thereadingexperience

Nothing New

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

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.

Making Sense for a Moment

I enjoyed reading Anakana Schofield's Malarky. It engaged my attention from the beginning, and it sustained attention through the appeal of its down-to-earth protagonist, its narrative of the protagonist's odyssey of self-discovery, and its quietly compelling style. It is an impressive first novel.

However, the reception of Schofield's novel has prominently emphasized its "experimental" qualities. In her review, for example, Emily Keeler refers to "its expansive and experimental spirit." Sharon Chisvin notes its "strangeness. . .in plot, structure, language and characterization." The novel's episodic narrative and fractured chronology in particular have been identified as creating this sense of "strangeness."

Despite my ultimate admiration for Malarky, I just can't accept that there's anything particularly experimental or innovative about it. The fragmentary narrative is effective, but it's hardly at this stage in literary history an innovative or shocking move. "Linear narrative" has been in retreat since modernism, to the extent that it's somewhat unusual these days to read a novel that is truly "linear" in the fashion of 19th century fiction. Similarly, the scrambled chronology works well in this novel, but Anakana Schofield is certainly not the first writer to think of using this strategy as a way of suggesting the operations of memory or of reflecting the unstable state of a character's mind. Schofield has artfully used both of these strategies in Malarky--they are perhaps the only strategies she could have used this successfully given the story she wanted to tell and the characters she wanted to evoke--but to call them "experimental" tells us less about this novel than it does about some readers' inability to consider the novel in its appropriate context.

There's nothing really "strange" about the characters in Malarky, although referring to the protagonist, an ordinary Irish farm wife, as "Our Woman," and to her loutish husband as "Himself" does create a certain oddity in the narrative. The novel's other major character, Our Woman's gay son Jimmy, is a somewhat mysterious figure, due to the fact that we really perceive him only from a distance, through Our Woman's recollections and in scenes witnessed by her but not presented to us directly. Jimmy is ultimately a mysterious figure to Our Woman as well, as her discovery that her son is gay (a literal discovery when she comes upon him having sex with another boy) is one of the events that leads her to question her assumptions about the life she has led and sets her on a journey that will end only after both Jimmy and her husband are dead and she has been hospitalized for a mental breakdown. Our Woman also discovers, through a meeting with a woman calling herself "Red the Twit," that Himself has apparently had an affair with her (Red the Twit turns out to be not so reliable a source, however). In response, Our Woman decides to engage in her own extramarital sexual explorations, encountering a card salesman (Card Man), who turns out to be something of a nonentity, and Halim, a Syrian security guard who is rather more interesting. Halim's sexual interest in Our Woman seems closely related to his interest in the biological realities of reproduction, and he repeatedly questions Our Woman about what it is like to give birth.

Our Woman's experiences are presented to us in a discontinuous form, moving freely through various stages of her relationships with Jimmy, her husband, and her lovers, including sessions Our Woman eventually has with a counsellor, "Grief," after her hospitalization. The novel might be called "expansive" in the way it seems to bring all  of these stages of the protagonist's life into the narrative "present," and eventually even to blur the line between past and present through this shuffling of chronology, but really Malarky is a remarkably honed and concentrated work that in spite of its disjunctions might be described as "poetic" in its unity of effect rather than experimental in its breaking of form. It might indeed also be called "expansive" in its portrayal of a woman seeking to enlarge her own sense of possibility (as well as her understanding of the world), but this is the novel's thematic focus, not a formal quality.

The most admirable feature of Malarky is its idiom-inflected language, which evokes Our Woman's speech patterns--sometimes directly, as parts of the narrative are related in the first-person--without losing the appeal of her Irish-flavored speech by in effect burying it in a psychological realism that goes too deeply into the perceiving consciousness of the character, where distinctions of idiom and accent disappear into generic "thought." Nevertheless, the novel's style does work to augment character, helping us to feel closer to Our Woman, at the same time it influences us to apprehend her world as she does, delineating that world in a dynamic and often memorable way, as when she begins to consider Jimmy's behavior shortly after realizing he must be homosexual:

Of course she worried tall that it was off to Patsy's boy he was. It there was a way to separate them, she'd build a wall for the sake of it. She'd to steady herself into the chair as it came back to her again. She pulled the cushion, the strange one with off-colour ducks on it that one of the girls had embroidered for her and now she couldn't recall who and she wanted to recall who because she wanted her mind cleared of what was rolling in to remind her of that night. It was Jimmy. All Jimmy. She couldn't blame the other boy for he was the younger. If she'd turned away she could have saved herself. but she did not. Every time she saw a cup or glass of orange squash, it would come back to her. She was in it now.

Passages such as this occasionally require somewhat more patient reading in order to untwist the syntax or to "hear" the voice. One might thus say that in this way, along with the novel's fragmented structure, Malarky asks for a more active reader, but neither the structure nor the language is so utterly unfamiliar that they would really disconcert an attentive reader. Schofield has written a novel that draws on existing strategies that nevertheless don't allow the reader to fall back on the most conventional expectations of sequential plot and transparent prose, but the conventions of fiction, the strategies and techniques a writer might draw upon, have surely developed enough beyond those that existed a century ago that a work taking advantage of these later developed strategies would not still be viewed as experimental. (To regard it as such would be unfair not just to other works that might indeed be called experimental but to a work like Malarky itself, applying standards or criteria that are inappropriate for judging it.) Malarky uses its chosen strategies very effectively, and that is the sign of its artistry, not the degree of its "experimental spirit."

Perhaps the clearest mark of her artistry is the way in which Anakana Schofield employs the formal and stylistic devices found in Malarky to produce a novel of considerable emotional power. Our Woman is a convincingly invoked character who earns our sympathetic response, both to her confusion when faced with the apparent breakdown of her marriage (or the breakdown of her role as "wife") and with the probability that her son is gay, as well as to her subsequent attempts to change herself. The novel's final words has Our Woman reflecting that "It's beautiful when it all makes sense, so it is. Occasionally it makes sense, just for a moment," and Malarky is most successful as the portrayal of Our Woman's attempts to make her life make sense. In this way we could say that the novel's fragmented form reinforces the protagonist's quest by asking the reader to help make sense of the narrative by piecing together its continuity in a more exacting way than other stories of self-realization might. The reward is worth the effort, however, as when we finish the novel we feel we have reached a "moment" of aesthetic completion that might not have been possible had Schofield used some other narrative form.

It is the triumph of Malarky that by the end its main character seems conjured fully into life but also that this has been accomplished not through obvious appeals to emotion or overdramatizing but through the clarity and rigor of style and structure skillfully applied. This need not lead us to categorize it as an experimental work, but it should prompt us to call it a very good novel.

Claiming the Future

(This review originally appeared in Open Letters Monthly)

Though the recent attention given to such writers as Roberto Bolaño and Clarice Lispector has helped to broaden our perspective on the important contribution of Latin American fiction to postwar world literature, it’s likely that most readers continue to associate that contribution with the writers of the so-called “Boom”: Garcia Marquez, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, etc. One could imagine this legacy might seem to younger Latin American writers both a blessing and a curse, as it continues to give writers from this region a more receptive audience than they might otherwise have, but also leads to expectations these writers don’t necessarily want to fulfill. It is tempting to think we could approach an anthology of “new” fiction from such writers by putting aside expectations based on our previous experiences reading “Latin American fiction” as published in the United States, that we could immediately begin to appreciate this fiction on its own merits without further reflection. It is a temptation better resisted.

In an early review of The Future Is Not Ours: New Latin American Fiction, John Freeman advises to “skip over the anthology’s churlish introduction” by editor Diego Trelles Paz. This would be a mistake, however. Not only does this introduction actually avoid being “churlish,” but it provides the stories collected in the anthology with important context we need to fully account for some of the stories’ formal features as well as their subjects. Because the stories are presented in simple alphabetical order by author’s nationality, the guidance offered by Paz in his “Prologue” helps the reader assimilate them more fully than would be possible without it.

Most immediately, Paz informs us of the origins of this anthology in an online project (from which this book offers a selection) initiated by writers “who use electronic means . . . to fight the internal editorial isolation in which the region is submerged.” As Paz puts it, the original anthology “was made by writers in search of readers.” He describes a situation that has long prevailed in Latin America, in which writers (and readers) from one part of the region have trouble getting access to books from other parts, so that “Latin American” writers are to an extent left unaware of each other. Yet for a long time now new fiction from Latin American has been marketed, especially in the United States, as if this fiction was all of a piece, “a bastardized version of magical realism that combines magic, folklore, and miraculous cooking to go.” This version of Latin American fiction is “exoticism on-demand for foreign consumers and American and European Spanish departments.” Perhaps this sounds “churlish” to readers who have blithely accepted such bastardized magical realism as somehow the essence of Latin American fiction, but Paz’s insistence that the writers included in The Future Is Not Ours be distinguished both from the “Boom” writers and from each other is important for readers to keep in mind as they sample the stories in this book.

Paz thus mostly avoids making broad generalizations about the styles or the assumptions that might link the writers in The Future Is Not Ours, except for the shared presumption of futility reflected in the title. The future is bleak, and for reasons that aren’t confined to Latin America, as we all now inhabit “a time catastrophic in terms of equality and social justice, sinister with respect to human rights, apocalyptic for the ecological health of the planet, cynical toward those least favored by the neoliberal fundamentalism of a marked currently in free fall.” However much these conditions might be even more destructive in Latin America, where social injustice and more widespread poverty make it even more susceptible to the depredations of oligarchy and global capital, these intimations of a dystopian future would resonate fully enough with American and European readers facing their own version of such a future. In this way, Paz proposes, most stories in the book address concerns beyond “national boundaries” without succumbing to the lazy realism that contents itself with depicting the ubiquitous influence of American culture on all countries.

While Paz does want to insist that “one of our greatest strengths as a group is that, above all, our fractures are internal,” he nevertheless also provides a taxonomy of the “core motives and concerns” to be found in The Future Is Not Ours. In some ways this guide to the shared thematic and formal concerns of the included writers offers a better way to organize a reading of the book than the fairly arbitrary arrangement of the table of contents. Paz suggests three categories: First is the treatment of “differing manifestations of violence.” In Fifteen Flowers,” by Argentine Federico Falco, the violence emerges from personal conflicts, although the story portrays these conflicts among characters growing up in an environment in which they clearly have little to look forward to. Daniel Alarcon’s “Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979” shifts the focus to violence as an explicitly social and political phenomenon, as it portrays the beginnings of a revolutionary group (probably the Shining Path guerillas) and the casual brutality implicit in its mission. (The group’s first “revolutionary act” as described by the narrator: “We strung up dogs from all the street lamps, covered them with terse and angry slogans, Die, Capitalist Dogs and such; leaving the beasts there for the people to see how fanatical we could be.”) Guatemalan writer Ronald Flores’s “Any Old Story” focuses not on the explicit violence that arises from conditions of deprivation and despair, but on the spiritual violence those conditions visit on ordinary people, in a story of a young girl defeated in her attempt to “improve herself” by migrating from the provinces to “the capital.” Similarly, Alejandro Zambra’s “34” addresses the dehumanizing political violence in Pinochet’s Chile, but obliquely, in a story about students at the National Institute, “the most prestigious secondary school in Chile,” who are known only by their assigned numbers. The final line is especially chilling as a portent of what awaits these students, as the narrator (number 45) tells us about number 34: “Little by little, we lost track of him.”

Most of these stories are subtle, engaging the theme of violence without belaboring their social and political ramifications (and therefore making them all the more powerful as we come to fully recognize the implications). Puerto Rican writer Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s “Pillage” relates its narrator’s horrific experience witnessing two men rape and murder a ten year-old girl, although it also seems to link this violent act to ongoing political circumstances, but again obliquely, through the narrator’s sudden awareness of the girl’s screams beneath the sounds of the “rallying at the campaign closings of the usual politicians” and in his confession he had secured his job through a connection with the ruling party, a connection “that didn’t seem likely to be renewed.” Even more obliquely, he informs us that “no one else would hire me with my record, knowing my secret.” The narrator watches the girl being brutally beaten without intervening, and we are left to wonder what resonance this scene might have, if any, with the political context so elliptically introduced.

Other stories in the book, Paz points out, focus on “eroticism,” although, as “Pillage” illustrates, sex “isn’t far removed from the matrix of violence.” One of the most disturbing stories, “Sun-Woo” by Argentine Oliverio Coelho (also the first story in the book) follows a Latin American writer who finds himself in South Korea (immediately demonstrating that these writers are indeed willing to extend themselves beyond “national boundaries”) and involved sexually with the title character, whose sexual appetite proves dangerous, to say the least. Chilean Lina Meruane’s “Razor Blades” is a simultaneously creepy and buoyant story about a group of schoolgirls whose sexual awakening is manifested in a frenzy of depilation. Beginning with the armpits, soon enough they are “running the razor blade down our arms and up our calves and thighs.” The story culminates in the forced shaving of a new girl, Pilar. After reaching her “black, swollen pubis,” the narrator tells us, “we threw our razor blades onto the floor and kissed that mouth and then each other with our tongues, crazed by the ecstasy of our discovery.” The most disturbing story in the book may be by another Chilean, Andrea Jeftanovic’s “Family Tree,” in which a father is seduced by his daughter into an incestuous relationship. The daughter, who has been abandoned by her mother, is clearly attempting to ensure her father doesn’t also leave her (she spies on him when he is entertaining women in the wake of his wife’s departure), although he is apparently unable to see this. At the end of the story the daughter is pregnant and the two are preparing to “settle down”—unless the story is actually the unfolding fantasy of the father/narrator (which might just make the story even more disturbing.)

The third category Paz describes does not unite the stories thematically but instead directs us to see the “aesthetic diversity” in the collection. Unfortunately, these are generally among the weaker stories in The Future Is Not Ours. Some, such as Ena Lucia Portela’s “Hurricane,” are conventionally realistic, if more extended, narratives with political overtones, while others, such as Santiago Nazarian’s “Fish Spine” or Carlos Wynter Melo’s “Boxer,” are briefer but still realistic sketches that evoke pathos in a way that borders on sentimentality. Samanta Schweblin’s “On the Steppe” is a surrealist work that creates an enigmatic situation (an odd outbreak of infertility, it would seem) that never really becomes anything other than enigmatic, its effect depending on the withholding of information that if provided would likely make the story a fairly tepid entry in the postapocalyptic genre. “Wolf to Man,” by Ines Bortegaray, and “Love Belongs to Another Part,” by Slavko Zupcic, are the most “postmodern” stories in the book, each of them focused metafictionally on writers and writing: the former depicts a journalism student preparing a report on a former revolutionary who is on his deathbed; the latter shows a novelist working on a story incorporating letters written by his presumptive father, whom he has never met. The postmodernism of both stories doesn’t really go much beyond such perfunctory self-reflexivity, although “Wolf to Man” does also include annotations a la David Foster Wallace. Moreover, the underlying narratives framed by these metafictional devices are finally not very interesting.

If there is disappointment in reading The Future Is Not Ours, it is disappointment in its relative lack of aesthetic diversity. On the one hand, it is gratifying to see Latin American writers moving on from magical realism (without necessarily dismissing its achievement), but there is more departure from the “magical” side of this once provocative pairing than from “realism.” Stories such as “Lima, Peru” and “Pillage” use the methods of realism very skillfully (in these cases, something like the “slice-of-life” strategy), but there is little suggestion from this book that the way forward from magical realism might involve formal innovation, or at least some re-appraisal of the role of storytelling in fiction. Paz does point out the greater willingness of these writers to include elements of genre fiction, but while this might make Latin American fiction potentially more attractive to a wider international audience, it doesn’t really encourage fresh approaches to narrative practice, since if anything genre fiction tends to rely even more reflexively on conventional modes of storytelling than mainstream literary fiction.

Arguably this aesthetic conservatism is an unavoidable function of the shared worldview evinced in the book’s title. Writers of formally or stylistically adventurous fiction implicitly think there is a future—at least for literature—and it belongs to them and to all other writers attempting to replenish the resources of literature with freshly conceived strategies, techniques, tropes. One would not begrudge the writers in The Future Is Not Ours their pessimism, of course, which provides an underlying perspective that makes many of the stories here so emotionally bracing. Even readers reluctant to share in that pessimism will surely find the book (or at least parts of it) compelling in this way, but if it does present a broader overview of this generation of Latin American writers—as it does, inevitably—it is one that shows them somewhat in retreat from the more audacious practices and commodious vision of Borges, Cortázar, and Garcia Marquez, the writers who first brought Latin American fiction widespread attention beyond the borders of Central and South America. These stories are still well worth reading, and perhaps, given current circumstances in Latin America, they represent precisely the kind of fiction we should expect to encounter, but one might still hope that writers from this part of the world conclude that the future is theirs after all, and that they begin to discover new or surprising ways to extend the future of fiction without attenuating their engagement with the realities of life as it is lived there.

 

Shadowy Operations

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

Most discussions of Philippe Claudel’s fiction eventually identify Kafka as a likely influence, some even describing his narratives as “Kafkaesque.” If anything, The Investigation, the most recent of Claudel’s books to be translated into English, makes it unmistakably clear that such comparisons are entirely accurate, but it might also prompt us to consider the implications of the comparison more carefully. Kafka’s undeniable greatness aside, why, after almost 100 years, would a novel that so obviously duplicates the most familiar features of the Kafkaesque, that so obviously wants to be Kafkaesque, also still want to be regarded as somehow original and daring?

Claudel’s books have certainly been received as if simply by evoking Kafka (also Beckett) they deserve to share the high regard with which Kafka’s work is generally held, and if resemblance to a story Kafka might have told is a legitimate criterion of judgment, The Investigation might indeed deserve acclaim. A man known simply as “the Investigator” has been assigned the task of assessing a recent spate of suicides at “the Enterprise,” an all-encompassing but shadowy operation that, as the Investigator discovers, is involved in just about every form of human activity, and might be the ultimate source of all such activities. He meets other figures given similarly emblematic cognomens: The Giantess, from whom he has to beg a room after his initial rebuff from the Enterprise (or at least its Guardhouse), the Policeman, the Guide, the Watchman (these latter two the same person performing different jobs), the Manager, the Psychologist. All of these characters serve as obstacles to the Investigator in completing his task (which in fact never really begins). The Enterprise itself proves to be more or less impenetrable, the Investigator’s repeated efforts to gain access to its mysterious authority resulting only in his own gradual enervation and increasing despair.

Claudel’s borrowing of the allegorical markers we associate with Kafka — the universalized protagonist, the enigmatic, impalpably threatening environment — could not be more blatant. The story of the Investigator’s deflected attempts to penetrate the security apparatus and the accumulated bureaucratic layers of the Enterprise mirrors the similar attempts of the protagonists of The Trial and The Castle, and it seems unlikely that many readers of The Investigation would miss these parallels. Because we know that in a properly Kafkaesque tale at best only irresolution will result from the protagonist’s efforts, there really is no suspense, no surprising plot turns, no real character development in the novel, so that it would seem the main focus of interest is reduced to noting the way in which the imitation of Kafka is carried through. To be influenced by Kafka’s allegorical strategies and his vision of the dehumanizing conditions of modern life is one thing, but to essentially simulate a narrative of the kind Kafka might have written does not seem an especially venturesome move.

If The Investigation adds anything at all to the aesthetic strategy inherited from Kafka, or provides some ultimate surprise, it is through situating the narrative in a context that takes it beyond the dreamlike aura conveyed by Kafka’s fiction, all but “baring the device” in its suggestions that the Investigator is not living out a nightmare but is living in a fiction, that both he and the world in which he is caught are ongoing creations of an author whose presence the Investigator at times senses but who otherwise remains concealed. This metafictional conceit is actually most visible — to the reader at least — in what seems to be the carelessness or incompleteness of the creation: Taxi cabs are there one minute and gone the next; crowds of almost literally faceless people move in uniform directions on opposite sides of the street; weather changes from summery to snowy in a single day. The Investigator seems to inhabit a fiction not much interested in specific detail, whose particulars are few, the minimum necessary to sustain the allegorical narrative but apparently of little concern in themselves. At the novel’s conclusion, its status as metafiction is confirmed. The Investigator finds himself in a twilight zone full of containers, inside each of which are what can only be taken as discarded characters, never again to be released from their confinement. He confronts “the Shadow,” who conjures up the Investigator’s own demise, leaving him finally a “very clear image of slow dripping and the soothing music it produced, soon covered by the sounds of sheets of paper being torn up and then burned, and the faint whisper of ink poured out onto the pages of a book.” The Investigator’s coffin is sealed with the “click” of a laptop computer being closed.

One could say that the metafictional framework within which Claudel relates his Kafkaesque narrative leaves an impression it is more thoroughly crafted than most of Kafka, but in my view it really only reinforces the conclusion that the novel is not at all original but derivative, both of the fiction of Kafka and of the work of those postmodernists whose self-reflexive fictions inspired the widespread use of term “metafiction” to describe them. These writers are primarily American — among them John Barth, Robert Coover, Gilbert Sorrentino — so perhaps we could say that Claudel’s innovation is in allying the modernism exemplified by Kafka’s parables of alienation with the postmodernism of the initial wave of metafictionists, except that some such adaptation of the various departures from realism prominent in 20^th century fiction can be found in much current European fiction. To the extent that The Investigation can plausibly be taken as representative of European fiction (as conceptualized in, for example, Dalkey’s Best European Fiction series), claims that this fiction is inherently more experimental and adventurous than American fiction overlooks the fact that it is heavily indebted to American fiction for bringing widespread attention to the possibilities of “fiction about fiction” as a logical extension of modernism’s challenge to conventional storytelling. That this debt goes largely unacknowledged suggests that writers such as Coover and Sorrentino, as well as even lesser-known metafictionists such as Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman, are sufficiently unknown or undervalued that what they began doing almost half a century ago remains invisible to writers and critics for whom the concept of metafiction belatedly seems an audacious idea.

The Investigation perhaps works best as a kind of mystery story, but unlike Kafka’s fiction, in which the mystery is ineffable, its solution impossible from the start, in this novel the mystery is solved after all, and all too conveniently. Claudel uses the devices of metafiction not to question traditional storytelling, to provide an alternative to it, but ultimately to reinforce it. The Investigator’s discovery that he is a fictional character provides the novel with a clear and complete resolution of the sort we would never find in Kafka. Perhaps this would make the novel mildly entertaining for readers who take their postmodernism in its most homogenized form, but while The Investigation certainly does feature a few darkly amusing scenes in its chronicle of the Investigator’s travails, anyone interested in what adventurous fiction looks like after the inspirations of modernism and postmodernism have been assimilated will probably find it a disappointment.

Enemy of the State

Edmond Caldwell's Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant (Say It With Stones) is a much worthier and more accomplished book than 99% of what is published as "literary fiction" by most "name" publishers. It takes numerous risks, both formally and thematically, but it also manages to be entertaining without conceding to conventional notions of plot arcs or backstory or "fine writing."

