is dangerous or unstable or even uncontrollably ambiguous in its proliferation. If language is indeed an elusive phenomenon whose power exceeds our capacity to wield it, this is a proposition that comes to our attention because it is advanced directly, in no uncertain terms, by the novel’s narrator and its narrative, not because the novel itself embodies the idea aesthetically either in style or form. The dissonance between the novel’s doom-laden message about the perils of human communication and its author’s proven facility — here and in his previous work — with the medium through which it occurs is rather hard to ignore, and it makes The Flame Alphabet seem an artistic misstep.

Mark Danielewski

Even fans of Mark Danielewski and his typographically adventurous novels House of Leaves and Only Revolutions should be disappointed with The Fifty Year Sword. Previously published only in the Netherlands in 2005, this novella adds almost nothing to a consideration of the aesthetic possibilities of manipulating the physical features of a printed book not already present in the two novels, and if anything the underlying narrative to which these manipulations are meant to contribute is even less compelling than those we encounter in House of Leaves and Only Revolutions. If the former manages to bring some life to what is finally an overly familiar narrative (perhaps two interlocking but overly familiar narratives) through its challenges to the protocols of the printed page, and the latter partially substitutes, at least for a while, the sheer audacity of its defiance of these protocols for an even more lackluster narrative, The Fifty Year Sword does neither of these things. Its textual provocations are tepid, mere flourishes, its story, such as it is, little more than a convenience and difficult to take seriously.

The Fifty Year Sword does little more to depart from the typographical conventions of fiction than to give the appearance of printed verse, or verse dialogue. (That the lines of dialogue are color-coded as a way of identifying the speakers seems simply a repetition of the same sort of device used in the two novels, and altogether it is not a particularly interesting device, anyway.) At one point the text is printed vertically rather than horizontally, requiring us to rotate the book in our hands, but again this move is the sort of thing we have come to expect from House of Leaves and Only Revolutions, and once it has been established that our assumptions about how to properly read a book are to an extent arbitrary, to simply keep issuing this reminder without offering compelling demonstration of how literature might continue to be enhanced by reading differently makes the effort seem mostly gimmickry. (Fortunately, in The Fifty Year Sword use of the device is limited, so we aren’t really forced to dwell on its apparent lack of purpose.) Otherwise, the unconventional or “innovative” elements of The Fifty Year Sword are restricted to the use of graphic illustrations (many of them) and various misspellings and neologisms, neither of which are in fact innovative at all. The wordplay seems particularly derivative of Joyce in Finnegans Wake — “pricksticking,” “indacitation” — while the illustrations are generally unremarkable, albeit not terribly intrusive.

Danielewski gave a reading of The Fifty Year Sword in 2010, when it was still unavailable in the United States as a printed text. Perhaps this “theatrical performance,” as it was described, managed to make the novella’s story seem more substantive, or at least more dramatic, but shorn of the whizz-bang and stagy spectacle it doesn’t make for very captivating reading as a book. It is more or less a children’s story in which a group of orphans listen to a figure identified as “the Story Teller” relate a story about magical swords. A touch of “adult” interest is added in the conflict between the seamstress Chintana and Belinda Kite, who has had an affair with Chintana’s husband. The novella ends with Belinda Kite literally being cut to pieces (in a delayed response to one of the swords) and falling apart “even as slices of joints and nails/scattered apart on the frosty stone/followed /by the slow tumbling/slivers of the rest/of Belinda Kite’s/hand.” Again this scene might have greater effect when reproduced in a “theatrical performance,” but then perhaps it might have been written directly for such a performance rather than as a work of fiction, where the artificial arrangements of the words in this description can neither substitute for the visual immediacy of the scene as performed nor finally elevate it beyond the rather ordinary fairy tale-ish story it concludes.