Of course, that it does take risks is the primary reason it couldn't be published by one of those name publishers. While it may be true that adventurous, iconoclastic writing has never found much favor among publishers (Sorrentino, Gaddis, e.g.), even publishers who claim to prize "literary value" as much as commercial value, these days small presses and self-publishers are taking up even more of the slack left by the abandonment by publishers of all but the safest, most formulaic versions of the literary. Such books might tweak established practice here and there, but the truly innovative writers are inhabiting the fringes of literary culture, as represented by mainstream publishing, more than ever. (The career of Gary Lutz seems to me a prime example.)

The first thing that undoubtedly would trouble many would-be publishers of Human Wishes/Enemy Combatants is to be found most directly in the title, which is taken from two separate chapters (the last two) in what the title page identifies as a novel, but which could as easily be taken as a sequence of stories featuring the same protagonist. The "unified" collection of stories has become something of a commonplace in current fiction, but in most of these books the connections between stories are superficial, an attempt perhaps to get around a short story collection's lack of marketability by making it more like a novel. The stories in HW/EC do center around a single protagonist (fairly transparently, Edmond Caldwell), but the connections between them go much deeper both implicitly and explicitly, so that, although some of them could certainly coherently stand on their own as shorter fictions, all of them work most resonantly in relation to each other and within the context of the book as a whole.

The stories most immediately share a common style and structure, the seemingly shapeless and deceptively formidable nature of each undoubtedly also features of the book that make it unpalatable to many publishers. Except for one piece, and a small part of another, in the form of a play (the former a parody of Beckett featuring Samuel Johnson and his cat as characters), the stories/chapters of Human Wishes/Enemy Combatants are composed in a single, uninterrupted block of text, the sentences of which can frequently become quite long and unwieldy. Although in my view this strategy is a little too reminiscent of the work of Thomas Bernhard, it does work well in conveying the protagonist's experiences, which do not occur in discrete, paragraph-sized slices but as one-thing-after-another, as well as his mental processes, which are not exactly organized. This is reflected as well in the rush of sentences, which don't so much meander as collide with each other in a grammatical free-fall. Since Caldwell's prose avoids conventional figurative ornamentation, however, it actually works to advance "story" fairly straightforwardly, even if the story simply accumulates incidents rather than imposing on them more artificial plot devices. Although these formal and stylistic features might at first seem intimidating, I think most readers would readily enough discover that they can adapt to the book's different, but not inaccessible, way of organizing language. (They will further discover that the book's first piece, "Apple Seized," is also the shortest and that, in addition to the thematic elements it introduces, it provides a good opportunity to begin adapting.)

I believe most readers will also find a unifying source of interest in the novel's (unnamed) protagonist, but again it is probably not the sort of interest that would commend itself to a publisher hoping to appeal to those seeking to naively "identify" with a fictional character. Although this protagonist is not without his charms, they are the charms of a sad sack, schlemiel-like figure to whom things happen rather than becoming an active agent of his own fate. His misadventures can be quite entertaining, while at the same time an undercurrent of menace is also decidedly present. The threat is embodied on a personal level by the protagonist's sense that, though he is presumably a white American, somehow his physiognomy suggests to people he is Semitic, either Jewish or Arabic, the latter of which makes onlookers especially uncomfortable, of course. On the social level, the threat posed by the American surveillance state is invoked in the very first story, set in an airport, but the protagonist doesn't so much feel he is himself under suspicion because he might be a terrorist but because his general demeanor betrays his status as a slacker writer contributing nothing productive to the social order. The one tie he does have to that order is through his wife, whom we never see but who seem to be organized and successful (making us wonder, of course, why she's married to our protagonist).

That the protagonist is a writer supplies Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant with an additional unifying element, one that also marks it as an "experimental" work and thus less attractive to publishers' marketing departments. The book is also about its own composition, the metafictional strategy most visible in the book's fifth story/chapter (out of nine), as the protagonist visits an art museum featuring a Joseph Cornell exhibition and "stands before the fifth box in the middle of nine boxes devoted to his nine lives, to his left are the four previous boxes and to his right the four subsequent boxes." The boxes bear the titles of the nine chapters of the book we are reading. Literary self-consciousness is manifested as well in the mock Beckett play and in the final chapter, which begins: "Someone must have dropped a dime on our hero, for without having done anything wrong he woke up one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into an enemy of the state."

For the most part, the metafictional contrivances are clever and amusing, although there is one self-reflexive gesture that works less well. Caldwell uses his book as an opportunity to extend his critique of the critic James Wood, to whom there are numerous references and about whom "Samuel Johnson" engages in prolonged discussion in "Human Wishes." While I agree with much of this critique, the very fact that I found myself agreeing/disagreeing with these sections of the book as critical discourse ("A real critic would be discovering new writers and new trends in writing, not just passing judgment on whatever the publishing megaconglomerates choose to shovel onto the shelves of the big chain-bookstores") made for an awkward pause in the reading experience as I struggled to understand the aesthetic purpose of this discourse. At best it seems to me an ultimately superfluous satirical gesture, that pause of mine a rip in the book's aesthetic fabric.

Unfortunately, I would have to make a similar judgment about those parts of the book, in particular "The Little Wayfarer" and "Enemy Combatant" that take it away from geopolitics used as atmospheric backdrop into what borders on geopolitical agitprop on behalf of the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel. Although this is made relevant to the protagonist's story through a rather long digression tracing what may (or may not) be his lineage as the actual son of a Palestinian immigrant to the U.S, the pause required to assimilate an otherwise clearly polemical interlude is even longer, and, to me at least, significantly weakens the second half of Human Wishes/Enemy Combatants.

Nevertheless, these are flaws that I would attribute to a writer trying to do too much rather than settling for too little, and if Caldwell needs his rage at perceived injustice (part of a more general dissatisfaction with the world--including the literary world--as it is) to inspire what is still both an iconoclastic and intricately fashioned work such at this, I for one am prepared to accept such flaws as incidental damage. Sometimes in attempting to "say something," a writer manages to make something even more interesting.

Soaked in Meaning

(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.

Marriage Had Not Worked Out

(This review was originally published in Full Stop.)

Divorcer may be the best opportunity yet for readers who have shied away from the fiction of Gary Lutz because of its reputation for being dense and “difficult” both to discover that Lutz’s work is accessible after all and to understand why his admirers are so fervent in their praise. The stories included in this book are just as remarkable in their accumulation of singular, surprising, and painstakingly constructed sentences as those gathered in Lutz’s previous books, but Divorcer has a thematic coherence that puts Lutz’s wordplay into a context that helps us more readily appreciate the role such innovative sentences play in giving rise to the larger discursive and aesthetic order of which they are a part.

Lutz has himself described the method by which he builds his sentences in some detail, most notably in the essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” but also in numerous interviews he has given over the years since his first book, Stories in the Worst Way, was published in 1996. Most of Lutz’s stories, he explains, are conceived as sentences, or a gradual accumulation of sentences, without relation to character or a plot. He describes his interest as being almost exclusively in placing these sentences together in the most resonant way he can devise, resonant literally in how words reinforce and echo one another and how the sonic and grammatical relationship between those sentences maintains and magnifies such echoes. Assonance, consonance, and alliteration play an important role in this process, as does manipulations of grammar, odd juxtapositions, unusual word choice, word combinations and neologisms. We don’t have to get very far into the first story in Divorcer, the title story, to find a passage that immediately illustrates many of the typical features of Lutz’s prose:

The afternoon welcomed me into its swelters. An hour went by, then cleared the way for another. I had found a bench near the store and stood in quiet beside it. Others came and sat: unfinished-looking men, a pair of proudly ungabby girls I took for lovers done for now with their love, a woman graphically sad in ambitious pinpoints of jewelry. Then a man so moodless, I could see all the different grades and genres of zilch behind his eyes. The city flattered these people who in the country would have been flattened fast for all to see all the same.

The reader is immediately invited to pause and consider the first sentence as a self-contained linguistic unit. Why this unorthodox figure—“welcomed me into its swelters”—with its verb made into a noun? The second sentence also draws attention to itself, this time through the strange and arresting use of personification, reinforcing the conclusion that Lutz wants us focused in at the sentence level. To cling to conventional expectations that such sentences will finally become vehicles for the forward movement of plot or character development will lead only to frustration. In fact, it seems to me that the assumption that Lutz aspires for his prose to act as a transparent medium for storytelling often results in the dissatisfaction that some readers and reviewers experience in his stories.

For readers willing to accept Lutz’s redirection of our aesthetic interest, it is perhaps tempting to conclude that Lutz’s art is an art of the sentence, considered in isolation from the elements of narrative, character, or setting. Thus almost all reviewers and interviewers who express admiration for his fiction concentrate their attention on Lutz as a unique stylist, ignoring the way his stories retain these elements. The formal patterns that emerge are both a result of and a natural aesthetic complement to the singular sentences that constitute his work. If individual sentences in a sense leave us suspended in their word twists and serpentine syntax, the stories in which they appear do something similar, accumulating these sentences to create a kind of layering effect that gradually expands our sense of character and situation without making them secondary, mere vehicles for advancing a conventionally developed plot. The stories work by linking sentences to paragraphs to episodes, establishing a relationship of mutual resonance and reinforcement, building up from character and situation an impression of depth or breadth that can seem static, but could also be accepted as an aesthetically coherent alternative to the notion that “story” entails movement forward.

“Divorcer” not only introduces us to this alternative strategy, but also to the theme that pervades the work and allows Lutz to expand his technique beyond the bounds of what would be possible in an individual story. Like all of the other pieces in Divorcer, it is composed of marked fragments, each one adding a layer to the narrator’s account of his short-lived marriage. The sections move freely around the narrator’s recollections of the marriage, each of them capturing a moment or arriving at an insight that illuminates the circumstances of the marriage and its ultimate failure, but by no means suggesting that human relationships can be explained by representing them in a “story.” As one would suspect, the reality of failed marriage is most memorably evoked in the most bracing sentences:

Marriage had not worked out to be a doubling of each other’s life, though there were duplicate juicers and sources of music.

My penis might have had reach, maybe, but it never increased itself for her.

My wife: she was the active one in the marriage, mixing other men into it.

Both through sentences like these and through a formal arrangement that reproduces the poetic suspension in which such sentences are designed to hold the reader for the story as a whole, “Divorcer” allows us, in effect, to inhabit the experience of divorce rather than simply read about it.

The other stories in the book expand and enhance this effect, approaching the experience from different angles, augmenting it through depth of treatment, their characters compelling precisely because they seem to blend into each other, their shared predicament conveying a powerful sense of pain, confusion, and loss, as well as, frequently enough, self-hatred. In “The Driving Dress,” the narrator loses weight in order to begin wearing the clothes left behind by his ex-wife, coming to terms with his (second) divorce by fleeing his own identity. In “Fathering” and “Middleton,” no actual divorce is involved, but each introduces us to a marriage at a point when its failure is implicit. In the former, a father focuses his attention on helping his daughter through school, after which his job as a father will be mostly done. Meanwhile, he arranges trysts with other men for his wife, as if acknowledging that the marriage itself is now past its usefulness. In the latter, a husband’s wife has died, and as the husband briefly relates to us the events of the funeral, it becomes clear the marriage had become perfunctory: “There had in fact been talk of divorce, but we talked about it the way other people talked about getting a pool or maybe just a pool table, even just the miniature kind that rests atop a regular table, even a card table.” That the marriage was inadequate to the husband’s needs is confirmed when shortly after the funeral he begins a sexual relationship with a man.

Two additional stories, “To Whom Might I Have Concerned?” and “I Have to Be Halved,” widen the focus to include same-sex relationships as well, although they are portrayed as just as subject to disillusionment and dysfunction as their heterosexual counterparts. Thus sexuality in Divorcer is not shown to make a significant difference in tempering the fragility of intimate human relationships. All human beings are prone to the same blindness, indifference, and casual cruelty, all human love accompanied by an expiration date. As the narrator of “Womanesque” explains his failures, “It’s just that I was born, grew some, started differing, didn’t stop.”

These are certainly not original insights. What is original in Gary Lutz’s fiction is the especially powerful way in which these insights are expressed, emotionally affecting without resorting to traditional narrative devices. He does not narrow the possibilities of “literary” language to the usual sort of figurative flourishes that too often serve mostly as linguistic decoration, nor does he rely on typical notions of “plot” or of “well-rounded” characters or any of the other established elements of fiction that draw attention away from language. If much “experimental” fiction is primarily experiment with form, Lutz’s innovation is in paring back form in order to reconceive the purpose of the sentence as the truly essential element of prose fiction. In the way they reinvigorate the English sentence, Lutz’s stories in Divorce ought to inspire other writers to consider how close attention to the shapes and sonorities of sentences can in turn bring a satisfyingly new kind of organization to fiction.

 

Waiting for the Final Word

(This review was originally published in The Quarterly Conversation.)

Because of the praiseworthy efforts of Archipelago Books, with the publication of In Red, we now have available translations of all four novels Polish writer Magdalena Tulli has written to date. Considering the general lack of attention given to translations by major American publishers, such a happy circumstance provides an opportunity to assess the work of this writer to an extent unfortunately not possible for too many translated writers, who are generally represented in English by at best an incomplete selection that may or may not include their most important work, or through which it is difficult to make a fully informed judgment of the important work because of the absence of needed context. Many writers are arguably subject to a distorted perspective due to the vagaries of translation, resulting no doubt in both the over- and the under-estimation of individual books in what is essentially a state of enforced ignorance for critics and reviewers.

Thus if English language readers had only Tulli’s first novel, Dreams and Stones, we might conclude her work is some hybrid of fiction and philosophical reflection, this novel a kind of poetic meditation in prose on the origins and development of a city. The city itself is really the novel’s only character, its various stages of growth the only plot. If we were further able to read Moving Targets, we might assume Tulli is a radical metafictionist, as it takes the motif of creation and makes it into a tale of specifically literary creation, following the efforts of an ineffectual narrator to invoke his characters and get his story started. This novel would seem to mark Tulli as a “postmodern” writer focused on the implications of storytelling itself. Adding to the mix Flaw (chronologically her most recent book), however, it would seem that Tulli’s novels can also be “about” something other than themselves. Flaw does not abandon the self-reflexive depiction of the dynamics of storytelling and the process of creation; rather it incorporates this concern in a portrayal of a fully made city with characters that do come to life, albeit more as a collective than as individual figures, and a story whose drama goes beyond (or is in addition to) the drama of narrative construction.

In Red is Tulli’s most conventional novel—which is not to say it could finally be described as a conventional work of fiction. Still, to the extent it does offer individuated characters, some degree of plot “movement,” and a strongly delineated setting, readers hesitant to commit to one of the novels that seems formidably experimental might find In Red a more comfortable introduction to Tulli’s fiction. But while the novel does provide somewhat more of the familiar elements of conventional fiction, it nevertheless doesn’t allow the reader to retreat altogether to conventional reading pleasures. If there are identifiable characters who are “developed” over the course of the narrative, there is no one character whom we are invited to regard as a protagonist. Indeed, while a succession of characters are introduced, most of them led to the same fate—early death— none of them are characters with whom we are likely to “identify.” Most of the focus is on figures of prominence and authority, primarily businessmen, and these characters in particular tend to blend together, as if each such character is another version of the previous. The procession of new characters in turn produces the novel’s narrative structure: a chronicle of notable personages and events in Stichings, a (fictional) town in a (fictional) province of northern Poland.

Stichings itself is really the main character in In Red, tracking what happens there through roughly the first half of the 20th century its primary concern. In this way it is perhaps not a radical departure from Dreams and Stones, adding people and their interactions to the portrayal of a city, superimposing their “story” on the story of the city’s growth. Although Stichings regresses as a much as or more than it progresses (at the end of the novel it is consumed by fire), it could be said to serve the same function in this novel, in a less overt, more outwardly disguised way, as the city does in Tulli’s first novel: as the vehicle for an allegorical representation of the act of literary creation. In Red’s enactment of this allegory calls less attention to itself and for the most part remains implicit, but the framing of the novel clearly enough emphasizes the symmetries of commencing and concluding the act of storytelling: “Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything,” the novel begins

last of all should pay a visit to Stichings. Simply take a seat in a sleigh and, before being overcome by sleep, speed across a plain that’s as empty as a blank sheet of paper, boundless as life itself. Sooner or later this someone—perhaps it is a traveling salesman with a valise full of samples—will see great mounds of snow stretching along streets to the four corners of the earth, toward empty, icy expanses.

The novel’s closing lines if anything make the parallel between the story of Stichings and the invocation of fictional worlds through writing even more apparent:

Traveling salesman in search of happiness or deliverance: if you wish to leave Stichings, do not hesitate for a moment: you have to do it between the capital letter and the period, without any broken-off thought, without waiting for the final word.

That the novel focuses on the act of creating a fictional “place” such as Stichings does not mean it fails to maintain the illusion that Stichings is a “real” place. Polish readers would no doubt finds its details and its portrait of the life of the city entirely genuine; for the rest of us, the illusion of reality certainly seems complete. The characters, however much they are deliberately made to echo and repeat, are still credible, recognizable human beings. The stories of success, failure, and misadventure in which they are involved are likewise recognizable and recognizably human. The reader could take the overtures to the “traveling salesman” as invitations to enter into the fictional portrayal of Stichings and its inhabitants, without necessarily reflecting on the process of literary composition or interpreting the mechanisms involved. Readers could certainly enjoy In Red as a lively narrative of the notable events in an out-of-the-way corner of Europe, although not so out-of-the-way that we can’t see ourselves reflected in the people living there.

However, while In Red could be read and appreciated for its more conventional, if at times eccentric, treatment of plot, character, and setting, such an appreciation would remain incomplete without the opportunity to situate this novel in the context of Tulli’s still evolving body of work. The access that Archipelago now gives us to this work in full allows us to see that Tulli is a writer who begins in an awareness of the artificiality of literary creation and the independent logic expressed by stories, but who has also endeavored to embody these concerns in narratives that appeal to familiar expectations of literary narrative. Even if we still cannot say that through these translations we can apprehend Tulli’s most immediate engagement of these concerns with the resources of the Polish language, nor can we experience the historical and cultural resonances of the depiction of this period in Polish history as readily as Polish readers, we can, thanks to the work of both the publisher and translator Bill Johnston, make a more concerted effort to estimate the achievement of this writer than we can with most writers we can know only through translation. My own tentative judgment is that her achievement is considerable, perhaps even singular, in the way it enlists “postmodern” strategies to further traditional goals of storytelling.

Allegorical Codes

Stacey Levine's The Girl With Brown Fur (Starcherone Books) is yet another example of the way in which a certain strain of current "experimental" fiction has become tied to surrealism as the apparent alternative to conventional practice--presumably understood as itself committed to "realism," to which the new surrealism is the appropriate challenge. The most notable (and popular) harbinger of this mode of literary antithesis is perhaps the fiction of Aimee Bender, but it is now arguably the dominant approach among younger writers and in the fiction published by "indie" journals and presses.

Which, of course, means it's now no longer even vaguely "experimental," even if it ever was. (It wasn't.) It seems to be the default strategy of a rising generation of writers who otherwise regard themselves as unconventional. It is becoming, in other words, the new, unexamined convention. Levine is older (her first book was published in 1993), so perhaps her work could be regarded as a precursor of sorts, less subject to the charge of trendiness, even as it does continue to participate in practices that are fast becoming dull and commonplace.

"Dull" is precisely the word I would use to describe The Girl With Brown Fur. Not only are the individual stories tedious to read, but the relentless sameness of the stories (with some alternation of shorter with longer ones) makes reading the collection as a whole an oppressive experience. If the stories were more boisterously absurdist, or even just more straightforwardly whimsical, the book might be at least passably entertaining, but instead they proceed through their mostly amorphous narratives in the same affectless tone, reciting their mostly desultory actions and events in the same robotic way. Although writers such as Kafka and Borges, to whose work Levine's is sometimes compared, relate strange, ultimately inexplicable occurrences in a deadpan manner, as if such occurrences were perfectly normal, Levine's stories convey no particular impression at all. Her characters--and these stories are character-centric--have no presence, as if just giving them a name and assigning them weird things to do and say is enough to make them interesting.

The very first story in the book, "Uppsala," exemplifies all of these problems. Although it is one of the briefer stories, its welcome begins to wear with the initial scene-setting:

We come from a bad family and we are disgraced.

"What time do we get there?" asks Brother.

"Stop cluttering your mind with those kinds of thoughts," answers Mother. It is Brother's nineteenth birthday, and we are driving off to the cabin.

We think she is terrible.

The true source of our family remains unknown, though it effectively has prevented speech and compassion for the speechless.

The remainder of the story advances very little beyond what we learn in this passage, to the extent what we are told is comprehensible in the first place. The family arrives at the cabin, where we learn that indeed her children fear her. It is a "bad family" that dares not speak around her due to her "terrible" unhappiness. Unfortunately, these basic facts are then repeated again and again, in different words: "Our nights are static and lonely as ice gathers around the perimeter of this family kitchen"; "Our family is sad and does not live in a verdant place"; "But we are bound in a community of tension and stupendous threat the name of which only Mother knows." The burden of the story's additional narrative movement is carried by similar narrational declarations: "Because of our wounds, we each have grown permeable and have for example consoled one another at twilight"; "That winter we leaned the snow incited our games and the desire to freeze away our mother's sickness and we grew angry."

The "poetic" flourishes--"Amidst the piercing whiteness. . .our wishes that combine to produce friction of desperate severity"-- that decorate this and other stories can't rescue them from monotony and affectation. Although in the longer stories more of the narrative action is conventionally dramatized, they still, as Kristy Eldredge approvingly puts it, proceed "allusively, in an allegorical code," one that in my opinion condenses sense too densely in the name of superficial oddity and "quirk." And while in a story such as "Uppsala" the characters aren't meant to be developed extensively enough that the allegorical names they are given--Brother, Father, Mother--don't yet descend fully into mannerism, the other characters in the book play similarly one-dimensional roles. The effect of most of the stories is the same as in "Uppsala": the surface oddity substitutes for both character development and plot, and neither the language nor the imagery nor the mostly muted humor can rescue them from tedium.

Eldredge further maintains that Levine's approach "always feels down-to-earth and revealing of very real pockets in the human psyche." Some such claim, that the characters are recognizable even as they fail to be distinctive, that Levine is probing the primordial psyche, seems to accompany many of the generally admiring reviews and discussions of Levine's work, but even if I thought these claims had merit, I would not consider them significant accomplishments. The last thing we need is a continuation of the privileging of "psychological realism" through other, more superficially disguised means, reinforcing the notion that the appropriate goal of fiction is to probe and reveal the "human psyche," as if fiction were just an adjunct of psychotherapy. Going after the "deep pockets" (what is "revealed" usually amounts to platitudes and commonplaces, as in the generic "unhappiness" of Uppsala") through reversing the methods of realism is no more enlightening than it is in realism proper, and equally specious.

There is nothing formally challenging about The Girl With Brown Fur. The conventions of exposition, scenic construction, and dialogue go undisturbed. Character and plot are not abandoned, merely flattened out into lifelessness. The stories' uniform style does nothing to redress this lifelessness, aside from the usual sort of figurative language. The only conceivably unorthodox strategy in these stories is the reversal of realism, and at some point this becomes merely a repetitive gesture and ultimately only reinforces the protocols of realism by constantly reminding us of their deliberate absence. If Stacey Levine cannot be accused of helping to reduce surrealism to cliche by jumping on its current bandwagon, her fiction does nothing to avoid that fate.