The most useful service the publication The Fifty Year Sword might offer is to confirm the initial achievement of House of Leaves, but also to illustrate the limitations of that achievement, at least as Danielewski has so far shown in his attempts to follow up on the accomplishments of his first novel. House of Leaves established the basic principle underlying his alternative practice as a fiction writer, that “the book” as traditionally conceived and formatted is an object whose properties we have come to consider fixed but are in fact entirely contingent and thus open to revision. House of Leaves is a prodigious attempt at such revision, including experiments with typeface, print placement (in the traditional column, multiple columns, in areas cordoned off in various ways, rightside-up, upside-down, sideways, in brief snippets at the top, bottom, and middle of the page), the insertion of visual/graphic aids, the “proper” function of the page in general. Danielewski wants the reader’s eye to roam around the page, to suspend the expectation that a literary text must adhere to the conventions of reading associated with the European codex (left-to-right, top-to-bottom) that now define what “reading a book” signifies. This is certainly a perfectly valid strategy, based on a valuable insight that could continue to inspire writers of innovative fiction. However, Danielewksi and his admirers have attempted to promote his work as if this insight is unique to him and his fiction sui generis, when in fact writers such as Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Fedeman investigated the possibility of taking the printed page as malleable 40 years ago. Federman’s Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976), in fact, are at least as radical as Danielewski’s novels in their textual disruptions, and, in my opinion, more aesthetically satisfying.

House of Leaves provides its share of aesthetic satisfaction, but even it is marred by a well-worn and formulaic story, the story of an “outsider” existing on the margins of society (in this case an outcast with a scholarly bent and a mental illness) the conventionality of which isn’t really enlivened much by its intersection with a secondary narrative that doesn’t rise much above the level of an ordinary horror story, nor can either of these stories really sustain interest to end of a 700-page novel. This has in turn the unfortunate effect of more heavily burdening the novel’s textual play with even more of the responsibility for maintaining the reader’s attention, a burden it cannot quite fully shoulder at such length. The formal experiments of House of Leaves thus threaten to seem grafted onto a narrative that is really only an excuse for the exercise of these experiments. The fiction by Sukenick and Federman engaging in similar, and antecedent, experiments, never left such an impression. Their experiments were integral to the story being created through the formal effects, the “content” not distinguishable from the “form” that gives the story its singular expression. These works are also self-reflexively aware of themselves as stories in process, so that the literal act of inscription, of arranging words, sentences, and paragraphs on the page becomes part of the narrative content. Although House of Leaves does depict its protagonist as a writer of sorts, at least as the “editor” of the manuscript that brings the twin narratives together, this activity finally seems as much a fortuitous justification of the novel’s typographical pyrotechnics as an effort to explore the implications of this inscriptive free-for-all in a reconsideration of the aesthetic ordering of fiction.

This limitation is even more pronounced in Only Revolutions and The Fifty Year Sword. In Only Revolutions the pyrotechnics finally seem the novel’s only real source of interest, since once the reader is able to discern its narrative line (and this isn’t easy), it proves to be yet again formulaic and dull, essentially a version of a “road novel” in which its two peripatetic outsider characters travel across the country, with the additional twist that they drive across time as well. This science fiction element parallels the horror element in House of Leaves, intended to provide the otherwise perfunctory story with some additional appeal, but if anything it falls even flatter. The story of the two young lovers and their adventures across time and space has almost no drama, not even of the episodic kind found in most picaresque narratives, and its characters are entirely colorless. Thus while the pyrotechnics might be even more flamboyant — competing accounts meeting in the middle of the book, requiring us to flip the book over and read from both “front” and “back” — eventually the tedium induced by the narrative makes it increasingly difficult to continue the attempt to assimilate them. Ultimately it is hard to deny that Only Revolutions is indeed a very experimental novel, but it is a decidedly failed experiment, albeit of a sort that might still be adapted successfully in another context — something briefer, or at least with a more effective fusion of matter and manner.

Unfortunately we cannot conclude from The Fifty Year Sword that Only Revolutions might be just an understandable misstep after the audacious debut of Danielewski’s iconoclastic project in House of Leaves, its flaws the product of unfocused or misdirected ambition. It does not show us a writer exercising much ambition at all but merely repeating the same moves his first book prepares us to expect, repetition Only Revolutions continues at exhausting length. Certainly The Fifty Year Sword is a very slight work, and a first-time reader of Danielewski who starts here is most likely to conclude it is superficially unusual, but hardly in a way that is likely to change the course of literary history. Such a reader might in fact find it simply boring. Still, the disappointment of this book should not altogether rule out the chance Danielewski will discover a new and surprising strategy in a future work exploiting his essential insight into the plasticity of the literary text, one that allows neither our notions of “text” nor of “story” to go unexamined. Only Revolutions was not that work, but perhaps the “serial novel” Danielewski is soon to be publishing will be. (Simply that he has chosen to publish it in serial form is not, of course, itself a particularly venturesome or innovative move.) For now, House of Leaves remains as an admirable literary performance that unfortunately threatens to become merely a curiosity.