The Searchers

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.

What's New?

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

The most serious obstacle to taking the anthology 30 Under 30 as an illuminating introduction to “innovative fiction by younger writers” is that, literally, it provides no introduction. The thirty stories are presented to us without context, with no preliminary statement by the editors, Blake Butler and Lily Hoang, of the principles of selection they used,no discussion of the variety of experiment or innovation the reader will encounter, no indication of the logic, if any, behind the order of the stories’ presentation. Essentially we are asked to make sense of the anthology as we can, without the assistance of those who presumably believed it was important that an anthology of innovative fiction by writers under 30 be published in the first place.

Perhaps this is deliberate. Perhaps the editors hoped to let the stories, in effect, speak for themselves. As a gesture in support of the integrity of the selections included, this might be laudable enough, but arguably any anthology of innovative or “experimental” fiction requires some advice and direction for readers not already sympathetic with its ambitions, perhaps even intimidated by it, and it would seem even more important to provide some guidance for a book such as 30 Under 30, which in concentrating on experimental fiction by a rising cohort of writers brings up several implicit questions: How does this new cohort understand the concept of “innovation” as applied to works of fiction? How do the writers situate themselves in relation to previous innovative writers? What new avenues of exploration do these stories open up for fiction writers who might in turn be inspired by them?

An editor’s introduction that addressed these questions certainly could not answer them definitively, but an awareness that such questions naturally suggest themselves in confronting a book like 30 Under 30 surely would help the reader to read the selections attentively, in a way that rewards the effort. Most of all, it would help the writers whose work has been selected, since their fiction could be judged in its appropriate context, in relation to both the work of their predecessors in the development of self-consciously innovative fiction and the other writers included in the anthology. Instead, the reader is left to apply whatever connotations of “innovative” he/she already brings to the stories, if any, which potentially leaves some of the selections incomprehensible to some readers and does nothing remind us that connotations of “innovation” and “experiment” must remain in flux, that expectations of fiction evolve along with the form itself.

Moreover, readers who do expect that an anthology of innovative fiction will exhibit significant formal innovation will probably be disappointed with 30 Under 30. On the whole, the selections included are quite heavy on narrative, even old-fashioned linear narrative, however surreal or fantastic the events chronicled often are. Indeed, surrealism or a fantasy-inflected version of absurdism seems the dominant strategy in these selections, but it is a fabular, allegorical mode of surrealism in which the reader’s attention is consistently oriented toward story. Many of these stories have strong affinities to the work of Aimee Bender and George Saunders, who, to judge by this anthology, may be among current writers the strongest influence on the rising generation of “younger writers,” although some of the fiction in 30 Under 30 subtracts the essentially whimsical humor that characterizes Bender’s and Saunders’s work, making these surrealistic fables somewhat starker in their distortions of reality.

Another inspiration for the flights from reality that mark most of these stories seems to be various narrative forms of popular culture: movies, tv, comic books, perhaps video games. Matt Bell’s “Jumpman vs. the Ape,” for example, recapitulates King Kong by way of DC comics, its protagonist attempting to himself ascend the structure the ape is climbing in order to rescue the heroine from its clutches. The story in substance extracts the melodrama of heroism and victimization from such popular genres, but, in a move reminiscent of Groundhog Day, Bell portrays Jumpman failing in his goal of winning the girl and being compelled to repeat the quest again and again. Jaclyn Dwyer’s “Biography of a Porn Star” is an affecting if askew account of the life and work of the title character, which portrays them as decidedly unglamorous. Both of these stories take familiar narrative types and twist or invert them, a strategy that works well enough in these two stories but that surely now isn’t very “innovative,” previously employed as it was by such “postmodern” writers as Donald Barthleme and Robert Coover. The same thing might be said of Devin Gribbons’s “A Short Story,” which is an enjoyable enough metafiction (its first-level “plot” revolving around the development of a device that destroys souls) but can’t really be said to much extend the possibilities of metafiction beyond those already established by the postmodernists.

There are some stories in 30 Under 30 that do obviously experiment with form. Zach Dodson’s “I Write to You” is presented in the form of a familiar Mead Composition book (complete with cover and appropriately lined pages), but finally there’s really nothing about the substance of the story–a series of typically disconnected musings by an unidentified diarist–that really is either enhanced by the formal framework or seems to require it. Adam Good is described in the contributor’s notes as an “interdisciplinary artist” rather that a fiction writer, and while his “Guided Walks” might provoke some curiosity as a “word installation,” it doesn’t seem likely as a model for future development in fiction. The most interesting and successful of these formally unconventional stories in Todd Seabrook’s “When Robin Hood Fell With an Arrow Through His Heart,” which relates the death of Robin Hood and the demise of the Merry Men through a first-person account by one of the latter that observes no typographical rules or boundaries. But in this case the ortho/typographical idiosyncrasies have an aesthetically justified and reinforcing function, as the wandering prose and depleted verbal resources mirror the lost focus and declining powers of the Merry Men in the wake of Robin Hood’s death.

A kind of lassitude and lack of focus lingers thematically over much of this collection. In addition to the frustrations of purpose conveyed by the narratives of stories like Bell’s and Seabrook’s, many if not most of the selections portray characters who are at loose ends, disconnected from their environment, alienated and aimless. In many ways the prevailing surrealism seems a way of emphasizing such disconnections and alienation, but the loss of direction is perhaps most directly represented in the extreme fragmentation characteristic of the selected work as a whole. If narrative is emphasized in this work, it is not narrative continuously presented. But, again, fragmentation cannot really any longer be considered particularly innovative as a narrative strategy, however much it does seem appropriate to the characters, setting, and circumstances of specific stories and to the worldview that emerges from the collection in general. Michael Stewart’s “Sister,” comprised of twenty-two very brief “chapters” (in an eight-page story) is just one example of a story unfolding in fragments, although its structure particularly highlights its radical compression. The cumulative impression left by stories like this is that even though the need to tell stories remains, the possibility of telling them straight–either through the assumptions of realism or through sustained narrative exposition–seems to have been exhausted, no longer among the resources currently available to the writer of ”Compression” is at work in 30 Under 30 in other ways as well, specifically in the form of “shorts” or “flash fiction.” Several of the included writers are represented by a series of such pieces, including James Yeh and Joshua Cohen. Yeh’s pieces are untypically (for this volume) realistic sketches that seem carefully composed for the “flash” form. Although it is tempting to find continuities between the five short pieces that would allow considering them as a larger whole, finally they are probably related only by the first-person narrator common to each. Cohen’s seven shorts seem even less integrated, but since Cohen is arguably the most accomplished innovative writer included in this book, and since his already published work has been of the maximalist rather than the minimalist variety, it is also tempting to wonder whether he might be experimenting with the juxtaposition of seemingly disassociated short prose pieces, or whether such pieces simply have less force when regarded separately.

While “flash fiction” is hardly a new phenomenon, it is fair to say it has yet to achieve full acceptance as a literary form separate from the “regular” short story or as a possible convergence of short fiction and prose poetry. Of the approaches to be sampled in 30 Under 30, it seems to me the most likely to continue offering writers the opportunity to extend the horizons of fiction. Simply inverting realism through surrealistic distortion and discordance (as if “realism” is still the primary enemy of innovation in fiction rather than conformity of practice more broadly) is a limited strategy that can become just as conventionalized as realism. Working toward a hybrid of fiction and poetry (which need not be restricted to short forms) would perhaps encourage writers–and readers–to focus more on language as the essential element of both.

Finally, literary “innovation” can really occur only through the emergence of form from language artfully arranged, an achievement that, putting aside the promise some of the writers included here certainly show, unfortunately is not consistently realized in this anthology.

 

The Living Labyrinth of Literature

(This review originally appeared in The Quarterly Conversation)

Not far into his new book, The Anatomy of Influence, Harold Bloom provides what attentive readers could consider an explanation of sorts for his curious status in both the general literary culture and among academic critics. “More than a half a century as a teacher,” he writes, “has shown me that I am best as a provocation for my students, a realization that has carried over into my writing. That stance alienates some readers in the media and in the academy, but they are not my audience.”

There is no doubt that Bloom has proven to be a “provocation” beyond the classroom, and in a way that often “alienates” rather than productively challenges, which is no doubt the effect Bloom hopes to have on his students. Most recently Bloom has provoked the “media” to purvey an image of him as an elitist, curmudgeonly defender of tradition and scourge of the popular, a literary dinosaur still roaming the earth even though the climate in which he finds himself has irreversibly shifted. Bloom thus seems to appear to some “ordinary” readers as a rather menacing figure whose views stand as a challenge to their reading habits, or as a rather pompously comic figure whose opinions can be safely dismissed. Bloom himself actually anticipates this latter response to his books in his frequent self-identification with Sir John Falstaff, although it is Falstaff’s refusal to be anything other than himself that Bloom most prizes.

But if Bloom has alienated literary journalists and casual readers by being willing to make distinctions and to assert literature’s seriousness of purpose, before his current incarnation as kind of public critic, he also alienated his original scholarly audience as well, although for a time he was considered not an apostate from academic criticism but among its most cutting-edge practitioners. While today Bloom is perceived as an enemy of “theory,” during the 1970s he was himself a prominent, even notorious, theorist whose Freudian-based account of poetic influence scandalized his more traditional colleagues and even led to his being grouped among the more radical theorists such as Derrida, de Man, and Foucault. Eventually it became clear that Bloom’s invocation of Freud and Nietzsche was part of an attempt to account for the power of great works of literature, not to diminish their value, and Bloom gradually began to provoke the scorn of “advanced” critical theorists, a scorn he freely returned by dubbing them members of the “school of resentment.”

So if the book reviewers and the academic critics no longer represent Bloom’s audience, who is his audience? One could uncharitably conclude that Bloom constitutes his own audience of one, but the very fact that he turned to a “popularizing” approach to both literature and his own ideas about literature and that he has now produced what he calls “my virtual swan song, my [attempt] to say in one place most of what I have learned about how influence works in imaginative literature” suggests that he does want to reach an audience of potentially sympathetic readers outside the academy, who might still be persuaded by the depth of his commitment to poetry (understood as the primal source of all “literature”) and his understanding of literary history to value great poetry more highly——if not as passionately as Bloom himself (which might be impossible), then more than both the culture at large and academic literary study currently allows. That Bloom does emphasize “great” works of literature perhaps seems hopelessly old-fashioned, an attempt to prop up one of the pillars of Western culture, but finally Bloom is less interested in celebrating greatness per se, whether in people or in civilization, than he is in conveying to the reader the power of poetry at its most vital.

Bloom signals in The Anatomy of Influence an awareness of the ways in which his previous books have been misunderstood, if not deliberately misconstrued, and thus the first chapter of the book attempts to clarify what Bloom has actually written in such books as The Anxiety of Influence and Agon. Perhaps the most serious misconception about Bloom’s theory of “influence” is that influence is something tangibly felt by a writer through his/her consciousness of a precursor writer acting as inspiration. But as Bloom points out, “Influence anxiety exists between poems and not between persons.” While in some cases a poet might be aware of this anxiety “at whatever level of consciousness,” for the literary critic “all that matters is the revisionary relationship between poems, as manifested in tropes, images, diction, syntax, grammar, metric, poetic stance.” One could say that Bloom’s approach to the reading of poetry requires both close attention to the text—looking for the tropes, images, etc.—and an awareness of literary history, the ways in which the poem’s manifest qualities maintain a connection, however much the poem seeks its own autonomy, with the poems that have already been written and that inevitably prompted, directly and indirectly, the new poem. “Poetic thought is always a mode of memory,” writes Bloom. “Primarily this is the memory of prior poems.”

Bloom’s approach thus diverges from that of the New Critics, against whom Bloom was reacting in his critical work of the 1960s and ‘70s, whose too-exclusive focus on “the tropes, the images, and the diction” for Bloom inappropriately separated the individual poem from “poetry.” One cannot sufficiently appeal to the former without also appreciating its place in the development of the latter, since the poem will always be marked by the “anxiety” produced by the unavoidable operation of influence. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom called for “a wholly different practical criticism” than conventional close reading, one that gave up “the failed enterprise of seeking to ‘understand’ any single poem as an entity in itself.”

Let us pursue instead the quest of learning to read any poem as its poet’s deliberate misinterpretation, as a poet, of a precursor poem or poetry in general.

The Anatomy of Influence is also an attempt to clear up misapprehensions of what Bloom intends by such a formulation as “deliberate misinterpretation.” Bloom’s own notion of the “misreading” has itself been misread, even deliberately, but this is merely a “weak” misreading that is simply a matter of getting Bloom wrong. A strong misreading is a “creative” one, indeed where poetry is concerned it is the very fountainhead of creativity. It is a type of defense mechanism whereby the poet (as what Bloom calls an “ephebe,” a poet-in-the-making) wards off the potentially debilitating power of the precursor by “swerving” away into a new expression or stance. In a sense the poet’s misreading is also “wrong,” but because of the nature of literature as a form of expression, there can finally be no wrong reading by a strong poet or critic:

. . . correct readings are not possible if a literary work is sublime enough. A correct reading merely would repeat the text, while asserting that it speaks for itself. It does not. The more powerful a literary artifice, the more it relies upon figurative language.

“Misreading” does not mean mischaracterizing or misidentifying a text’s proper meaning, since there is no proper meaning to strong works of literature. It is a figurative transformation of a “discourse” that is itself inescapably figurative.

Misreadings of Bloom, to the extent they are not simply willful attempts to distort what he means, represent a failure to understand that for Bloom criticism is also unavoidably a “resort to figuration.” How could the effort to comprehend “highly figurative language” be anything but figurative, unless it is outright an attempt to tame it, to restate it in other, inevitably reductive, terms? (If the poem could be expressed that way, why wasn’t it?) “To practice criticism,” according to Bloom, “is to think poetically about poetic thinking.” Thus those who expect that Bloom will match his privileging of the aesthetic qualities of literature with systematic, detailed close readings of individual texts are perhaps disappointed to find instead what can seem like generalizations or simply Bloom’s own passionately expressed appreciations. Those unprepared for Bloom’s “figurative” style of criticism perhaps take his formulations too literally, or don’t understand his excursions into Jewish mysticism or classical authors. To the extent that his erudite and declamatory method causes misunderstanding, The Anatomy of Influence does arguably work best as a summing-up and a corrective.

Bloom is probably perceived by some casual readers as dauntingly “serious,” and The Anatomy of Influence might help to correct the mistaken assumption not so much that Bloom does take literature seriously (the book’s subtitle, “Literature as a Way of Life” unequivocally signals this fact), but why he does so. Bloom is no moralist or academic taskmaster, certain that reading great books is good for us. While he does often identify with Samuel Johnson, a stern moral critic if there ever was one, as Bloom tells us in a brief chapter on Johnson’s critical influence, “Johnson as a literary critic means most to me in his apprehension of Shakespeare,” whose centrality to the Western literary tradition is made emphatically clear throughout The Anatomy of Influence. (In many ways the influence of Johnson on Bloom is the latter’s own creative misreading, reaching for the “Romantic strain” in Johnson that values imagination over “stability.”) Bloom expresses only disdain for Matthew Arnold, the other great moral critic, whose reasons for advocating a Western canon are not Bloom’s.

Although he professes devotion to Johnson, Bloom’s stronger alliance is to Walter Pater.
“As a disciple of Walter Pater and his ephebe Oscar Wilde,” he confesses, “I am an Epicurean literary critic, reliant upon sensations, perceptions, impressions.” Bloom values Shakespeare because he so capaciously provides these sensations and impressions, giving us access to the “sublime,” which is Bloom’s highest measure of aesthetic success. He follows Pater in regarding the sublime “as the adding of strangeness to beauty.” Bloom further associates strangeness with “uncanniness,” which is the “estrangement of the homelike or commonplace.” Shakespeare is the most distinguished creator of the sublime in literature:

Shakespeare, when you give yourself completely to reading him, surprises you by the strangeness which I take to be his salient quality. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands. The difference between reading Shakespeare and reading nearly any other writer is that greater widening of our consciousness into what initially must seem a strangeness of woe or wonder.

If Shakespeare or any of the other writers Bloom discusses in The Anatomy of Influence are good for us it is because of this “widening of consciousness,” not because they instruct or enlighten us. The sublime is a form of pleasure, although it is a “difficult pleasure,” one that can prompt both “woe” and “wonder,” or a complex intermingling of the two. It may thus give rise to the closest facsimile of an authentic religious experience, at least for Bloom, who otherwise professes no religious belief, his attachment to the Jewish tradition notwithstanding. Those of us who are willing to follow Bloom through his version of the canon and the anxieties of influence that bring it into being, his invocations of Kabbalah and Longinus, his insistence on “misreading” as the source of innovation, and his sometimes oracular pronouncements and judgments because his commitment to the value and integrity of literature is so palpable and his insights are indeed so provocative perhaps at this point might begin to resist Bloom’s outlook as excessively metaphysical, a private perspective that provides Bloom with a “way of life” the rest of us can’t really share.

Such resistance to the intensity of Bloom’s search for the sublime may provide the most cogent explanation of the accusation he is a “snob.” For Bloom, literature offers the truest access to the widening of consciousness he seeks, and books he judges do not promise such access are simply not worth taking seriously. And Bloom has seemingly so narrowed the range of works he does take seriously, and employs such arcane means of finding their value, he leaves the impression only he knows how to find it, that the canon he celebrates belongs to him. Even though an acquaintance with the numerous volumes of essays on various authors and works Bloom has edited (the Chelsea House series) will demonstrate that his approbation extends to many more writers than his reputation as a critical taskmaster would suggest, nevertheless he perhaps unavoidably cuts a somewhat embarrassing figure in an era when taking literature seriously is often seen as an offense to the democratic equality of taste, if not a outright complicity with a legacy of cultural imperialism.

The Anatomy of Influence is not likely to alter this perception among those who temperamentally could never take literature seriously because they take nothing seriously, or those for whom it is too frivolous to be taken seriously, but there ought to be readers in the sizable group fitting neither of these descriptions who could separate the ponderous manner Bloom at times affects in defense of what he fears are besieged literary values from potentially valid descriptions of the process of literary influence and of what precisely is original in the work of the writers Bloom examines and thus justifies their inclusion in the canon. If close reading is not always Bloom’s chosen avenue of approach to these writers, the extended, bravura analysis of, for example, Hart Crane’s The Bridge just might convert readers to Bloom’s view that Crane is an unjustly overlooked poet, and his discussion of the influence of Hamlet on Milton’s Paradise Lost might itself convince the reader the “anxiety of influence” is real.

The book as well is structured in a way that clarifies the line of descent of influence in both English and American poetry. The numerous chapters devoted to Shakespeare recapitulates many of the essential points Bloom made in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, but they also allow him to delineate Shakespeare’s influence on subsequent poets from Milton to Yeats, while his extended discussion of Walt Whitman allows him to do the same thing with the American poets who follow Whitman. Readers should get from The Anatomy of Influence an encompassing perspective on English language literary history (with a few detours into other languages as well) that provides the opportunity to assess whether Bloom’s account of how a tradition establishes and perpetuates itself seems convincing. Since any particular poem or any particular poet can acquire full significance only from within such a tradition, the book also could be said to offer a final statement of a theory of how poetry gets written. This may ultimately be the most important contribution Harold Bloom has made to the study of literature, and The Anatomy of Influence is if nothing else a useful condensation of Bloom’s exploration of the source of “poetic thinking.”

Readers who do find what Bloom has to say in The Anatomy of Influence worth contemplating will still want to move from it to The Anxiety of Influence, which remains arguably the most powerful version of the theory. Whereas in the new book Bloom announces that, in a critical climate he calls the “New Cynicism,” he wants to modify his conception of the anxiety of influence by redefining it as “literary love, tempered by defense,” in the first book he is much more willing to emphasize the more direful aspects of the poet’s struggle for expression in the shadow of the precursor poet. “If the imagination ‘s gift comes necessarily from the perversity of the spirit,” he writes there,

then the living labyrinth of literature is built upon the ruin of every impulse most generous in us. So apparently it is and must be—we are wrong to have founded a humanism directly upon literature itself, and the phrase “humane letters” is an oxymoron. A humanism might still be founded on a completer study of literature than we have yet achieved, but never upon literature itself. . . .

If all writers are in a sense indebted to other writers through influence, it is not the sort of influence that would lead the best of them to feel part of a “community”:

It does happen that one poet influences another, or more precisely, that one poet’s poems influence the poems of the other, through a generosity of the spirit, even a shared generosity. But our easy idealism is out of place here. Where generosity is involved, the poets influenced are minor or weaker; the more generosity, and the more mutual it is, the poorer the poets involved.

In The Anatomy of Influence Bloom somewhat softens this appeal to the self-centered, exclusionary forces (both Freudian and Nietzschean) that contribute to acts of true creativity, but it seems unlikely through his notion of “literary love” he now intends to suggest that the poetic impulse is a beneficent and convivial one after all. However, what Bloom really seems to reject is not the belief that literature represents a supreme human achievement but the “idealism” that would overlook the struggle involved or assume that the purpose of poetry is to benefit “humanity” in general. As Bloom indicates, it is possible to conduct through the study of literature an activity that is “humane” in its ambition, but this would have to be a literary study that does not distort or deny the source of literature in the depths of the “perverse” persistence of the human imagination.

Bloom’s engagement with both poetry and poems occurs most vitally in the depths of imaginative expression, his Paterian inclination toward “sensations” notwithstanding. In The Anatomy of Influence he reinforces his view that influence “works in the depths of image and idea, and produces intricate evasions that nevertheless bud and bloom.” It is “at its deepest . . . remote from echo and allusion, though it does not exclude them,” and is not primarily “an affair of stylistics.” As someone who belongs to that group of readers who willingly forms the audience for Harold Bloom’s provocations, I here find myself provoked to my own strongest objection to Bloom’s critical method. While a focus on “image and idea” does not “exclude” attention to style, in general to the surface features of a literary text, Bloom’s preoccupation with the “deep” and to some extent impalpable elements of the text too easily dismisses the relevance of “stylistics” in the experience of literature, even in determining the nature of “influence.” If influence can only be traced “between poems,” it seems somewhat arbitrary to assume it can be discerned more readily in those qualities of the poem that are to an extent invisible than in those that are manifestly visible.

Harold Bloom is in many ways a model of the literary critic urging readers to pay close attention to the works of literature we read. But for Bloom this attention is not first directed at the formal or stylistic features that we would immediately regard as “aesthetic.” Those features are in a sense taken for granted by Bloom, even as it is the aesthetic power of the poem that makes available the “deeper” content he is after. Reading for content is of course a common enough practice, even among literary critics, but ultimately Bloom’s pursuit of the evidence of influence as he understands it does threaten to become a Quixotic one (not that Bloom would necessarily consider this an unflattering description), the object of the pursuit to seem an esoteric one the importance of which is paramount primarily to Harold Bloom. There is still much to be learned from Bloom’s provocations, but probably his kind of reading can’t really be done by anyone else.

Arthur, Arthur

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.

Empathy Will Be Received

To an extent, it's a little surprising that Elisabeth Sheffield's Fort Da (FC2) has not received more attention. It is, after all, in part a fairly sensational story about what we now call a "sexual predator," in this case a reversal of Lolita in which the "offender" is a female scientist who becomes obsessed with an adolescent boy. Although to be sure the story is told (by the woman) in an unorthodox way, the narrative is explicit enough, and the representation of motive and psychology seems true enough, it would seem the novel might have caused a little bit of controversy, although the very fact the narrative is related through unorthodox means that to some extent distance us from the events portrayed and mute the potentially scandalous elements suggests that Sheffield certainly did not seek to court controversy.

What Sheffield seems to be after is a truthful account of the narrator's affliction (if that's what it is) and of her manner of coping with it. The narrator straightforwardly acknowledges her desire for Aslan, the adolescent boy, and painstakingly chronicles the events of their meeting, their eventually consummated relationship, and her final efforts to track him down when she is separated from him. But she is not quite able to tell us this story from a conventional first-person point of view, as if she can't finally bring herself to associate these events and her part in them with the "normal" self she still wants to preserve, as if she just can't acknowledge her own agency. Thus she adopts a cumbersomely "scientific" style emphasizing passive voice constructions. Addressing her "report" to her high school English teacher, Mrs, Wall, the narrator affirms

A true story that will faithfully present yours truly, without distortion or bias. To this end, a detached style has been adopted, one that will hopefully facilitate accurate reportage. The intent of this style is to step outside Rosemarie Ramee in order to more accurately observe her (and not, Strunk and White forbid, to annoy you with passive verb forms, which it is well remembered were a source of contention in high school). Yes, and maybe if the observations are presented with great care, with the greatest possible degree of honesty and precision, in the end empathy will be received.

Readers will have to decide for themselves whether to send RR (as she frequently hereafter identifies herself) "empathy," but her tortured attempts to remain objective, attempts she maintains throughout the narrative with gradually diminishing success, are really both the aesthetic and the emotional focus of the novel.

Aesthetically the style seems an apt analogue of the narrator's state of mind--she can tell the story, but only if she is in a sense able to withdraw her own participation and attempt to view the events with a kind of clinical detachment. Paradoxically, this forced detachment only makes the reader more aware of RR's obsession in the effort to cloak it, and her emotional turmoil becomes only more visible. This does have a discomfiting effect on the reader: there is a fascination to witnessing the machinations to which RR is driven in order to tell the tale, while we also recognize her strategy is in effect an attempt to minimize her offense. At the same time, it is not at all clear that Aslan resists RRs advances, or that he has been harmed by them, although of course the long-term harm cannot be predicted and we cannot finally trust that RR's account is anything but self-serving. She indicates that she is addressing her "confession" to Mrs. Wall because of the latter's reputation for leading an unconventional lifestyle, suggesting she does hope her audience might extend her some sympathy.

If Fort Da could be said to be "experimental" (FC2 is one of the most prominent publishers of experimental fiction), it would have to be in this tonal discontinuity--how far can the reader extend his/her sympathy to such a character presenting herself in such a narrative voice relating a story about what today approaches being as taboo a subject as we have? While the "report" form is interesting enough, it is finally just another variation on the epistolary or diary forms first explored in novels like Pamela or Robinson Crusoe as the immediate context and justification for first-person narrative. The narrative itself is essentially linear, and though the narrator's language occasionally makes it necessary for the reader to check his/her bearings, it unfolds interrupted only by the by now rather familiar use of footnotes (although given the text's formal status as scientific "report," the footnotes don't seem out of place).

If RR, like Humbert Humbert, believes her desire for Aslan, like Humbert's for his "nymphet," is a genuine expression of love, she seems less comfortable than HH with this form of love. Although both Fort Da and Lolita could both be said to be comic novels, the comedy of Lolita is darker,arising from the audacity of HH's behavior. The humor of Fort Da arises from RR's own confusions and limited self-knowledge. This makes Fort Da a consistently compelling read--to call it entertaining would seem impertinent--but whether it has something to "say" about, for example, the nature of female desire vs male desire, or about the origins of sexual behavior in psychological trauma (RR herself appears to believe she may be reacting to the early death of her brother) is perhaps for the reader to determine, depending on whether one considers it important that a novel treading on sensitive ground should redeem itself by making a "serious" point about the subject. In my opinion, the greatness of Lolita consists, in part, in its refusal to countenance communicating such a point. By raising "issues" related to pedophilia, Fort Da suggests it wants to address those issues and thus doesn't really show quite the aesthetic courage we find in Nabokov's novel.

Very Different From Themselves

Too often, reviews written by novelists or poets are taken as an opportunity to disparage an approach to fiction or poetry that isn't the reviewer's. A good example of this would be a recent New York Times review by Michael Cunningham of Rikki Ducornet's Netsuke. After faintly praising Ducornet's novel, Cunningham instructs us that

By delving into a character’s motives, a writer fulfills one of fiction’s most powerful potentials — the ability to draw the reader into a character, including the most repellent of them. Fiction can show readers what it’s like to be someone very different from themselves, even if that drawing-in is discomfiting.

Ducornet, unfortunately, "has erred too much on the side of discretion":

The pure malice of Ducornet’s [protagonist] is not alleviated by her reluctance to show us much by way of the injuries he’s inflicting on his patients. Ducornet treats the analyst’s patients as offhandedly as does the analyst himself. The book’s atmosphere of arid heartlessness begins to produce a parched feeling in the reader.

Cunningham's review betrays a lack of sympathy with the aesthetic goals of Ducornet's novel, goals that clearly clash with his own--"to draw the reader into a character"--and this unwillingness to accept a kind of fiction different from that which he writes is reinforced in the review by an unwillingness to understand what Ducornet's goals may be. He engages in no reflection on what Ducornet might be up to rather than psychological realism, and he considers Netsuke in total isolation from the rest of Ducornet''s by now rather ample body of work. If Cunningham has read any of Ducornet's previous fiction, his review seems rather determined to avoid any reference to it.

Readers familiar with Rikki Ducornet's fiction know that it does not attempt "to draw the reader into a character" in the manner--adopted, no doubt, from Virginia Woolf--that Michael Cunningham himself favors. This is not because she has no interest in character, but because in her fiction character is just one element that works to help give it its distinctive signature. Ducornet is not a realist, psychological or otherwise, but a fabulator, and were she to focus on drawing the reader inside the characters in the mode of Woolf or Faulkner she would either be undermining the very mode in which she has long worked, or be turning herself into a different kind of writer. Still, to say that Ducornet to some extent subordinates character to plot, setting, symbol and imagery, or, especially, style, is not to say that her fiction shows no concern for the "motives" of its characters. Indeed, long-time readers of Ducornet's work must be taken aback by Cunningham's suggestion that Netsuke exhibits insufficient attention to motive, since Ducornet's fiction so relentlessly chronicles what it represents as the motive force behind all human behavior: the unavoidable power of "desire."

In Ducornet's story, "The Word, 'Desire'", the protagonist, who is still experiencing the intense, intoxicating effects of new love, comes to appreciate this power when she notices her lover looking with obvious desire at another woman. She imagines herself into the perspective of both the lover, gazing, and the other woman, being gazed at, and finds herself concluding: "How far the word 'desire' goes! How it tugs us along! How it worries us, daggers us. How it lights our path." Ducornet's fables are fables of the manifestation and the consequences of desire, how it "tugs us along" and both "daggers us" and "lights our path." Her characters are driven by desire, experiencing both ecstasy and pain, come to a healthy acknowledgment of it, disastrously deny it. Desire in such works as The Stain, The Jade Cabinet, and Gazelle leads the characters to both become more human, and, in some cases, descend into the monstrous. Ducornet isn't really interested in showing readers "someone very different from themselves" because this fundamental human motivation is one to which we are all equally subject.

Thus the claim that a novel like Netsuke fails to explore "motives" arises both from a weak reading of the book and sheer ignorance, either literal or willed, of Rikki Ducornet's work as a whole. Cunningham asserts that the psychiatrist protagonist acts out of "pure malice" in seducing his patients, that he "systematically and without guilt soul-­murders" them. While it is not necessarily surprising that a reader might cringe with horror at the actions of a character like this protagonist (readers have expressed similar distaste for some of the actions and events depicted in her other novels), one might expect Cunningham to examine his response, to more fully appraise the text and more carefully measure his response against what the novel actually conveys to us about the protagonist. Because this character as subject to the inescapable influence of desire as any of Ducornet's other characters. He is not motivated out of "pure malice"--he may be malicious, but the malice isn't pure, uninflected by deeper impulses that are themselves neither benevolent nor malevolent but simply are what they are.

"My clients are thwarted, famished, and lonely," the protagonist tells us. "Inevitably, sooner or later, I seize upon and penetrate the one who has wanted this from me from the first instant. Or has taken time but has come around to wanting it." The narrator both believes what he is doing is of benefit to his clients--it's what they want as an assuagement of their pain--and knows he is exploiting them. He knows also he is exploiting his wife, Akiko, an accomplished and compassionate woman he both loves and despises. In betraying his wife with his clients, the narrator is acting on desires his marriage can't fulfill--that he doesn't want it to fulfill. Cunningham is correct to say that Netsuke is "a story about a man trying to bring his own house down" (although this isn't all the story is about), but this very insight implies he isn't simply acing out of malice. His accomplishments as husband and professional are being overrun by elemental impulses for which those accomplishments are an inhibition and a nuisance. In Ducornet's fiction, carnal desires must and should be expressed, but that doesn't mean the consequences will aways be "healthy."

Ducornet admittedly makes it difficult for us to grant the psychotherapist his portion of a shared humanity by making him the narrator of his own story. Novels narrated in the first person by morally compromised characters, such as Lolita, Thomas Berger's Killing Time, John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges, or, more recently, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones can charm us into a kind of moral complicity in which we come to regard our identification with the narrator with some horror, but can also lead us to recoil at too obvious violations of ethical norms and decorum. We can both lull ourselves into overemphasizing the narrator's "human" qualities, and allow our disgust to overlook them. Judging from Michael Cunningham's response, Netsuke can provoke the latter reaction. A first-person narrator is always unreliable to some degree, but some writers especially exploit the capacity for first-person narration to create ambiguity and instability. Rikki Ducornet is this kind of writer. Whenever she uses a first-person narrator, as readers we need to be prepared for, and willing to accept, the resulting ambiguities.

Netsuke, like many of Ducornet's novels, is relatively brief, which also no doubt adds to the possibility it will be misread in the manner exemplified by Michael Cunningham. We don't "get to know" the character as we do in longer works, especially those devoted to the kind of psychological realism in which "getting to know" is largely the point. Ducornet's kind of fabulation, which can draw on the elements of the fable or fairy tale without incorporating the movement toward narrative closure ("the moral of the story"), works best both through brevity and a deliberate avoidance of psychological "depth," at least through explicit strategies of point of view or style. Anything longer could mar the delicacy of what she is after, and "delving into a character's motives" would only undermine its subtlety.

Perhaps writers who take a much different approach to their own work will be unsympathetic to Ducornet's methods, but they ought to consider that bias before agreeing to review her work.

 

Audacities

Since Philip Roth has lately been publishing new work at a rapid rate, and since nothing immediately suggests this pace will slacken, it is probably not wise to make generalizations about what may be the "late" stage of his career. He may yet produce much more new fiction, perhaps returning to longer novels, perhaps with yet another "major" novel of the sort The Plot Against America was widely regarded to be. Still, the short novels Roth has now given the collective designation "Nemeses: Short Novels," which includes Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and Nemesis, at the least seem to have been written expressly as a series of short novels that invite reflection both on the possible connections and correspondences among them and on their status as works of, perhaps, Roth's later years as a writer.

The relative brevity of these books has struck many reviewers as including a shift in tone, even for some a loss of the energy and audacity we associate with "classic" Roth. It is certainly the case that these four short novels are absent the irreverence and comedic iconoclasm of works like Portnoy's Complaint (itself not a particularly long book) and Sabbath's Theater. On the other hand, they don't really lack the confrontational attitude toward existence to be found in Roth's previous fiction, their protagonists' ability to live comfortably in their own behavior, their fundamental assertions of self. The unnamed protagonist of Everyman, Marcus Messner of Indignation, Simon Axler of The Humbling, and Bucky Cantor of Nemesis all resist the external constraints they perceive to be pressing on them, just as do Alexander Portnoy, Mickey Sabbath, or David Kepesh. But these characters find themselves struggling more directly and immediately with mortality itself, and thus quite possibly the shorter form and less comedically pointed approach of the "Nemeses" books is entirely deliberate, Roth's effort to characterize this struggle in a more appropriately sober tone.

Indeed, perhaps the more appropriate collective title for the four books might have been the title of the third, since the process of aging and/or the prospect of impending death are portrayed in all of them as a kind of "humbling," although in The Humbling itself, Simon Axler is also humbled more specifically by his failing powers as an actor and by his sexual misadventure with a woman even more self-centered than he is. "Everyman" is humbled by his helplessness at the mercy of his failing body, while Bucky Cantor is humbled even more cruelly by the random actions of nature, struck down at an early age by polio. Marcus Messner is notable for his refusal to be humbled by the authority figure who has that goal in mind, but ultimately he also is subject to the subsequent humbling of an early death.

It is tempting to conclude that these four novels reflect Roth's own growing sense of being humbled by increasing age and infirmity, and of death as the final nemesis, but of course this could just as easily be an instance of the biographical fallacy, the assumption that a writer's work is a direct translation from episodes in his/her life, or in Roth's case, at least that his most recent books are more concerned with such ultimate questions than any of his earlier ones. Then again, Roth's fiction is notorious for suggesting parallels with his life, for presumably drawing on his own experience in ways that perhaps most radically blurs the boundaries between life and literature among all postwar American writers. One could say that much of Roth's work makes discerning the former in the latter a mostly hopeless task, but also perhaps trying to separate the two beside the point.

While none of the Nemeses books explores these boundaries as deliberately as Operation Shylock, The Facts, or even the Zuckerman books, they all do share the preoccupation with the historical Newark of Roth's childhood and continue to model characters and events on Roth's family members, particularly his father, and his own experiences as a boy and younger man. Everyman, which seems to me the weakest of these four books, is a rather conventional "autobiographical novel" that draws on the circumstances of Roth's life, in this case especially his medical history and, loosely, his relationship with his brother, but is otherwise unremarkable in the way it fictionalizes it's author's experiences without insisting on the connections. The Humbling would seem to be the least autobiographical work of this quartet, although again the portrait of an aging artist unhappy with his fading powers might be taken as a kind of self-examination, and the protagonist's vexed relationship with the femme fatale could easily enough be seen as a send-up of Roth's own image as both a writer and a man troubled by a dubious history with women. In this way The Humbling, not obviously based on the writer's life, is actually a more resonant example of Roth's aesthetic appropriation of "real life" than the more directly autobiographical Everyman, which attempts to invest its fairly routine story with additional significance simply through associating the protagonist with the allegorical figure named in the title

Indignation is, in my opinion, the most resonant of these four novels, the one most likely to stand among Roth's best books, especially as a shorter work that could serve future readers as an introduction to Roth. It both inhabits the autobiographical gray area and provocatively exploits this strategy by focusing on a protagonist who apparently has much in common with the young Philip Roth but then representing the protagonist as the posthumous narrator of his story. This is explained (barely) by projecting Private Marcus Messner's account as the final activity of his dying brain upon his mortal wound as a soldier in the Korean War, not long after the events narrated as Indignation, but the ultimate chapter relating this occurrence raises more questions than it answers: How did the narrator of this chapter gain access to Pvt. Messner's fading brainwaves? If this narrator is assumed to be Philip Roth, does this make Indignation finally a metafiction, the story of Roth telling us the story of the Roth stand-in Messner, only further obscuring the divide between the experiences on which the novel might be based and the fiction Roth has made of them?

As Jonathan Rosen points out, Indignation is "one of Roth's counter-life books, where the author seems to be confronting what might have happened had things gone just a little differently for him." And Marcus Messner has much in common with other Roth characters--not just Neil Klugman of Goodbye, Columbus, Gabe Wallach of Letting Go, or Alexander Portnoy, but also Nathan Zuckerman in the original Zuckerman novellas and Mickey Sabbath, characters who, if not always expressing "indignation" per se, certainly maintain a healthy (or unhealthy) degree of skepticism and impertinence. While such characters don't always necessarily prosper in the wake of their audacities, they persevere, a chance denied to Marcus Messner due to his premature death. To the extent we must inevitably regard all of these characters as variations on Roth's own self-image, we might thus call Indignation a kind of autobiographical fantasy, a version of the egoist narrative in which the protagonist does not survive his impudence.

Nemesis differs from Indignation in that the impudence of its protagonist is both learned and earned. Bucky Cantor is not naturally egocentric or defiant. He is in fact an idealist who wants only to do good and believes that this attitude will be rewarded. When he is cruelly disabused of this notion and not only contracts polio but is convinced he has been the carrier of the virus that has killed many of his students, Bucky himself turns virulently against the God he believes has burdened him with both a broken body and a broken spirit. Although Bucky is seemingly justified in his rage--the novel depicts his undoing as an almost malicious act of fate--he allows this rage to destroy whatever chance he still has left to lead a meaningful life. When at the end of the novel its narrator tells a much older Bucky, "Don't be against yourself. There's enough cruelty in the world as it is. Don't make things worse by scapegoating yourself," we must surely conclude that Roth himself partly endorses this sentiment, but it's hard not to conclude as well that he shares Bucky's disabused view of God's creation as a randomly brutal place. God would indeed be a sadist had he in fact created such a place, and this is what Bucky still seems to believe, but one could just as easily conclude that Bucky's problem is that he does still believe in that God, with whom he is in perpetual battle, when his experience simply confirms that the world can be random and brutal.

The narrator's encounter with Bucky Cantor is part of a final chapter in which we learn that the narrator of Nemesis has been all along one of Bucky's former students. Although we have been given one brief hint earlier in the text that this might be the case (and this is reinforced by the fact that Bucky is often referred to as "Mr. Cantor"), it is possible that many readers will assume that the novel is narrated by a third-person narrator, perhaps similar to those narrating Everyman and The Humbling. Those readers have to some degree been tricked by another subtle manipulation of point of view, which should prompt such readers to reexamine their response to what has come before. Is Nemesis another autobiographical excursion after all, in this case with the Philip Roth stand-in as the narrator rather than the protagonist? How confident can we be of the account provided through this "as told to" strategy? Are we simultaneously to find the narrative of Bucky Cantor moving and Bucky himself pitiable and to agree with the narrator that Bucky overreacted?

These are questions readers will have to answer for themselves. Both Indignation and Nemesis belong to that by now long line of Roth's fictions that in experimenting with the permeability of "facts" and fiction and in constantly challenging readers' expectations, not always in an immediately obvious way, pose questions without final answers, including questions about the very "realism" on which they otherwise seem to depend.

 

Illusions of Substance

Charles Baxter's stories, as collected in Gryphon, seem to me to epitomize an approach to fiction writing that has become the trademark approach in the era of the Creative Writing program and its "workshop" method of instruction. Whether Baxter has simply become the most consistent enabler of this approach, or might even be a model to which other aspiring Creative Writers turn for inspiration, Gryphon is a virtual sourcebook of the workshop method, and might ultimately be interesting for later readers and critics who want to understand the nature and appeal of this method--although, in my opinion, they will prove interesting for very little else.

The stories included in this volume are not exactly bad, but they certainly are dull. Consistently and surpassingly dull. First and foremost they are dull because they are so formulaic. It is true that Baxter's stories do not emphasize "plot" in the most traditional, drama-building sense of the term, but for this they substitute a more meandering, "slice of life" technique that nevertheless almost always leads to a moment of revelation, understated in the "quiet" manner favored by workshop realism (presumably a legacy of minimalism, but now more a mannerism than an intentional strategy), but a gathering-point of plot nonetheless. In a Baxter story things happen, and they are always pointing to a resolution of the underlying tensions the story has introduced. This sort of slackened plotting so predominates the stories in Gryphon that it quickly comes to seem just a pallid variation on conventional plot devices and settles into bland routine.

Baxter's characters are similarly repetitive, and ultimately seem alternative versions of the same character, however much the superficial circumstances change. Most often, they seem to be just drifting along in their lives (so the "drift" in the plotting, of course, is even more directly mimetic); sometimes they are merely eccentric outsiders, other times outright losers; often they are disappointed with their lives (whether they admit it or not), and even those characters who seem mostly content with their lot have experiences that bring out latent conflict. These characters are subject to the revelatory moment or episode, usually a realization on the character's part about the state of his/her life, to which the stories are leading. Usually the revelation adds up to the fact that the character is, well, drifting, disappointed, conflicted, etc.

Both Baxter's habitual mode of plotting and characterization could no doubt be called "quirky," or at least this is the overall "feel" of the stories. The characters are off-centered enough and the narratives just nonlinear enough that they can pass for unconventional, but "quirky" has become its own kind of storytelling mode, almost a genre of its own, in both fiction and certain "independent" films. It seems to designate a sufficiently unorthodox approach to suggest such works are to some degree original and innovative, but these "quirky" films and fictions are actually a flight from originality and innovation, a retreat into formal timidity and aesthetic sameness. They pretend to be daring in their choice of character, subject, or milieu, while reinforcing all the unadventurous expectations of narrative transparency that ensure readers won't be alienated by a work that is unduly "difficult." Charles Baxter's stories could be the lodestar of this style of "quirk."

Much of this quirkiness is also, ultimately, sentimental. The characters and their travails inevitably provoke, or are meant to provoke, protective feelings on their behalf, feelings of sorrow or pity for their limitations or of satisfaction at their occasional triumphs. Baxter's stories share in this sentimentality. The first two stories in Gryphon, featuring elderly characters with dementia, lay it on pretty thick, but while not all of the stories are quite so explicit in their heart-tugging, most of them most of them do ask the reader to indulge in emotions that are essentially sentimental. "Surprised by Joy" is an especially egregious example, a story about a couple whose daughter has died. The wife finally seems to manage to find "closure," but the husband still has not, and the story ends with the husband exclaiming "I don't want to be all right" while the wife looks at the beautiful mountains in reawakened joy. "Shelter" concerns a man who takes a sudden interest in helping the down-and-out and brings one young homeless man home with him, bemusing his wife but upsetting his son. In "Flood Show," a man almost drowns trying to cross a flooded river to reunite with his ex-wife, to whom he then confesses, "I couldn't help it. I never got over it." All of these stories take ostensibly strange turns to get to their sentimental conclusions ("Shelter" ends as the protagonist asks his wife to "shelter me" and embraces her), but they are finally just a diversion from the hackneyed tropes and cloying emotions in which the stories habitually traffic.

Often enough the stories attempt to cloak their sentimentality with portentous conclusions. In "Harmony of the World," a failed musician turned music journalist takes on a side job playing accompaniment for a singer whose lack of talent he can't finally keep himself from declaring. The protagonist, who is also the narrator, concludes by reflecting on the fate of souls in Dante's limbo, where they suffer "grief without torment." The narrator observes, "These sighs are rather like the sounds one hears drifting from front porches in small towns on soft summer nights." The bathos of this is overwhelming. The story does nothing to convince us that life in "small towns" rises to this level of grandiosity. (The analogy actually makes it seem rather banal and sordid.) It does convince us that the narrator is wallowing in his own self-pity. In "The Disappointed," a Swedish engineer visits America on business, perhaps to stay on in Detroit as a consultant. Not surprisingly, Detroit provides a virtual reverse image to the protagonist's antiseptic native Sweden, and at the end of the story he is mugged. Leaving the hospital, he "steps[s] out onto the front sidewalk, and to the air, which smelled as it always had, of powerful combustible materials and their traces, fire and ash." One hardly knows what this sentence is supposed to signify. It clearly wants to mean something. The "smelled as it always had" seems to add some pseudo-allegorical implication, but at best we are left with a story of ordinary, even obvious, disillusion elevated into faux-apocalyptic imagery.

This kind of fake profundity embodied in the story's concluding image or gesture is unfortunately yet another characteristic of the workshop story Baxter shares, to the ubiquity of which he has no doubt contributed. Such a device is just "indeterminate" enough to seem appropriately "literary," while managing to simulate a moment of insight that is sufficiently arresting to convince some readers the story must be consequential. In all of the devices that Baxter uses, he works to manufacture this illusion of substance, both formal and thematic. Since I have not found a single negative print review of Gryphon, I have to conclude he is apparently succeeding.

 

Strange Silence

(This review first appeared in Open Letters Monthly.)

Too many biographies of writers do a disservice to their subjects by encouraging a preoccupation with the writer’s life at the expense of renewed appreciation of the work. Some few biographies no doubt do manage to chronicle the life in such a way that it expands our understanding of the work, especially by clarifying the writer’s own thinking about it. But the typical writer’s biography seems to proceed on the assumption that tracing out the narrative of the writer’s life is just as important as reckoning with the narratives he or she created—the latter of which, of course, being the only reason we would have interest in a writer in the first place.

Shouting Down the Silence, David C. Dougherty’s biography of Stanley Elkin, does its subject a disservice by being such a terrible book that it is hard to imagine it could either enhance appreciation of Elkin’s fiction for those already acquainted with it or persuade those unfamiliar with it that he is a writer worth their attention. Since this latter group was already disappointingly large during Elkin’s lifetime and only grows larger in the years following his premature death, a book about Stanley Elkin ought to remind us that he was one of the most gifted writers of his time, a prodigiously dynamic stylist with an uproariously inventive imagination to match. In a period of American fiction (specifically the 1960s and 1970s) devoted to audacity of style and an unabashedly comic outlook, Elkin might have been the most audacious and the most aggressively comedic, a central fact of Elkin’s work that his biographer should prominently emphasize. Yet in his final chapter, Dougherty writes merely that “one purpose of this biography is to gather useful information” should Elkin’s “stock rise.” This seems remarkably passive if Elkin’s fading influence is as real and as troubling as Dougherty seems (correctly) to believe. One might think that someone who is both Elkin’s biographer and a notable scholar of Elkin’s work would use the opportunity to produce a biography of Elkin at a time when his legacy is uncertain to support a larger effort to prevent the writer from falling into irrelevance or losing his proper place in American literary history. Instead he has given us a listless chronicle of the course Elkin’s life took once he began writing short stories and eventually attracted the attention of publishers.

We might ask why it is important to “gather information” about this process. Considering that the information Dougherty gathers is not put into service of elucidating Elkin’s work, it’s difficult to know why he thinks it will prove valuable once Elkin’s fiction has been rediscovered. Implicitly Dougherty seems to believe that should Elkin regain the status he deserves, readers will want to know about the man, separate from their reading of his novels. This may, in fact, be true — but ought a literary biography merely accede to this sort of interest, or should it make some attempt to reinforce interest in the work? If readers are more likely to turn to biography than to critical studies as supplemental reading, perhaps the biographer, especially if he is also a literary critic, could use the form to persuade readers that a critical perspective can prove more rewarding than the collection of details about the writer’s life.

Even if we think the primary purpose of biography is to gather such details, Shouting Down the Silence is still remarkably inattentive to the features of Elkin’s work most readers have found most distinctive — those signature elements no reader can fail to notice but which can also seem so extreme in Elkin’s hands that surely many would appreciate an attempt to account for them. Elkin has been called a difficult writer, a writer not always considerate of readers accustomed to a passive reading experience, and Dougherty does very little to explain why readers should put aside such an expectation when reading Elkin’s fiction, in exchange for a more demanding experience but also one that is in its own way frequently exhilarating.

The most insistent and unmistakable attribute of Elkin’s fiction is its overflowing language, its cascading figures, accumulating modifiers, neologisms, and serpentine sentences. Elkin is not just a stylist but a wizard of words, a stylist of seemingly inexhaustible resources and utterly singular in his characteristic moves. Near the end of The Franchiser (1976), protagonist Ben Flesh reflects on a “new dispensation” that is likely to make him obsolete:

He was an old-timer. If he lived he would live crippled in the new world, would tch tch and my my at its strange new ways. Modern times country-courthousing him, old-timering his personality, shoving shucks in his vocabulary, thrusting by gollys into his mouth, whooshes, goldarns, I’ll be’s, all the phony awe and mock disgust. For he knew no other way, only the old vaudeville routines of the stagy quaint. Why, this was a problem. Gee whiz, shucks by golly whoosh goldarn. I’ll be. I’ll be.

Elkin claimed Faulkner as one of his stylistic inspirations, but Faulkner’s style is cadenced and oratorical in its rhetorical excess, while Elkin’s is both more freewheeling and more precise. Elkin makes language perform in a surprising way when Ben Flesh anticipates his personality being “old-timered” and finding the impending changes “shoving shucks in his vocabulary,” but in each case the verbal flourish is also memorably evocative of the phenomenon Ben Flesh is contemplating. Elkin’s excess is central to his aesthetic ambition, which is to animate his loose-jointed narratives through the constant revelations of a boundlessly vital style.

It is further telling that Ben Flesh thinks of himself as attuned to “the old vaudeville routines of the stagy quaint,” since the second, complementary feature of Elkin’s work that warrants commentary is its thoroughgoing, vaudeville-like comedy. So dedicated to this kind of “low,” gag-filled comedy is his fiction that some readers might not have considered Elkin altogether “serious,” perhaps partly accounting for one group of readers to whom Elkin failed to appeal in terms of commercial popularity, a failure in general that he seems to have felt acutely. (“I am very discouraged,” Elkin wrote about the sales of A Bad Man (1967), in a letter quoted by Dougherty. “This is the case for my discouragement. I had not frankly expected to get rich, with a best-seller. …I will never write a best seller…. However, I would have thought that my reviews…would break that barrier, to reach, with luck, sales of ten thousand maybe.”)

But Elkin was one of the most serious of writers, whose seriousness of purpose is expressed by a refusal to take anything seriously. All subjects, including, say, the looming death of children, can be approached through the same kinds of comedy routines, hilarious patter, and rhetorical exaggeration. Near the beginning of The Magic Kingdom (1985), protagonist Eddy Bale, whose young son has recently died, manages an audience with the Queen to plead for assistance for his plan to take a group of terminally ill children to Disney World. Before seeing the Queen, Eddy tells a young noble about the plan:

The child hears him out and concedes, “That’s a smashing plot!
“Thank you, sir.”
“Blast, I wish I’d the lolly, but I don’t come into my inheritance for just ages yet. Your troubles would be over if I did.”
“You’re very gracious, Your Grace.”
“Not a bit of it, Mister Bale. We all admired young Liam.”
“Thank you.”
“Twenty thousand,” he says, considering, stroking his chin, imagining ways it might yet be done.
“Yes?” Bale says.
“Well, he says, it’s just a thought, of course.”
“Yes?”
“We could put on a horse show.”
“A horse show.”
“Or sell lemonade.”
“Lemonade’s a thought.”

Elkin’s comic vision encompasses a world that calls for these devices to be adequately rendered, so permeated by suffering and misfortune, and ultimately so senseless, does it seem to be that the comic routines offer the only relief from this suffering.

We could regard Elkin’s style as reinforcement of the comic vision, or the vision as the necessary consequence of the style, but while a biography could not and need not attempt to determine which came first (style and vision are probably inextricably linked), it certainly could at least address those aspects of the work, perhaps examining the factors in Elkin’s background or his psychological makeup that might help explain how the question arises. Perhaps the biographer could simply survey Elkin’s own comments on the subject, whether in print, speeches, or recorded conversations, attempting to clarify what the writer thought he was after as a stylist and a literary comedian, whether he had a fully-formed, articulated literary aesthetic. But Dougherty does none of this, instead becoming preoccupied with sales figures, Elkin’s always dashed hopes of writing screenplays (or of having his fiction adapted into film), and his persistent frustration with his lack of widespread popularity as a writer of fiction. In an all-too typical move, for example, Dougherty begins a chapter by noting that “The decade’s final years were the most prosperous and controversial of Elkin’s writing life,” explaining further that “Despite his disappointments about the movie of ‘The Bailbondsman’ and the failure to film The Art of War [an Elkin screenplay], renewed interest in filming his works flourished as his most influential work to date, The Living End, amused, delighted or shocked various audiences” – as if the most meaningful sign of Elkin’s success was the fact that The Living End was drawing the attention of film producers, not that more people were finding themselves “delighted” with Elkin’s fiction.

Of his surpassing gifts as a stylist we learn only that he possessed them, and about his skill with comedy we learn that he often employed it in person, but as for how he brought it into his work we are left at best to witness it for ourselves from the few passages Dougherty quotes along the way. Exactly why Elkin believed his approach worthwhile in a “literary” writer is a question left both unasked and unanswered.

Since the subjects related to Elkin’s life as a writer that Dougherty does raise are so tangential and ephemeral, it becomes even more difficult to determine just how Shouting Down the Silence will be useful when Elkin’s work is indeed rediscovered and established as the important work it is. Moreover, even readers who might rest content with “information” about the writer and his circumstances are not likely to find this book very satisfying, either. No doubt the most daunting challenge Stanley Elkin faced in his adult life was the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis he received while still a relatively young man, as well as the subsequent effort to cope with the disease. Again we learn from Dougherty the fact that Elkin received such a diagnosis, and he occasionally reminds us that Elkin suffered, but we ultimately get very little sense of what it must have been like to live with this fact, certainly not how the gathering signs of physical decline and early death might have informed Elkin’s attitude toward his work, particularly his sense of the relevance of the comic vision he nevertheless continued to pursue. In discussing The Franchiser, for example, a novel with an MS-afflicted protagonist, Dougherty avers that “Elkin’s insistence that the novel isn’t autobiographical seems disingenuous,” but provides no sense of what “autobiographical” might mean in this context other than quoting another scholar suggesting the book must be autobiographical because, well, Elkin uses MS as a “cultural symbol” and he himself had the disease! Of Elkin’s family life we really learn next to nothing: his wife, Joan, who by most accounts played a crucial role in allowing Elkin to maintain a writing life, makes no strong impression at all in Dougherty’s recital, while Elkin’s three adopted children exist in name only.

The book does provide some insight into Elkin’s relationship with academe, if only because Elkin was among the first cohort of writers to spend an entire career as a teacher of creative writing and it would thus be impossible to chronicle his life without relating his experiences as both writer and teacher. Dougherty doesn’t much take advantage of Elkin’s twinned professions to examine the way serious writers have become more or less dependent on teaching creative writing to enable them to write as they wish without undue concern about commercial success, but it is conceivable that Shouting Down the Silence in its cumulative account of Elkin’s work on the faculty of Washington University, as well as his various supplemental appointments as visiting professor or writer-in-residence and his life on the academic reading circuit, could be of some use to critics and scholars looking more intensively at the effect academic creative writing has had on American fiction. Perhaps it is not surprising that a biography written by an academic and published by a university press would prove most illuminating about the subject’s relationship to the academy. It is disappointing, to say the least, that it manages to illuminate very little else about its subject, a writer who deserves the kind of consideration this book almost willfully refuses to provide.

Warning Signals

In a negative assessment of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Biblioklept reports finally giving up on the hope that the novel "might have something to say about American culture and politics in the early 21st century." My own fear in reading this novel, confirmed almost immediately, was that Shteyngart did have "something to say" about politics and culture and thus his novel would be a "commentary" or a "critique" or some other version of "social observation" rather than an aesthetically credible work of fiction. And such it is.

Of course, another word to use in describing a work like Super Sad True Love Story is "satire," and it would be more charitable perhaps to discuss the novel as a participant in this genre rather than as something making a claim to be "art" in the first place, Although certainly the best satire is also the most artful, I would still maintain that satire aspires to be primarily a mode of moral or political discourse, or of cultural criticism, and not an object of aesthetic contemplation. (Some works of literary art, however, do create secondarily satirical effects that add to their appeal, as in the fiction of Stanley Elkin, for example, while other "classic" satirical works take aim at a sufficiently universal kind of human folly that they retain their satirical edge, as in the plays of Moliere.) Satire needs to be aesthetically compelling enough that readers tolerate a message delivered in an indirect way through narrative and character rather than more efficiently through direct discourse but ultimately it is judged by its purchase on the conditions it critiques, not its formal or stylistic accomplishments.

Unfortunately, even by this alternative standard, Super Sad True Love Story doesn't measure up. It is just another of those by now familiar futuristic satires that projects a few years ahead to reveal that current trends have reached a kind of logical conclusion, making the United States into a dying Empire ruled by clueless politicians and unabashed oligarchs, who have brought consumerist ruin on the land and are in the process of asserting class-based tyranny. What Super Sad True Love Story adds to the mix is the portrayal of a society addicted to cyber technology and its own ruinous effect on literacy and its relegation of books to the peculiar few. This will no doubt become a popular trope in later iterations of the dystopian vision, as writers continue to worry their vocation is headed for the dustbin. Shteyngart's narrative makes the predictable points: that the wired world exacerbates our preoccupation with trivia, that it reinforces our tendency to self-absorption, that it enables a passivity the powers-that-be can exploit, ultimately that it makes us stupid.

That these are potential dangers in our use of digital technology seems undeniable, although its potential to do exactly the opposite in each of these effects seems to me equally real. More importantly, the novel seems to exist primarily to point out these dangers, and since I was already perfectly aware of them (as I imagine most readers of this novel are, as well), I found Super Sad True Love Story a particularly unrewarding reading experience. It offers few aesthetic pleasures apart from its oft-invoked theme, and it isn't very funny. (It becomes progressively even less so as the story plods on.) Once you get that the characters are addicted to their "apparatti" (supercharged Blackberries of some sort), which has led to their passivity in the face of the authoritarian rule of the "Bipartisan Party," it's hard to take the rest of the narrative's reiterations of these notions as very "edgy."

The most noteworthy achievement in this novel is Shteyngart's evocation of the "voice" of the protagonist's love interest, a young woman who both carries the burden of the novel's indictment of digitalized culture and becomes its test case in the possibility of transcending that culture. She is presented to us both indirectly, through the protagonist's written diary, and directly through her own "apparat"-powered communications, reproduced dialogically with the protagonist's diary. Shteyngart's mimicry of the verbal mannerisms and patois of a young person wired from birth is compelling enough, although her eventual transformation into a more self-aware and responsible adult is less convincing and makes her contributions to the alternating narrative strands just as dull as the protagonist's. The latter's diary writing is flat and uninspired, and I often found myself impatient to get through it in the hope that the next offering by the girlfriend would be more lively. The protagonist is himself a standard issue slacker whose inability to either go all-out for material success or lapse into a resigned mediocrity accounts more for his holding-on to the printed word than any real allegiance to "verbal" culture. He can't quite bring himself to discard his books and his antiquated writing habits but he wishes he could. Being neither bold nor entirely complacent just makes him seem adrift, and ultimately irritating.

Shteyngart's vision of America in terminal decline, hastened by the technology of distraction, is one shared by Rick Moody's The Four Fingers of Death. One might almost think, in fact, that the two authors had commiserated with one another over the grim fate they both foresaw and decided to compete for the title of dystopian of the year. Shteyngart probably wins, but only because Super Sad True Love Story so relentlessly pursues its dystopian "vision," its very existence so dependent on the explication of this vision. The Four Fingers of Death, while hardly a work of overpowering originality, nevertheless manages to embody its theme in a formal structure that provides interest in and of itself, to produce comedy that, although it is often satirical, also provokes laughter for its own sake, and to employ language that often enough enlivens the narrative rather than just dutifully carry it along. Whereas I had to force my way through Super Sad True Love Story, I found large portions of The Four Fingers of Death (and it's a 700+ page novel) to be quite entertaining.

One could call the novel a "frame-tale," as we are first introduced to Montese Crandall, a writer who inhabits a United States some fifteen years into the future and who writes a kind of minimalist fiction reductio ad absurdum: "very short, very condensed literary pieces, and by short, I mean very, very short. Shorter than you have probably read in your reading life. More than one word, usually, because one word is too easy, but quite a bit more modest than five score. The three hundred and fifty pages of a novel. . .are a tedious elaboration." Crandall manages to get himself assigned to a "novelization" of a low-budget science fiction film, which he will turn into the The Four Fingers of Death, the narrative that itself then constitutes most of the novel we are reading. The novelization relates the story of a manned mission to Mars undertaken by an American government desperate to distinguish itself in some way in the face of an undeniable loss of prestige and influence and increasing unrest. The mission goes horribly wrong, and a remaining crew member attempts to return to earth. This part of the novelization is related by that crew member, but before he can reach the earth he dies of a disease contracted on Mars and the rest of the novelization relates the aftermath of the mission, during which the atronaut's arm, still living as a result of the disease, wreaks havoc across the land and threatens to infect the world.

The first part of the narrative is the strongest, and not just because the narrator, Colonel Jed Richards, manages to buoy the story through the acuity of his observations and the urgency of his style. Implicitly it becomes obvious that Montese Crandall has discovered the virtues of maximalist storytelling, that what he previously regarded as "tedious elaboration" is something for which he has some talent after all. We are as well surely to note that Crandall has made this discovery while "converting" film into fiction, as if it has taken being confronted with the real differences between the visual storytelling of film and the verbal demands (and possibilities) of fiction for Crandall to understand that fiction is language, not its dissolution. If the story Richards tells is finally not cutting-edge science fiction, just a recognizable SF kind of plot well-told, it is well-told, and the "commentary" on the skullduggery of the American government (the disease brought back by Col. Richards is a bacteria the government intended to use for biological warfare) is not so ponderous as to pull the narrative down into the heavier gravity of explicit satire.

The second part of Crandall's novelization does get bogged down, both by overworked devices such as the extended passages related from the point of view of a language-challenged young male whose every other word is "fucking" ("In fact, Vienna had just fucking called him, in that fucking ridiculously fucking sex voice of hers that sounded like a ten-year old on helium") and by more obviously satirical episodes and plot twists. Jed Richards's disembodied arm run amok in the Southwestern desert gives Moody his opportunity to present his dystopian vision of America hollowed out by corporate, political, and technological overreach and on the verge of a mass uprising of the dispossessed. Some of the episodes are funny enough, including those featuring a chimpanzee who through a scientist's experiment becomes aware of his circumstances in an animal research lab and begins to speak with great intelligence and fluency, but they seem mostly pasted together, the novel's maximalism stretched beyond aesthetic coherence.

One could say that the novel focuses at least as much on the physical fragility of living bodies, the way their limitations always act to check our pretensions, as on the political and economic dangers we are facing. In this way, The Four Fingers of Death offers more than the transient satire of Super Sad True Love Story. But both of these books are pretty clearly motivated by a perception that the United States is currently heading in a destructive direction that could perhaps still be avoided if the warnings signalled through the narratives are duly registered. For those reading these novels who aren't already aware that this country faces dangers of the sort they dramatize, such signals may be useful, but for those of us already quite aware of the ominous portents for American culture we can discern all too plainly, the novels' most fundamental reason for existing at best only reinforces what we already know. Finally nothing in either of them allows them to sufficiently transcend their origins in topical satire that we should want to read them beyond their notoriety as works of satire. The Four Fingers of Death is lively enough to pay off the time spent with it, but certainly Super Sad True Love Story holds little purely literary interest. Like most satires of its kind, it is a self-consuming artifact: once it is no longer topical, it will have exhausted its value.

"What's Outside?"

No doubt many readers of Zachary German's Eat When You Feel Sad (Melville House) would report that it isn't much preoccupied with telling a story. There's no sense of progression, no "arc," no apparent attempt to focus on those details and episodes in the protagonist's experience that carve a "story" from it, as opposed to an account of that experience as undifferentiated events.

And yet I would say that this novel actually does nothing else than tell a story. It does not have a "plot," but otherwise it focuses unwaveringly on recounting the activities of its protagonist, named simply Robert. Robert himself does nothing but act and react:

Robert walks into his building. He opens his mailbox. He looks in his mailbox. Robert picks up an envelope from Netflix. He closes his mailbox. Robert walks up stairs. He walks into his apartment. He opens the envelope from Netflix. He reads a description of the movie The Squid and the Whale. Robert walks to his bedroom. He takes off his clothes. Robert plays the album Lambent Materialby Eluvium. He lies on the bed. His eyes are closed. Robert stands up. He puts on shorts. He walks to the kitchen. He looks at the window. He pours water into a glass. He looks at his cat. He thinks "I wish I was at my parents' house." Robert thinks "What's going on tonight? Should I call someone?" Robert calls Kelly. He leaves a voicemail. Robert thinks "I'm not sure what to do." Robert opens the freezer. He picks up an ice cube tray. Robert walks to his bedroom. He lies on his bed. Robert takes an ice cube out of the ice cube tray. He places the ice cube on his stomach.

The novel is structured by self-enclosed scenes such as this, each of which has a beginning, middle, and end, although not much in the way of drama is provided. Robert does this, notices that, listens to something, verbalizes a "thought." Through the accumulation of these scenes, Robert's life moves forward (punctuated by the occasional flashback or flashforward), but not because the novel's plot dictates that it must. Ultimately, the relationship between the actions narrated in passages such as this one is more paratactic (sentences that are essentially coordinate with one another, that could be connected with a simple "and") than hypotactic (sentences that are subordinate to an underlying thread of thought or direction), but such narrative drift is still a narrative. I would call German's method a radical application of the picaresque strategy, a form of storytelling in which one thing after another occurs, but without an artificially imposed plot structure. Robert's "story" is not about where events will ultimately take him as the properly dramatic outcome of what's come before but about the moments in his experience as they unfold, considered as themselves a sufficient source of story.

The paratactic strategy extends even to the verbalization of those thoughts. There is no "flow" of consciousness, only the sudden declaration in fully formed sentences: "I wish I was at my parents' house"; "I'm not sure what to do." In another representative passage, Robert begins to "think" about his circumstances:

Robert is in a classroom. He is sitting at a desk. He thinks "I should ask to use the bathroom and then walk outside." He thinks "What's outside?" Robert thinks "Nevermind." Robert thinks "I should just not come to this class tomorrow. I should go to English and then after English I should walk outside. It doesn't matter. There's nothing outside probably.". . .

There is no pretence here that in reporting Robert's thoughts the narrator is actually "plumbing" the character's mental states. The method being used is, if anything, a deliberate mockery of the idea that such an undertaking is or should be desirable as a literary strategy. Eat When You Feel Sad is about as far as a third-person narrative can get from focusing on "interiority" as the primary goal of fiction. It relentlessly stays on the surface, merely relaying Robert's actions and conversations, summing up his thoughts in grammatically complete sentences when it becomes necessary to include what's happening "inside" as well. This is, of course, a wholly implausible way of representing human cognition, but it is finally no more implausible than the stream-of-consciousness or free-indirect approaches, which are equally artificial in their attempts to convey "mind" through verbal discourse. German's novel is if nothing else a very useful reminder that this is the case.

To some extent, the emphasis on exteriors could be a function of German's use of an attenuated, "plain" style. One thinks immediately of Hemingway or Carver, although German pushes this style even farther toward rhetorical constraint. If Hemingway's style helped convey a feeling of world-weary alienation, German's conveys one of near-immobility and utter confusion. Whether such a style is being used to "reflect" this condition or the condition is the inescapable consequence of the style itself is a question that could be raised, but ultimately the effect is the same. The novel's distinctively reduced rhetorical devices evoke a milieu of reduced energy and purpose. Robert's world is a world characterized by the perpetual occurrence of one thing after another, narratable in the most elementary kind of language.

I wouldn't say that Eat When You Feel Sad is always compelling or entirely without other problems.The theme of disaffected youth has really long since ceased to be shocking, and while German manages to treat it from a formal and stylistic perspective that adds interest, I myself still find it hard to take the youthful ennui and aimless discontent altogether seriously. I think we all understand that American culture provides a difficult transitional period for "young people" who resist becoming future cogs in the mercantile machine, but I don't really think that we need updates of Rebel Without a Cause and Catcher in the Rye from each succeeding generation in order to underscore this reality. Even with German's formal/stylistic adventurousness in Eat When You Feel Sad, the novel doesn't completely manage to enliven an overworked subgenre.

Zachary German was 22 years old when this novel was published last year. I will be anticipating his next book to see whether this one is a fluke, whether he can transcend the limitations of the Novel of Youth and extend the narrative and verbal strategies employed in his first book. If he retreats to a more conventional approach, or if he simply offers more of the same, I will be disappointed.

Divine Influences

Kyle Gann's No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33'' (Yale University Press) provides as thorough an account of the genesis, performance, legacy, and nature of John Cage's infamous 1952 composition as most of us could want. Accessible to a general audience in both style and structure, the book attempts to rescue this work from its reputation as some sort of cynical joke and situate it once and for all as an important and worthwhile contribution to musical history. In doing so, it also provides a very effective introduction to the music and career of John Cage more generally.

Gann necessarily discusses the various influences on Cage and 4'33'', not all of them musical.The journals of Henry David Thoreau and the art of Robert Rauschenberg. for example, provided inspiration, even precursors of a sort--Thoreau in his musings on silence, Rauschenberg in his White Paintings, to some extent visual equivalents of 4'33''. Among the non-musical influences, however, Cage's attraction to Zen Buddhism, especially through the writing and teaching of Daisetz Suzuki, looms as probably the most significant. Gann traces Cage's understanding of the purpose of music to a conversation he had with the Indian musician Gita Sarabhai, which led Cage to accept Sarabhai's declaration that the function of music is to "sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences." Eventually, Buddhism became the primary force behind Cage's efforts to "quiet the mind" and 4'33'' perhaps the most explicit expression of a Zen-derived outlook. "[P]erhaps the simplest understanding of 4'33''," Gann writes, is that "it is an invitation to (or, if you weren't aware of what was coming, an imposition of) [the Zen practice] of zazen."

Thus it would seem that the primary ambition of this piece, perhaps of Cage's oeuvre as a whole, is to reinforce religious belief, to provide through the experience of "music" a form of spiritual meditation. Cage's experimental music is a kind of experimentation in which the impulse to create something "new" is inextricably tied to the impulse to advance an underlying "content." For Cage himself at least, one presumes that the content, his invocation of the principles of Zen, could not have been communicated through other than the unconventional methods he has chosen, that his form is experimental only because an unorthodox way of listening is required for audiences to "hear" what conventional musical form hides. In the case of 4'33'', what he wants us to hear is literally silence, or the sounds we usually mistake for silence, especially when attending musical concerts. Gann convincingly demonstrates that Cage's purposes in this piece and all of his work are serious indeed, far from the "game-playing" formalism experimental artists are so often accused of perpetrating.

Some might say that Cage's balancing of form and content is the only way the "new" can emerge, that formal innovation is authentic only when it allows the subject to be articulated appropriately. But of course what is new in 4'33'' is not at all the subject (even when listeners are led finally to recognize the subject), since it can hardly be argued that music (art more generally) as spiritual meditation, or as bearer of religious "message," are novel thematic concepts.The "content" in this case is thoroughly conventional and familiar, even an anachronism. What is new is the formal audacity of Cage's radical use of silence. This is surely the most immediate effect of the work on most audiences, and for those of us who are indifferent to the spiritual/religious "meaning"--who are indifferent if not hostile to all efforts to substitute religion for art--this is the only meaningful effect. The purely musical implications of Cage's experiment in making silence produce sound are fascinating and worth pursuing. The attempt to advocate for the benefits of Zen Buddhism is, for me at least, of no interest at all.

And surely it is the musical implications of 4'33'' that will be of continued interest to composers, musicians, and music critics as well. What was "new" about Cage's piece was precisely its concerted effort to exploit the sound of silence, and the further possibilities of this approach--quite apart from its putative role in rendering the mind "susceptible to divine influences"--will be its lasting legacy, as well as that of his other experimental strategies. Cage's work will survive as music, not as spiritual meditations. We should be grateful that Cage's commitment to Zen Buddhism provoked him into creating a work like 4'33'', but ultimately that commitment is just the biographical means to an aesthetic end.

Listening for the Words

Although Robert Lopez's Kamby Bolongo Mean River (2009) received no reviews from the mainstream print media, the reviews it did receive from online publications and literary journals were unanimously fervent in their praise of the novel. Lauded for its formal daring, its "carefully crafted" prose, and its forthright depiction of mental instability, Kamby Bolongo was welcomed as an innovative work that fulfilled its experimental ambitions.

That a novel perceived as unconventional would be applauded in this way is on the one hand an encouraging sign that a receptive audience (among reviewers and other writers, at least) for such work does exist. On the other hand, that this novel in particular was so highly admired for its putatively innovative qualities suggests to me that the reviwers might have been rewarding good intentions over actual achievement, the promise of an unconventional approach over the real thing. (And indeed it is rare enough that a novel that truly challenges reigning practices gets published.) If not, I have to conclude that these reviewers are simply giving too much credit to a novel that is more derivative than it is original, too easily translated into aesthetically conservative terms.

Most of the reviews (as well as this interview) cite Beckett as an influence on Lopez's fiction, and, superficially at least, the situation portrayed in Kamby Bolongo Mean River does resemble those in works like Malone Dies or The Unnamable. But this is Beckett-lite, a catatonic version of Beckett's stories of isolation and despair in which the unnamed protagonist lies in what seems to be a hospital bed, sometimes masturbates (as he repeatedly tells us) and sometimes answers the phone (or imagines himself doing so). Beyond the repetitious notations of his surroundings, the narrator also seems to reminisce about his childhood--seems, because we can't be sure that anything we're told is more than a delusion, a strangely patterned fever dream. The son of a single mother with a sibling named Charlie, the narrator almost manages to explain his current circumstances by recalling the past--he was apparently sickly, often lost in make-believe, etc--but doesn't really quite. The dilemma he is in must remain murky and ambiguous, but ultimately it's hard to care whether the narrative situation gets resolved or not, or whether the narrator is actually as damaged as we are led to believe, so insubstantial does it all seem. It's a performance of isolation and injury, not the rendering of these conditions in language that makes them feel credibly present.

The language the narrator does use is mostly without affect, given over to the neutral recording of the narrator's circumscribed activities and perceptions and the equally spare details of his childhood. The repetitions of phrases and images gives the narrative voice an obsessive-compulsive quality that produces stylistic coherence, although finally the voice is anything but dynamic. One reviewer described it as "a deceptively simple voice that beguiles the reader with its awkward usages, and it quickly engenders sympathy with the narrator for having such a limited descriptor set," but it doesn't seem to me that Lopez is trying to elicit reader sympathy, at least not directly. Both the "awkward usuages" and the obsessive vocabulary reflect the character's state of mind. As far as I can tell, the novel exists as an attempt to reveal an impaired state of mind, an afflicted consciousness. In other words, it is ultimately a recognizable manifestation of "psychological realism," however unorthdox its surface features might be. In attending to his words, with its "limited descriptor set," we are exploring the protagonist's "mind," since it seems almost as if it is only through these words that he arises to consciousness in the first place.

The narrator himself discounts the role of words, remarking of his phone conversations that "when I listen I don't listen for the words. I listen for what is between the words and behind them. The way you do this is listen to how the voice sounds." The problem with this as a clue to reading the "words" of Kamby Bologno Mean River is that there is no "what is between the words and behind them." Whatever we learn about this character and his condition we learn through the words. Inferring more than what the "voice" says is pointless; we could read into the narrator's account any amount of further speculation, both about his life story and the context of its relation, but this sort of speculation would only result in the reader writing his/her own version of the novel. The narrator's language is our access to his mental life, which is really the only life he has. Capturing the reality of this is the novel's primary effect. To call him an "unreliable narrator" would be equally pointless. Determining what is true or what is false about his account, besides being a fruitless task, presumes there is some truth outside of the narrator's faltering discourse. I can see no reason, and no purpose, in holding on to this presumption.

And it is with the disposition of language that comparisons between Lopez and Beckett seem most inapt. Consider the following passage from Kamby Bolongo:

Someone asks you what you are doing and you say nothing.

I am almost always doing nothing it seems. It hasn't always been like this but it has been for as long as I can remember.

Charlie is always doing nothing whenever I talk to him on the telephone. I will call him up and ask what are you doing Charlie and he will say nothing like that. This is not another reason I feel sorry for Charlie because has always liked doing nothing.

Beckett, using a similar motif (from Malone Dies):

I don't like those gull's eyes. They remind me of an old shipwreck. I forget which. I know it is a small thing. But I am easily frightened now. I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real than nothing. They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until thay drag you down into its dark. But I am on my guard now.

The first is superficial, reiterative wordplay. (More like it occurs throughout the novel.) There is wordplay in Beckett, but it is never superficial. Malone isn't fooling around with the "nothing" that is "real." It's about to drag him down into its dark. In Kamby Balongo Mean River, language is a passive mirror of the character's misfortune. In Malone Dies, it is the active agent of the character's attempt to validate his existence, to shed some final light, however dim and indirect, on the fact of his life and death. One can't imagine Beckett settling for Lopez's sort of facile mimicry of a diminished consciousness.

To the extent that experimental fiction simply reinforces through means other than conventional storytelling the notion that fiction's ambition should still properly be to achieve a kind of versimilitude--the verisimilitude of psychological states--it's not accomplishing much. It's true that modern experimentalism began in the efforts of writers like Joyce and Woolf to take fiction inward, but their focus on subjective perception has long since become conventionalized as well. Beckett's fiction represents one of the first notable attempts to advance beyond psychological realism, but Kamby Bolongo Mean River doesn't use Beckett's example as motivation to exceed it. It faintly echoes Beckett's manner while otherwise it defers to the objectives pursued by every other "literary" novelist.

Talk to Me

I agree with Dan Magers that John Cotter's Under the Small Lights (Miami University Press) "has less of the expansiveness of prose, and more the concise cognitive breath of poetry," although this should be amended to specify the "expansiveness" of a certain kind of expository prose employed by some novelists. Other writers of fiction have always preferred a more "concise" kind of prose, and while such prose could be called "poetic" in its effect (I'm not sure what the word "cognitive" adds to this formulation), it is not usually because the writer in question is seeking to emulate lyric poetry but because the writer finds this style of prose most effective in evoking the fictional world he/she is after. One could say that, in consciously pursuing a concise style, writers such as Hemingway or Carver or Mary Robison do seem more attuned than many "expansive" writers to the role played by language (literally the use of this word rather than that, the assembling of words into sentences) in the creation of fiction and that this deliberate restraint results in a prose more immediate in its effect.

Cotter's novel does seem to originate in this orientation toward style, but to simply associate it with the "concise. . .breath of poetry" does not really capture just how Cotter achieves his particular "concise" effect. Under the Small Lights is a novel that proceeds primarily through dialogue, but it is not the usual kind of snappy, faux-film dialogue to be found in much of today's "literary fiction," nor is it simply the perfunctory use of dialogue many novelists believe is necessary to write a "proper" novel--here's some exposition, here's some dialogue, here's some more exposition. Here's a part where the character must "speak for himself." Instead, both character and event are revealed through dialogue, the latter element sometimes consisting of dialogue. Furthermore, at times following and accurately attributing the dialogue on the reader's part can be its own kind of action. The following scene features three characters, the narrator, Jack, in love with Corinna, who is (or will be) marrried to Jack's friend, Paul:

"One of those girls came by today," I said, tongue loose with gin. "She buzzed up. Her. . .the other one already told me the other day that she was 'intrigued.' She said, 'Are you intrigued?'"

"Intrigued?" Corrina bit her lip. "So she's Anais Nin?"

"Right,so. It was a bad day. I don't mean to get morbid or. . .I'd been at the. . .I don't know what happened but I'd been at class, then I went to the Cafe du Paris to have a coffee and a sandwich. I was reading Beckett's poems."

"I saw that you had that," Paul said. "I was curious to read that."

"They're pretty grim." The buzzer jarred and I jerked to press talk.

"This is Bob Dole. Who's winning?"

"Bob Dole."

"Really," Paul said, eyeing Corrina, "because of all people. . ."

I leaned on the buzzer. "Anyway I was real sad, like, heartbreak and worry and. . .she came in the door and said 'Last time I saw you, you were naked.' Yeah, I know, right? Cute. So. I figured, alright we'll talk, and I made some tea." I started walking down the hall to unlock the door for Star and shouted, "And I told her everything about how I was bawling, and she was like, see you!"

"It's already unlocked!"

"Oh!"

"So, Jack!" Corrinna yelled. She softened when I came back to the room. "When are you going to get a girlfriend?"

She was fixing a second drink, long fingers collecting the wet bottle caps.

"I don't know."

We are presented here with a situation that unfolds and a group of people who speak more like what might be found in real life than what is usually found in novels. We're not really sure of the significance of the subjects of conversations, which anyway continue to shift . We must infer from the reference to Bob Dole that the characters are watching a Presidential debate, which ultimately acts only as the backdrop to the ongoing conversation, itself conveyed as a disjointed affair often left incomplete and marked by serial interruption.

Much of the novel is organized around scenes like this. The obvious analogy is to the use of dialogue made by the dramatist, and indeed the protagonist of Under the Small Lights is himself occupied throughout the novel in writing a play (with his friend, Bill), suggesting a congruence between Jack's artistic inclinations and his role as narrator. What this novel accomplishes with the strategy is enhanced, of course, by the contribution of Jack's voice as narrator and thus by the focus on Jack's growing estrangement from his circle of friends and his ultimate disillusionment. This process is dramatized in various self-contained episodes that range freely over time and place, their relative brevity and discontinuity mitigating against our perceiving them as "acts" in a novelized play, even as the burden of dramatic development is carried by the subtly revealing dialogue. Ultimately what we learn about the novel's characters and their toxic intimacies is conveyed through what we can discern in their at once both urgent and aimless talking with one another.

There is nothing especially new or revalatory about this strategy. Fiction driven by dialogue to the extent it seems to be appropriating theater is a well-established mode, especially in English fiction (the novel of manners most particularly), and no one has experimented more thoroughly with the possibilities of embedding narrative structure within dialogue than William Gaddis. But Cotter's willingness to make his dialogue more than just narrative drapery, to challenge readers to interpret it as something other than perfunctory chat, is admirable enough at a time when most writers are urged to think about "narrative arc" and "polished prose" as the writer's compelling concerns--all the tricks that make passive, complacent reading the norm. Readers could find the interchanges between characters in Under the Small Lights initially rather elliptical, the overall narrative strategy somewhat disorienting, but the closer attention they are asked to pay is worth the effort, if what we want from our experience of fiction is more than simple compliance with workshop tested formulas, an experience that perhaps makes the aesthetic choices made by writers an opportunity precisely to enhance our appreciation of what's at stake in such choices.

Most readers would probably find Under the Small Lights finally to be a recognizable slice of "lifelike" realism, albeit one still loosely fitted to the mold of the bildungsroman. Hoewever much it might frustrate the attempt to make language transparent to plot, it does so for the sake of building character and scene in a way that ultimately conforms to convention. I might find this to be the novel's most serious limitation, but I can easily imagine many readers finding the payoff to be a rewarding one. It is a novel that takes us to a familiar place, but it does not follow the same old well-worn route.

Behold the Man

The most important argument James Shapiro makes in his book Contested Will is not that the author of Shakespeare's plays and poems is William Shakespeare (the "Stratford man")--anyone who honestly examines both the evidence for Shakespeare's authorship and the evidence for all of the rival candidates (most notably the Earl of Oxford) can only conclude there is no reason to doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare--but that the whole controversy over authorship has arisen because of the assumption held by so many people that a writer's work is a reflection, direct or indirect, of that writer's life.

Of course, the work is a reflection of the life, in the trivial sense that writers have only their life experiences (including what they've read or imagined) to lean on in producing the work, but the assumption goes farther than this: Events in the work recapitulate events in the life, social circumstances determine both manner and matter. Writers don't just write from their lives, they write about it, and the work can't escape its biographical influences. Once this logic is generally accepted (as Shapiro demonstrates it did under the dominance of Romanticism), it almost becomes inevitable that the "facts" of Shakespeare's life, so mundane as they generally are, become irreconcilable with the extraordinary occurrences in the plays and with the great verbal facility manifest there and in the sonnets. The poorly educated glover's son from Stratford, whose experiences apparently extended no farther than this provincial town and the London theaters, could never have written the great work attributed to him. As Shapiro puts it,

The extent to which so much that now gets written is autobiographical can easily alter the expectations we bring to all kinds of imaginative writing. We now assume that novels necessarily reveal something about a writer's life. . .At the same time, many literary biographies are supplanting the fictional works they are meant to illuminate, to the point where Ariel and The Bell Jar struggle to find a readership that books about Sylvia Plath's suicide now command. In such a climate, it's hard not to assume that literary works--of the past no less than of the present--are inescapably autobiographical.

This has been a blessing for those who deny Shakespeare's authorship, whose claims stand or fall on the core belief that literature is, and always has been, autobiographical. . . .

Thus, the authorship "controversy" is a fiction dreamed up out of a suspicion of fiction the creation of which would seem to be the writer's first task.

If anything, the distorting effects of the belief that fiction is just autobiography slightly altered are even more widespread than Shapiro suggests. Not only are biographies making claims on readers' time that would more appropriately be spent on the subjects' work, but biography has become about the only writing about literature to be reviewed in print book review sections, and, coupled with the focus in academic criticism on sociology and culture, is really the only kind of literature-centered commentary available to interested readers. New biographies are lauded or dismissed according to their capacity to explain "how he did it"--as if appreciating the process of literary creation is more important than appreciating the creation itself. Even this is just a barely disguised desire for a more elevated form of gossip, which is finally and unavoidably the stock-in-trade of all biography and almost always emerges as the contribution a biography makes to the "understanding" of its subject.

That this fascination with the life lived by the author over the purely literary implications of the work can be traced to the rise of Romanticism surely can't mean that Romanticism itself is responsible for the reduction of literature to an illustration of autobiography, recoverable through the research of the biographer. Although Shapiro convincingly maintains that the notion of reading autobiography into an author's work was alien to the literary culture of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it's hard to believe that audiences had no interest in the personal details of playwrights' or poets' lives, that the drama-filled life of, say, Christopher Marlowe attracted no attention. Curiosity about other people's lives (real people, not just the "people" depicted in literary works) must surely be a long-standing and universal human characteristic.

But while fiction and drama exploit this curiosity by depicting the lives of imagined people, it is apparently difficult to convince all readers that the integrity of narrative art depends on granting the imagination a free rein. Presumptions that the novelist or dramatist is "really" writing about some real person, including possibly himself, betrays either a distrust in the imagination, a suspicion it promises more than it can deliver, or outright disdain for it as the foundation of literary narrative. This explains the current infatuation with memoir among American readers (and the increase in writers willing to provide it) and the dogged persistence of the Shakespeare deniers. Of course, not all readers who delight in the disguises of the roman a clef or thrill to the juicy memoir are going to be led by their preferences to doubt that Shakespeare among all writers had a vigorous imagination, but the authorship controversy is of a piece with the more general impatience with the transformative role of imagination.

Surprisingly (or not so surprisingly, given his background as a New Historicist), one of the readers who seems skeptical of Shakespeare's imagination is the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, whose 2004 book, Will in the World, attempts to fashion a biography of Shakespeare by attending closely to echoes and suggestions in the work. Greenblatt's knowledge of Shakespeare, his times, and his plays, is immense, but he unfortunately deploys that knowledge to reinforce connections between the life and the work. Shapiro writes of Will in the World that it

gave [the autobiographical thesis] the seal of approval of the leading American Shakespearean of the day. Greenblatt admits straightaway that 'the whole impulse to explore Shakespeare's life arises from the powerful conviction that his plays and poems spring not only from other plays and poems but from things he knew firsthand, in his body and soul.' Rather that consider what historical developments gave rise to this conviction, he focuses instead on how firsthand experience can be retrieved from Shakespeare's surviving works, allowing extraordinary access into the poet's desires and anxieties.

I think Shapiro is being rather reticent in criticizing Greenblatt's project. In trying to show that the work actually does confirm Shakespeare's experiences as its source, he only winds up giving support to the assumptions that made the authorship controversy possible. Greenblatt too underestimates the reach of imagination. Why couldn't the primary thing Shakespeare "knew firsthand" be the capabilities of his own imagination? Why couldn't "body and soul" simply be the springs of that imagination? Why isn't this enough?

Cosmopolitan

In his part history of Bulgarian literature/part survey of the career of contemporary Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, Dimiter Kenarov remarks that to appreciate Gospopdinov "one does not have to be Bulgarian, or to know the name of the Bulgarian president" and that his novel Natural Novel (Dalkey Archive) "has all the necessary visas to travel comfortably between countries and translations without losing the identity of its vision." In his review of the novel, J. M. Tyree echoes this assertion of Gospodinov's transnational appeal by suggesting that Natural Novel "belongs more to the cosmopolitan postmodern aesthetic of Italo Calvino than its native locale" and that "the novel could have been set almost anywhere."

It was my experience of Natural Novel as well that a distinctively Bulgarian milieu seemed curiously absent, although Bulgarian readers would surely be more readily able to identify those elements of such a milieu that are depicted. And it was also my experience that the novel had something in common with the work of a writer like Calvino, or with the "postmodern aesthetic" in general. It may be the second impression that is partly responsible for the first, but in Natural Novel, postmodernism is applied so lightly that its "cosmopolitan" effect can't really fully account for the fact the novel "could have been set almost anywhere."

Natural Novel shares this characteristic with two other works of Eastern European fiction I have read in the past few years, Magdalena Tulli's Flaw and Dumitru Tsepeneag's Vain Art of the Fugue. Since my acquaintance with contemporary fiction from Eastern European countries is limited, I do not want to make generalizations about it--although Kenarov's essay does seem to suggest that it is precisely Gospodinov's "cosmopolitan" approach that makes him a significant figure among current Bulgarian writers--nor could I offer any especially keen insights that would explain the abstracted, "anywhere" quality of these three books, even if there is some cultural or literary factor that unites them. What immediately comes to mind as a possible explanation is a post-Communist rejection of "realism" as a whole, including but not restricted to the "socialist" variety, which entails a movement away from local details and cultural "texture" and, perhaps, an embrace of the Western decadence of postmodernism.

Although I enjoyed all three of these novels, most recently Natural Novel, their accessibility "between countries and translations" ultimately leaves me feeling ambivalent about them and about the "globalization" of fiction more generally. On the one hand, their metafictional strategies are appealing to me, as a reader sympathetic to this postmodern variant, but on the other hand I also find the thinness of detail and texture vaguely unsastisfying. One of the arguments often made on behalf of translated fiction is precisely that it provides us an avenue of increased acquaintance with "foreign" cultures, but a book like Natural Novel often seems to reflect our own culture back to American readers, both in literal references to American culture ("Remember how in Pulp Fiction Bruce Willis goes back to get his watch and decides to toast Pop Tarts, while Travolta is reading in the john?" one man asks another in a conversation about toilets) and in its fragmented and self-conscious narrative devices, most of which seem to me to derive primarily from American postmodernism--indeed, while writers like Calvino and Borges are among the original inspirations of literary postmodernism, that inspiration was initially and most fully expressed in postmodern American fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Natural Novel finally reads to me most like a synthesis of the narrative manner and techniques of writers such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Gilbert Sorrentino.

This familiarity perhaps helps Gospodinov or Tulli more easily find English-language readers, but I wonder if these writers aren't being translated in the first place because their work is more likely to attract such an audience as exists for translations. A work like Natural Novel certainly offers itself to a critic who must read it in translation (namely me) in a more readily accessible way--if nothing else, I have a working knowledge of postmodern devices and the postmodern sensibility--but I can't think that a globalized fiction that makes it less necessary to attend to Bulgarian or Polish or Rumanian as literary languages with their own distinctive features, or that mitigates the effort to understand an "alien" culture, is altogether a good thing.

Time's Arrow

If it is at all possible to call a novel a "poet's novel," Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder (Coffee House Press) would seem literally to be one. Its author, Travis Nichols, is currently an editor at the Poetry Foundation, writes a poetry column for the Huffington Post, and, as far as I can tell, has prior to this book mostly if not exclusively written poetry, including a collection, Iowa, published earlier this year.

Is this, then, a poet's novel only in the narrowest, most reductively descriptive sense (he's a poet who has written a novel) or is it a novel informed by the sensibility and the assumptions about form and language more specific to poetry, and thus one to be judged according to those assumptions rather than those readers and reviewers usually themselves bring to the consideration of fiction? If the latter, should we consider Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder some kind of hybrid of poetry and fiction, a separate category of fiction (or of poetry), or should we simply look for it to bring to our reading of fiction something different, some strategy or emphasis we don't ordinarily allow for in our reading of plot- or character-driven novels?

It is the success of Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder that it poses, and partially answers, these questions; it is its failure that those answers are only partial, and to some extent unsatisfying. The novel seems clearly enough written against the grain of the approach taken by most professional novelists, an approach that encourages immediate engagement with character and event, establishes context through setting and relevant background, above all eases the reader's way into and through the story with an exposition-laden prose. It really doesn't do these things, at least not quickly or directly, and doesn't ever do the last-named. However, it does in my opinion eventually accede to the essence of this approach, even as it arrives at shared ends through somewhat unorthodox means.

Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder ultimately does tell the story of a World War II pilot who, along with his grandson and his girlfriend, visits in his old age the scene of his crash-landing in the Polish countryside. The story is told to us by the grandson, at least indirectly, as the novel takes the form of a series of letters written to "Luddie," the presumed rescuer of the grandfather (the grandson calls him the "Bombardier") who may or may not be still alive (it turns out she isn't). Through the letters, we learn a little bit about the narrator's own past, about the Bombardier's life since the war, about their trip to Poland, but most of the narrative is taken up with the trio's attempts to locate Luddie, the Bombardier's crash site, the presumed target of the bombing raid that resulted in the crash. The search is complicated by the Bombardier's obviously faulty memory, but the novel concludes with the trio's discovery of the ruins of the bombed-out target, presumably validating the Bombardier's remembered experience.

It's precisely this validation of the memory of heroism (even if the Bombardier doesn't necessarily think of it as such) that makes me less than satisfied with this novel, although it does redeem itself as a departure from novel-writing business as usual in other ways. Most readers will note from the beginning the narrator's oblique and repetitive prose style, as almost any chapter of the book will illustrate:

Something has happened to me, but it is not what I thought would happen to me when I told you something was going to happen to me.

Something has happened to me because I left New England and came back to the Midwest, where I was born.

I should have know better than to come back to where I was born because time is not a circle.

Is it a line?

I should have known better because it's always dangerous to come back, especially if you leave from a new home to come back to where you were born. It's always dangerous because if you give where you were born a chance, it will wrap its roots around your insides and pull you down close to the ground. (Chapter 2)

The narrator's letters act neither as "chatty" correspondence nor as a narrative device that substitutes for conventional expository narration but could just as easily be replaced with some other device that gets the story told. The narrator's halting, circuitous language emphasizes its own unfolding as language, working to ensure that we are always as aware of this language as we are the story it is struggling to move along. The narrator is struggling with the story, and the manner of telling reinforces that struggle. Perhaps we could say that this method is "poetic," not so much because more often than not language is laid out on the page in a compressed way that seems "verse-like" but because it does stress so concertedly the effort to find efficacious expression of what one wants to say, to find the right means and medium.

In wondering whether time is, in fact "a line," the narrator is also announcing the novel's preoccupation with the relationship of time and memory, whether the latter always conditions the former, or whether it is possible to get an accurate sense of the former while thinking of it as a "line." The narrator moves in circles recording his own and the Bombardier's experiences, and the trio themselves essentially move in circles while trying to pin down the location of the Bombardier's crash. The novel seems to be suggesting that time--or what really happened--is inevitably lost in the attempt to recall it, or to narrate it, even, or perhaps especially, something as momentous as World War II and the experiences of the "greatest generation" that fought it. But the last-minute discovery of the "real" site, however much stumbling around is involved in the process, left me, for one, feeling disappointed that Nichols didn't fully extend this meditation on our perception of time through to the novel's conclusion. It left me thinking that despite the haze the passing years had enveloped around the events of the war, the narrative was affirming that the haze was ultimately penetrable through determination and a little patience.

Thus it seems to me that Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder winds up to some extent reinforcing the discursive conventions of fiction. Its stylistic and structural departures delay and condition the resolution of the novel into a well-shaped narrative, but they ultimately provide it nonetheless. In doing so, the novel becomes less an effort to explore the borderlands between fiction and poetry as their boundaries have currently been determined, and more an acknowledgment of those boundaries. It's a book worth reading, however, as its modest challenges to novel-writing convention still make it a more satisfying reading experience than most literary fiction.

 

The New Equivocation

Readers familiar with Rebecca Goldstein's previous fiction would no doubt find that 36 Arguments for the Existence of God has much in common with the earlier work. It concerns itself with the intellectual nexus formed by science-mathematics-philosophy, is set in the campus world of academics, and supplements its focus on the life of the mind by introducing questions about Jewish identity and Judaism as a side interest. It is the sort of thing most readily identified as a "novel of ideas," although this novel may be the most insistent on foregrounding the "ideas" themselves as its central interest.

In novels such as The Mind-Body Problem (1989), Mazel (1995), and Properties of Light (2000), Goldstein takes as her subject characters working in the "hard" disciplines who struggle to reconcile their commitment to the intellectual rigor of these disciplines with their physical and emotional impulses that tempt them away from that commitment, in some cases toward the suspension of reason and rigor represented by religion and religious tradition. 36 Arguments continues the preoccupation with this subject but does so in the form of a conventional academic satire, a mode the earlier novels, for all their focus on academics and their eccentricites, did not really approach. These novels (as well as the short story collection, Strange Attractors) seemed to manifest an effort to satisfy both the demands of philosophy and of literary form (perhaps analagous to their protagonists' efforts to reconcile head and heart). Properties of Light, for example, finds a provocative way to use science to create a ghost story of sorts, as one of its characters comes back to quantumly "haunt" the woman responsible for his death.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God, however, doesn't really exhibit the same concern for transforming philosophy and science into literary devices. Granted, the "36 arguments" construct is used as a structural element, incorporated literally in the form of a series of propositions and their refutations as the novel's concluding section and metaphorically by providing the novel's chapter titles, but otherwise this novel presents few surprises either formally or thematically, proceeding as a garden-variety academic satire complete with bursting egos, pretentious-sounding projects, and fierce political in-fighting. It provides Goldstein with the opportunity to portray the current phenomenon of "new atheism," but its appeal is largely restricted to the examination of this phenomenon as a "current issuue." While some marginal interest might be added by dramatizing this phenomenon through attributing positions to fictionally depicted characters, finally not much about the controversy over new atheism is really illuminated by dressing it up as fiction rather than addressing it more straightforwardly through analysis and explication.

The most serious limitation of 36 Arguments, however, is that as satire it isn't very funny. None of the characters rise above facile caricature--the female characters are all in one way or another too much woman for the diffident protagonist--and emphasizing the decidedly Jewish names of campus buildings (at "Frankfurter University") and a college president named "Shimmy" only goes so far. The most egregious failure is the portrayal of Jonas Elijah Klapper, "Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values" and embodiment of pomposity, clearly enough modeled on Harold Bloom. Once one "gets" that this character is based on Bloom, the endless reiterations of his girth, his affected speech and mannerisms, and his encyclopedic references to Jewish mysticism become almost unbearable. It's never clear whether Klapper is meant to represent the foolishness of literary study in general, or of a particular kind of anti-scientific literary discourse, or whether he just signifies that it's inappropriate to be Harold Bloom. Whatever the case, we can only conclude that, as Gordon Haber puts it in his review of the novel, Klapper "is supposed to be a comic figure because his interest in Judaism leads to messianic delusions, and because he’s fat."

Because so much space is devoted to Jonas Elijah Klapper, and because presumably something is to be made of the contrast between Klapper's approach to "faith and values" and the approach the protagonist, originally a disciple of Klapper, eventually favors, or between Klapper's take on Judaism and that of "true" Hasidic Jews, or something or other, the insipidness of the novel's portrayal of him subverts any purely literary claims it might have to make on us. The flashbacks to this period in the protagonist's life prove almost completely superfluous and little in his interactions with other characters is of much interest. We are left with a subplot concerning the "Valdener Hasidim," a community of Hasidic Jews for whom both Klapper and the protagonist develop an increasing fondness. Interest focuses in particular on the current Valdener Rebbe and his heir apparent son, a mathematical genius in the making who is ultimately forced to choose between the potential of his genius and his responsibility to the community he is apparently destined to lead.

The protagonist, Cass Seltzer, a Frankfurter pyschologist who has written a surprise best seller called The Varieties of Religious Illusion, is himself not a very compelling character. He exists mostly as an opportunity for Goldstein to evoke the mileu he inhabits and to raise the issues of faith and belief with which the novel is principally concerned. He has the consumately "moderate" personality that allows him to empathize with believers even as he is chosen to make the case for nonbelief in a setpiece debate near the novel's conclusion. He is clearly enough regarded as the "winner" of the debate, yet his admiration of the community spirit that maintains the Valdeners in their traditions and of the decision by the son to continue those traditions after his father's death is also palpable. The narrative never deviates from Cass's perspective, and we are inevitably led to appreciate both his intellectual toughness and his soft spot for tradition and solidarity.

The novel's concluding episode, a joyous celebration of a Valdener wedding, veers away from satire and rests ultimate sympathy with the community practices of the Hasidic Jews. This is the sort of thing some readers find "moving" or "transcendent," but I find it muddled and maudlin. It doesn't seem to me to rescue a sense of "mystery" about human life but indicates a willingness to disregard the truth. It doesn't invest Cass Seltzer with additional "humanity" but confirms his ability to equivocate. Cass may not be a believer, but he'd really, really like to be one, the irrationality of belief notwithstanding. The right kind of religious belief--not too intense, but with a lot of dancing-- would be so nice and agreeable.

 

Detecting a Wrongness

In his review of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, Hari Kunzru maintains that what separates this novel from the postmodern novels Lethem clearly admires is that "it’s too good-humored to attain real satiric bite and is often content to drop a name instead of wrestling with the slippery ideas that might make Lethem’s heroes worthy of a true fan’s regard." This is probably right, although to say that the novel lacks "satiric bite" doesn't mean it is not still essentially an attempt at satire, just as it's true that while Chronic City doesn''t especially wrestle with "slippery ideas," the claim that so-called "systems novels"--a term coined by Thomas LeClair in his book on Don DeLillo, In the Loop--can be defined by their own grappling with such ideas is altogether questionable.

Lethem's work is often associated with the first generation postmodernists, particularly Pynchon, Barth, and DeLillo, as mediated by the science fiction of Philip K. Dick and superhero comic books. This amalgamation of high postmodernism and popular literature seems to be, in fact, what most readers and critics take to be his signature variation on postmodernism in fiction. However, while it may be the case that Lethem is inspired by the postmodernists to create his brand of literary fantasy fiction, there isn't much that's especially innovative about a book like Chronic City. It seems more like a tired pastiche of postmodernism than an attempt to extend the reach of postmodern experiment into a different era and changed circumstances.

Kunzru maintains that Lethem "knows he’s writing belatedly and wants us to know he knows" and that this gesture perhaps makes the novel "a conscious tribute of some kind, a love letter to the writing that inspired Lethem to become a writer." If John Barth initiated postmodernism by positing a "literature of exhaustion" that exploited the "used-upness" of fictional form to generate new forms, Kunzru's suggestion might indicate that Lethem is in his own way converting postmodernism itself into an "exhausted" source of formal development, at least for his own work, except that, where Barth and company forced a new attention on form, style, and narrative strategy, Lethem settles for vaguely surreal machinations of plot (providing what some want to call an "alternative reality") and loudly "colorful" characters (most of them given obviously Pynchon-derived names). There is otherwise nothing that could be called formal innovation in a novel like Chronic City, nothing that really challenges readers to examine their assumptions about the form.

Lethem's status as an experimental writer, then, seems entirely based on his incorporation of genre fiction narrative conventions into novels that have generally been accepted as "serious" fiction. The plot devices of detective stories and science fiction allow Lethem to ostensibly bypass the requirements of ordinary realism, providing for an approach that blends caricature and pseudo-fantasy to produce what in my view can best be described as whimsy. But whimsy is not exactly a postmodern mode, and in Chronic City it betrays a certain aesthetic timidity. I think I agree with William Deresiewicz, who in his review of the novel comments that Lethem "wants realism, with the credibility it brings--wants us to take the world of the novel as a faithful copy of the world we know--but he also wants to stack the deck by deploying supernatural elements whenever he finds it convenient." Thus the New York City portrayed in the narrative needs to be recognizable enough as New York City that we are able to associate the events and themes with the real place but not so much that the author can't introduce runaway tunnel robots, an illusory space mission doomed by the presence of Chinese space mines, or snow in August.

This sort of contained fantasia can't really be what the postmodernists had in mind as an alternative to conventional realism, nor is it credible as a revision or reorientation of postmodern challenges to inherited practice. It implies that postmodern experiment was simply a strategy designed to undermine the principle of verisimilitude, so that any work not strictly observing the rules of traditional realism could be called "experimental." And while Lethem's work is consistent with much postmodern fiction in that it is essentially comic, the comedy of a novel like Chronic City is indeed much too gentle, too shy of the more corrosive humor of much postmodern comedy. It isn't so much that the novel is short on "satiric bite" as that ultimately it is merely satire, a relatively mild critique of post-9/11 New York under Bloomberg, which has become inhospitable to its misfits and nonconformists. The postmodern comedy in the work of Pynchon or Barth or Barthelme doesn't seek to "correct" behaviors and institutions that threaten individual autonomy or impede social progress; it portrays such threats and obstructions as inherent to human life and thus unfortunately not much subject to amelioration.

Darby Dixon expresses his disappointment with Chronic City as perhaps the consequence of his own inability as a reader to "patiently dissect its meaning and formulate its connections," to "place [its] ideas and themes on pedestals in whose shadows lurk plot and character." This assumes that what is really at work in this novel is an underlying deep structure of "meaning" and "ideas" the reader must uncover. It further implies that what must make it a suitably postmodern work is precisely this deep structure of "connection." But neither does Lethem's novel conceal any deep meaning not made apparent through choice of satirical targets, nor is this undertow of supposedly abstruse "matter" what animates postmodern fiction. The story of the relationship between narrator Chase Insteadman, former child actor, and Perkus Tooth, former bohemian intellectual now pothead, allows Lethem to canvass his "alernative" New York from top (Insteadman is something of a mascot for the city's high-society types) to bottom and to adjust his satirical focus accordingly. That the purport of the novel's "ideas and themes" doesn't go much beyond this surface satire is in its favor, as we aren't subjected to the kind of tedium the exploration of "ideas" in fiction usually entails. In this way Lethem is actually faithful to his postmodern predecessors: to the extent Barth or Pynchon or DeLillo incorporate ideas, they do so as inspiration for formal or narrative devices ("entropy" in Pynchon's story of that name, for example) rather than as abstractions with which to "wrestle."

However, Chronic City nevertheless suffers from its own kind of tedium, exactly of the sort Darby Dixon identifies when he admits he found it simply "boring." Chronic City never attains the structural or stylistic vitality that would be required for us to suspend our disbelief in its plot contrivances. Its narrative drags along and its narrator's language is leaden and unnecessarily prolix to the extent that I mostly had to force myself to finish the book. The narrator is himself an unengaging figure whose status as a blank slate on which his friend Perkus inscribes a more capacious understanding does not make him a character with whom one wants to spend over 450 pages. And Perkus himself is much less interesting than Lethem wants him to be. He's an essentially stock countercultural type--he likes to discourse on "Monte Hellman, Semina Culture, Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, the Mafia's blackmailing of J. Edgar Hoover over erotic secrets (resulting in the bogus amplification of Cold War fear and therefore the whole of our contemporary landscape), Vladimir Mayakovsky and the futurists, Chet Baker," etc., etc., etc.--and his recurrent cluster headaches and other mental problems make him seem merely pathetic, not heroic.

In his review of Chronic City, Ron Charles acknowledges it is "a tedious reading experience in which redundancy substitutes for development and effect for profundity," but he nonetheless thinks Lethem "proves he's one of the most elegant stylists in the country," offering "perfectly choreographed sentences." I have in the past found Lethem a pleasing enough stylist, but the style exhibited through Chase Insteadman produces sentences that are anything but "perfectly choreographed." Here's Chase in one of his moments of reflection:

I'm outstanding only in my essential politeness. Exhausting, this compulsion to oblige any detected social need. I don't mean only to myself; it's frequently obvious that my charm exhausts and bewilders others, even as they depend upon it to mortar crevices in the social facade--to fill vacant seats, give air to suffocating silences, fudge unease. (I'm like fudge. Or maybe I'm like chewing gum.) But if beneath charm lies exhaustion, beneath exhaustion lies a certain rage. I detect a wrongness everywhere. Within and Without, to quote a lyric. It would be misleading to say I'm screaming inside, for if I was, I'd soon enough find a way to scream aloud. Rather, the politeness infests a layer between me and myself, the name of the wrongness going not only unexpressed but unknown. Intuited only. Forbidden perhaps. Perkus would have called me inchoate. He wouldn't have meant it kindly.

I could have settled for the first sentence. Or perhaps "Perkus would have called me inchoate." These descriptions tell me what I need to know about Insteadman (to the extent I need to have Insteadman telling me about himself in the first place). The rest is just prattle, and by the time I get to "I detect a wrongness" and the politeness infesting a layer "between me and myself" I just want him to shut up.

This sort of inexhaustible self-examination and droning exposition occurs throughout the narrative and more than anything else accounts for the lackluster reading experience Chronic City turned out to be. Perhaps it is a sign of the author trying too hard to create "meaning" and forge "connections," but I don't think so. I think it's just Lethem's failure to execute his "alternative reality" into something more than a labored fantasy.

A Sad Decline

Lorrie Moore's first two books, the story collection Self-Help (1985) and the novel Anagrams (1986), introduced a writer possessing an appealing comic touch, lightly applied but not reducible to mere "humor," and a modest if still palpable impulse to formal experiment. Self-Help incoporated as a formal strategy the conventions of direct address found in the genre of nonfiction named in the title. Thus this passage from "How to Be the Other Woman": "Shave your legs in the bathroom sink. Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition. Wives are like cockroaches. Also part of a great historical tradition. They will survive you after a nuclear attach--they are tough and hardy and travel in packs--but right now they're not having any fun. And when you look in the bathroom mirror, you spot them scurrying, up out of reach behind you." Or the beginning of the book's fourth story, called simply "How": "Begin by meeting him in a class, in a bar, at a rummage sale. Maybe he teaches sixth grade. Manages a hardware store. Foreman at a carton factory. He will be a good dancer. He will have perfectly cut hair. He will laugh at your jokes." Anagrams presents us with the stories of "Benna" and "Gerard," except that in the novel's five sections these are never quite the same characters (although also not completely different, either), their lives rearranged and recombined as narrative anagrams. It contains the kind of verbal comedy also characteristic of Self-Help and that would come to be a distinctive feature of Moore's fiction: "Eleanor and I around this time founded The Quit-Calling Me Shirley School of Comedy. It entailed the two of us meeting downtown for drinks and making desparate pronouncements about life and love which always began, 'But surely. . .' It entailed what Eleanor called, 'The Great White Whine': whiney white people getting together over white wine and whining."

These two books made me think Lorrie Moore might be counted among a younger generation of adventurous writers neither programmatically postmodern nor retreating to the sparer comforts of minimalism, following up on the radical departures of postmodernism in a perhaps less confrontational, more accessible way. Unfortunately, her subsequent books have evidenced a sad, uninterrrupted decline into bathos and convention, each of them more disappointinly trite than the last. Even the story "People Like That Are the Only People Here" (collected in Birds of America), which is ritually cited as Moore's finest work, seems to me mostly an exercise in sentimentality, its supposed mordancy of tone notwithstanding, invoking that most maudlin of narrative devices, a child in distress, without redeeming it. It relies entirely on the reflexive emotional reaction many readers have to this device, but I, for one, don't really need to be convinced that having a sick baby is a woeful state of affairs or that the American health care system is deplorable. As far as I can tell, this story only exists to "say" these things.

Neither Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? nor any of the stories in Like Life or Birds of America exhibit the interest in alternative narrative forms found in Self-Help and Anagrams. They are all conventionally structured narratives employing the kind of strategies designed to "connect" us to their characters, establish appropriate narrative "arc," and provide "telling" and "vivid" detail reinforced by every creative writing program in the country. And while many of them are leavened by what the dust jacket of Birds of America calls the "wit, brio, and verve" manifested in dialogue and by the occasional first-person narrator, the "wit" becomes non-threatingly humorous and essentially ornamental to the "human interest" most reviewers now find central to Lorrie Moore's approach.

Moore's 2009 novel, A Gate at the Stairs, shows the most precipitous decline into banality and unearned emotion yet. It may be the worst novel by a "name" author I've ever read, which is made all the more dismaying by the fact it comes from a writer I once admired. Once again this is a story that leans heavily on the initial emotional appeal of children, but in this case although an orphaned child is introduced and her plight made a center of interest for a while, utlimately this narrative thread has very little emotional weight and is finally dropped, not to be taken up again. Other potentially emotion-laden episodes are introduced as well, but they all remain surprisingly inert, both in narrative and emotional effect. Thus, while the situations evoked in the novel are potentially mawkish, they are executed with so little imagination and formal integrity they essentially just arise and recede without making much of an impression at all. The death of the protagonist's brother, for example, seems so arbitrary, so clearly the product of narrative convenience that her reaction to it is almost grotesquely overwrought. We've been given so little reason to care about the brother, or so little insight into the relationship between sister and brother, this episode as the novel's climactic event falls disastrously flat even in a narrative that never gets off the ground anyway.

A Gate at the Stairs chronicles one year in the life of Tassie Keltjen, a Midwestern college student, shortly after the events of 9/11/01. Apparently, this context is meant to be significant, the story Tassie tells in some way inflected by or representing allegorically the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but exactly why it is significant or how the story "responds" to the period after the Twin Towers collapsed and before the Iraq war began I am not able to say. In his review of the novel, Ron Charles asserts that it contains "profound reflections on marriage and parenthood, racism and terrorism, and especially the baffling, hilarious, brutal initiation to adult life." I can't find any "profound reflections" on any of these issues, most especially terrorism, although this may be a function of my disinclination to read fiction for "reflections" on anything rather than the failure of the author to make her reflections more tangible. Moreover, if the nature of her reflections were suddenly to become more apparent to me, I'm pretty sure this would only clarify further exactly why I find this novel so unpalatable, providing additional evidence that Lorrie Moore has abandoned aesthetic adventurousness for dreary "engagement."

The novel certainly does depict "marriage and parenthood," as Tassie finds herself working as a nanny for a couple who have adopted a biracial child. This presumably also introduces the issues of race to which Powers alludes, but the closest we get to "reflection" on racism is through a series of inane conversations among a group of adoptive mothers of cross-racial children that Tassie overhears. Tassie's employers probably are meant to be "colorful" characters whose marriage provides a contrast with Tassie's own parents back on the farm. They are, however, so superficially portrayed--the menu at the wife's gourmet restaurant is more interesting than she is--that "reflection" on their obviously foundering marriage is hardly possible. Further, the eventually revealed backstory explaining their situation, including their desire to adopt, is so astonishingly implausible that whatever resonance Tassie's experience with them might have is completely lost. Tassie's parents are actually more interesting, although their son's death at the book's conclusion reduces them to a generic set of grieving parents, emblematic, I suppose, of the many other grieving parents created by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The scenes focusing on Tassie at home and interacting with her parents are the best in the book, but they are overshadowed by the interminable accounts of Tassie at work and at school.

The latter include an interlude in which Tassie takes up with a fellow student named Reynaldo, who presents himself as Brazilian, but turns out to be an American muslim from New Jersey. I think. Apparently he's a proto-terrorist, or terrorist fellow traveller, or something. If we are to take seriously the notion that a Wisconsin farm girl at an upper Midwestern state university finds herself involved with a budding terrorist, then these scenes are unquestionably the most embarrassing in the novel. Otherwise, they're just impossibly muddled.

One quality of Lorrie Moore's fiction that initially made it attractive to me does survive in A Gate at the Stairs. As narrator of her story, Tassie Keltjin frequently enough exhibits a comedian-like sense of humor:

Adoption seemed both a cruel joke and lovely daydream--a nice way of avoiding the blood and pain of giving birth, or, from a child's perspective, a realized fantasy of your parents not really being your parents. Your genes could thrust one arm in the air and pump up and down, Yes! You were not actually related to Them!

"You know," Tassie recalls saying to a date who has just announced to her he's gay, "if you concentrated you could be straight. I'm sure of it. Just relax, close your eyes once in a while, and just do it. Heterosexuality--well, it takes a lot of concentration!. . .It takes a lot for everybody!"

On the other hand, there are passages that struggle for cogency, as when Tassie muses about women's fashion:

What would be cool was something different, more murderous, and not depticable. From what I could see, the best look would involve not just something new, but something with insouciant jewelry and ominous leather goods denouncing something old that lay within yourself and others. Probably I would never accomplish this. Without explicit instructions I had no feel or instinct, at least not for the new part. I felt, however, that if called upon, I could do the other part--denunciation--but privately. Privately part cool, since I partook of denouncing (silently, violently) all the time.

These reflections are clearly enough laboring to "say" something significant, but I don't really know what it is.

The contrast between the sure-footed comedy of the first two passages and the straining for effect of the last seems to me to encapsulate the fatal flaw of A Gate at the Stairs. Moore retains, on a verbal level, her essentially comedic vision and skills but ulimately allows them to be subjugated to a ponderous effort to be "about" something more "serious." A writer who began by writing funny, formally agile fiction has now produced an emotionally overworked, formally dull novel only intermittently relieved by a funny line or facetiously rendered scene. I have said this is one of the worst books I've read, but the experience of reading it is really more depressing than anything else.

What's Going On?

That Thomas Pychon would come to draw on the resources of the detective novel is not really surprising. As many reviewers of Inherent Vice correctly pointed out, Pynchon's fiction has long incorporated the mystery plot as its essential narrative device, with characters such as Herbert Stencil, Oedipa Maas, and Tyrone Slothrop taking on the role of "detective." What Will Blythe says of Doc Sportello, private eye protagonist of Inherent Vice, is true of these other characters as well: "Doc attempts to solve a mystery that may or may not be solvable, so dense are the thickets of information through which he must hack, so opaque the motives of nearly everyone he comes across."

It might be said that this portrayal of Doc Sportello as a kind of perplexed if intrepid jungle explorer makes Inherent Vice a pastiche of the detective novel, or even a parody, an exercise in genre revisionism that takes the epistemological core of the detective narrative--the search for knowledge--and uses it to mock the the pretensions of such narratives to finally arrive at "truth" and to satirize the very notion that a "search for knowledge" in modern America is even possible. There is some truth to such an interpretation, of course, but I don't finally think that Pynchon's novel is a burlesque of the detective novel and nothing more. The touchstone for Inherent Vice is pretty clearly the fiction of Raymond Chandler in novels such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, and it could equally be said that Chandler's own work evinces a good deal of epistemological skepticism itself, and Philip Marlowe is frequently portrayed as attempting to hack his way through "thickets" of misdirection. Marlowe often seems just as confused by the opaque motives of those he encounters as Doc Sportello.

Inherent Vice is at least as much a homage to the radicalism of writers like Chandler and Ross McDonald, a testament to the adaptability of the detective novel to various settings, styles, and concerns, especially in contexts in which the very possibility of uncovering "truth" is or ought to be a lingering question. Doc Sportello may seem a sorry excuse for a private eye--a shambolic, laid-back stoner--but he's also dogged and perceptive, and he feels a sense of duty toward those he is enlisted to help. If he is led through some mazes that remain mazy and if the full import of what he discovers is not altogether assimilated, this is only par for the course in Pynchon's fiction, and having gone through the process of seeking the truth has been more enlightening than not, both for Doc and for the reader. Through Doc's peregrinations around Los Angeles, he and we become more fully aware of the historical and cultural forces at work that will transform the hippie haven of Gordita Beach into just a memory of personal and countercultural resistance to the encroaching power of new technologies and an unleashed capitalism that will shut down the brief emergence of a more humane way of life--the way of life associated with "the sixties"--before it could become more than a fragile utopian moment.

What ultimately makes Inherent Vice compelling is that in accepting the narrative protocols of the detective novel--which includes the obligatory visit of the femme fatale who initiates the action, an encounter with goons that leaves Doc unconscious, episodes of verbal sparring between Doc and a cop, etc.--Pynchon also manages to produce a novel that is recognizably Pynchonian. The detective novel is used to his purposes and is thus in this instance transformed into a comic picaresque in which, as with most picaresque narratives, characters are thinly developed beyond a few essential features, their adventures themselves of more importance than what these adventures might add to our sense of the characters as "rounded" individuals. (Thus the frequent enough criticism that Pynchon's characters are "cartoonish" is completely misconceived.) I think I agree with Thomas Jones that

the Anglophone novelist whom Pynchon most closely resembles – with his delight in silly names, scatological jokes, wild digressions and impromptu outbursts of song lyrics, his disregard for distinctions between fact and fiction, his scientific background, his belief in the randomness of the world and fascination with the patterns that appear in the chaos – is Tobias Smollett.

In such novels as The Adventures of Roderick Random, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker--even the names of the protagonists are appropriately Pynchonesque--Smollett helped establish the picaresque as a narrative strategy in the early English novel, but despite Smollett's influence on, for example, Charles Dickens, both he and the kind of picaresque narrative emphasizing "randomness" and digression was superseded by the post-Flaubert novel of realism and the "well-made story." Writers like Pynchon and John Barth partially revived the picaresque strategy in the 1960s, and surely both V and Gravity's Rainbow can usefully be read as picaresque accounts of randomness and incipient chaos.

What really unites Pynchon and Smollett is an essentially comic vision of the world, a world full of mishaps, bad luck, and evil portents, that presents itself not as an orderly arrangement of plot points but as an entirely contingent series of events--one thing leads to another. And it is a comic vision that at its best is also greatly entertaining. Pynchon's best work is above all funny, and the most unfortunate consequence of the scholarly attention Pynchon's fiction has gathered over the years is that too much emphasis has been put on "paranoia" and "entropy" and other weighty matters, obscuring the fundamental fact that Pynchon is in the line of great American literary comedians. His work is "postmodern" to the extent it is comic in a particularly thoroughgoing way, not because it invokes the second law of thermodynamics or posits the existence of global conspiracies. When his fiction becomes bloated and leaden, as I would argue it does in both Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, it is because he has lost this comic facility, or is intentionally disregarding it.

Thus for me Inherent Vice marks a return to the approach he seemingly abandoned after Vineland. It takes us on a comic/picaresque journey around southern California at the turn of the seventies, playing much of what it records for laughs even as it exposes us to acts of murder, brutal violence, drug trafficking, sadism, and economic rapacity--all the "inherent vice" to which humanity inevitably succumbs. The detective novel conventions give the novel a structural spine that helps to focus the novel's comedic energies while also allowing Pynchon the flexibility of form that characterizes his best work. Some might say the kind of pothead humor that arises from his choice of mileu and protagonist sometimes descends to the level of Cheech and Chong, but this is arguably a necessary side effect of the aesthetic strategy Pynchon employs: the world in which Doc Sportello roams is comic precisely because of the perspective the dope-smoking detective provides.

If finally Inherent Vice is somewhat less satisfying than Pynchon's other two California novels, Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49, not to mention V and Gravity's Rainbow, I would identify its most serious flaw as a kind of sentimentality about the vanished hippie world it evokes. It's a sentimentality only reinforced by the novel's conclusion--Doc driving in the inland fog, clearly enough symbolic of the coming cultural fog of the 1970s--although the novel's strongly sympathetic portrayal of the hippie scene has by then long since itself settled in. Perhaps it has been lurking in Pynchon's work all along, but the wistful tone of innocence lost pervades this novel, and a little too obviously for my taste. The characters in Inherent Vice, including Doc Sportello, are subject to a mild degree of comic mockery, but not enough to deprive them of their status as heroes of naivete.

"I Wouldn't Explain"

A debut work that is explicitly identified as experimental--or in this case "unique and innovative," as the book's back cover has it--seems a useful opportunity to consider what "experimental" appears to signify to young writers aspiring to produce fiction worthy of that designation. Erin Pringle's story collection The Floating Order (Two Ravens Press) offers such an opportunity, and while I have some reservations about classifying it as experimental, I nevertheless found this book an impressive set of stories. It is certainly not an ordinary first work of "literary fiction" and for that reason alone commends itself to readers looking for more than the pallid and derivative exercises in convention most such fiction has to offer.

If an immediately observable characteristic of "experimental fiction" is an implicit questioning of the centrality of "story," with its attendant requirements of "exposition," "narrative arc," "backstory," etc., then The Floating Order initially meets this expectation. A few of the stories do ultimately include moments of action--even rather extreme action--but most of them either proceed in the absence of a chartable narrative line or in effect take place in a discursive zone in which the important events have already happened, the protagonist, frequently the narrator and frequently a child, continuing on while unavoidably returning to these events in a fragmentary and oblique way. The reader is asked to suspend final comprehension of the nature and the consequences of these events, but the gradual realization of their full import has a quietly powerful effect.

The collection's first, and title, story is a good example of this approach. Narrated by a woman who has, we ultimately determine, drowned her own children (a situation no doubt inspired by the Andrea Yates case), the "story" unfolds as a kind of spontaneous emanation of the narrator's disturbed mind, circling around the deed but not quite confronting it, freely shifting from past to present, often speaking of the dead children as if they were still alive. The story doesn't so much plumb the depths of the character's insanity as it spills that insanity onto the page through the narrator's free associations of memory--however dissociated--and detail. Ultimately the jumbled, distorted pieces of the story cohere into an affecting account of the narrator's troubles, and the impact is only heightened by the incremental way in which the horror of her experience is revealed.

"The Floating Order" also exemplifies the prevailng prose style of the stories in this book, a style that reflects a certain ingenuousness in the characters' perspective expressed in unadorned language:

I asked the policeman if he'd like some juice, as we were out of milk. He was polite. I explained that my babies are saved. He held my hand and opened the car door for me. Natalie sat in the passenger seat and played with the radio dials. I told her to stop it. The policeman asked who I was talking to. I wouldn't explain. My husband has such high hopes.

Many of the stories are narrated by a child, for whom this sort of low-affect discourse seems well-suited in its guilelessness, but it also has an almost hypnotic effect when applied to damaged adult characters like this one. The occasional shocks it delivers as revelatory images and bits of information punctuate the narrator's recitation effectively substitute for straightforward plot progression.

The author wisely chose to present what is perhaps the volume's best story first, but the next several stories are also quite good, reinforcing the themes and the narrative strategy introduced in "The Floating Order." "Cats and Dogs" relates the predicament of two abandoned children (the father is in prison), the nature of that predicament revealed in the same piecemeal fashion; in "Looker," a father struggles to convey to his daughter what her now dead mother was like as a young woman, although again we have to infer she is dead through indirect references ("Your mother shouldn't have smoked"); "Losing, I Think" fitfully unfolds a story of a mother raising a child without the assistance of a mostly elusive father; in "Sanctuary," a mover while transporting a piano from a church finds the corpse of a young girl inside it.

These stories establish an atmosphere of menace and foreboding that permeates the book and that the style and structure introduced in the first few stories evoke especially well. Children are portrayed as particularly vulnerable to the hazards of the adult world, and thus most of the stories in The Floating Order feature children, either as narrators or important characters, attempting to cope with the consequences of human weakness, or in some cases with what seems the random drift of existence. The second half of the book is not as effective as the first, featuring some stories that are a little too sensational ("Why Jimmy?"), too melodramatic ("Drift") or tug a little too much at the heartstrings ("And Yet"), but the best stories show a young writer seeking to reveal uncomfortable truths and challenge complacent reading habits.

However, I'm not sure "experimental" would be the appropriate term to use in characterizing Erin Pringle's fiction as represented in The Floating Order. Ultimately the stories work to create an overarching depiction of the lives of children in present-day America, and, the honesty of the depiction notwithstanding, this is a project all too familiar in first books (and sometimes later ones as well) by American writers. To the extent that the book does take risks in style and form, it does so, or so it seems to me, in order to first of all advance this project, the "content" elevated above formal experiment. I don't necessarily say this is a flaw in the book, although I do say that the effort to "capture" childhood in fiction has become rather hackneyed and that while The Floating Order surpasses most other efforts in this sub-genre of literary fiction, it tacks hard enough in the direction of "saying something" about childhood in America in purely sociological terms that I have to regard whatever is "experimental" in the book as secondary to this larger purpose of locating the stories within the sub-genre, however "dark" they may be.

In my opinion truly experimental or innovative or adventurous fiction attempts to expand the possibilities of fiction as a literary form and does so for the sake of the form itself, not to amplify social or cultural criticism or to intervene in philosophical debates (although these things might be an indirect effect, as is often enough the case in all worthwhile fiction). To question whether The Floating Order really signals that Erin Pringle will consistently produce such aesthetically challenging fiction, however, is not at all to diminish its achievement or deny its satisfactions.

Furies

It seems to me that almost all of the reviewers who found fault with Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones--some of them quite harshly--failed to take sufficiently into account the effects and implications of its origin in the first-person narration of its protagonist. They made the mistake of imputing to the author, or to the author's "intentions," ideas that are properly confined to the discourse of the narrator.

The first step in a critically generous assessment of a work of fiction has to be to engage with the work on its own embodied terms, as far as those terms can be apprehended by the discerning critic. When a novel or story is presented as a first-person narrative--related either by the protagonist or some other subsidiary or observing character--this ought to be a sign that the account we are given is rooted in the perceptions, the language, and the assumptions of the narrator. All first-person narrators are to this degree "unreliable," although some third-person narrators might be unreliable as well (if such a narrator hews especially close to the perspective of the characters on whose behalf the narrator essentially speaks) and sometimes reliability is mostly irrelevant. Especially when a character is as self-involved, not to mention self-deceived, as Maximilien Aue, the true-believing Nazi SS officer who narrates his war experiences in The Kindly Ones, any critical commentary must acknowledge that "meaning" or "theme" (and even at times "style") are conditioned by the limits of the narrator's perspective.

One has to assume that in creating a narrator with such extreme limitations as Dr. Aue, Littell is fully aware of building in a space for ambiguity and uncertainty, of presenting us with a character whose every utterance has to be considered potentially compromised by context. One might assume further that Littell is posing to readers an explicit challenge precisely to scrutinize the text in this way, not to take it as the author's own account of Nazism or to judge it by standards inappropriate to the kind of work it is. Thus when Laila Lalami complains that the reader of The Kindly Ones is not "drawn into the narrative by the beauty of the language, a masterful use of point of view, or an intriguing personal life against which the monstrosity of the main character could be highlighted," she implies the novel would be less objectionable as a portrait of a "monster" if instead of its "plodding style" it employed beautiful language, unified the point of view so that the narrator seemed less dissociated, or made Aue's personal life more "intriguing" and less repellent. She is asking it to be something other than itself, something less troublesome.

For a text authored by an SS bureaucrat to exhibit "beautiful" language would defy belief even more considerably than does Aue's ability to show up at every important stage of the Final Solution, which Lalami describes as "unrealistic." If ever a novel justifies a "plodding style," The Kindly Ones is it, since it so accurately reflects Aue's bureaucratic soul. I confess I do not find this novel lacking "a single narrative consciousness" as Lalami sums up her problem with Littell's handling of point of view, although I agree that Aue's narration does modulate in tone. This seems to me, however, a consequence of the fact that Aue's "narrative consciousness" inherently veers from "confessional" to "argumentative," etc., not that this fragmentation is a flaw in the use of point of view. Narrative consciousness is finally unified by Aue's particular kind of fragmented consciousness, although even if we found only disunity in the expression of point of view, I'm not sure why that in itself should be regarded as an aesthetic failure. It could be argued that "unity" of consciousness in fiction is actually a false representation of actual human consciousness, which is likely much more disunifed than we want to think.

That Maximilien Aue's "personal life" is so distasteful as to make his story doubly monstrous was a common reaction among reviewers of The Kindly Ones. David Gates asserts in his New York Times Book Review assessment that "Aue is simply too much of a freak, and his supposed childhood trauma too specialized and contrived, for us to take him seriously," while Michiko Kakutani adds that "Aue is clearly a deranged creature, and his madness turns his story into a voyeuristic spectacle." Ruth Franklin scoffs that the novel's "utterly persuasive evocation of depravity" could be taken "as a sign of achievement." Franklin's review in particular evoked the critical queasiness stirred up by Littell's novel, with its widely quoted remark that "This is one of the most repugnant books I have ever read." She further contends that "there is something awry in this book's unremitting immersion in Aue's worldview, without any effort--direct or indirect, latent or manifest, philosophical or artistic--to balance or counteract it in any way." Melvin Jules Bukiet claims similarly that it is "not that a reader necessarily seeks a lesson, but fiction and nonfiction ought to approach the subject as more than an opportunity to wallow in the worst humankind has to offer," and these two comments most explicity reveal the incomprehension with which so many American reviewers of The Kindly Ones reacted to the narrative constructed by its protagonist.

Both Franklin and Bukiet implicitly testify here to the success with which Littell has given over the novel to his protagonist's Weltenschauung, a word Aue himself uses frequently, even if they also find that aesthetic act objectionable. In my opinion, a novel could do worse than engage in an "unremitting immersion" in its character's worldview, or, for that matter, "wallow in the worst humankind has to offer." That the critic found himself wallowing seems an indication that Littell has indeed created a compelling "narrative consciousness" that brings us uncomfortably close to an unsavory character with a repulsive worldview, not to mention overwhelming psychological problems.

Does an author have a responsibility to "balance" a character's unpleasant views or behavior with normative gestures, either "latent or manifest," indicating the author disapproves of the character's opinions and actions? Surely no reader believes that Littell does approve of his character's actions, so the perceived problem here must be that exposure to a character like Maximilien Aue will unduly soil the sensibilities of the reader. But surely no one expects readers to be converted to Nazism or sadomasochism through Aue's account of himself, either, so one must conclude that Franklin's and Bukiet's dislike of an "unremitting immersion in Aue's worldview" has been converted into a general critical requirement that bad people as depicted in fiction must be "counteracted" by a "philosophical or artistic " effort to meliorate their evil. One suspects that, despite his protestation that we don't necessarily need a "lesson" from such a novel as The Kindly Ones, Bukiet would prefer that its unmediated access to the point of view of a morally compromised protagonist be placed in a more didactically clear context as a corrective to "wallowing."

What is going to focus our attention on "the worst humankind has to offer" if not, at least occasionally, fiction? Is this a subject that ought to be ignored or forbidden? Why not write (or read) a novel that allows a Nazi SS man to speak of his experiences as witness to and participant in the attempted extermination of Jews and any other undesirable people? For such a novel to be successful it will almost necessarily offend and disturb some readers, but that is the consequence of attempting the work in the first place. Taking offense--or finding the novel "repugnant"--is not a credible aesthetic judgment, and in my opinion most of the negative reviews of The Kindly Ones lack credibility because they were either explicit expressions of distaste of this kind or thinly disguised versions of such distaste masquerading as critique of character and plot logic.

The major accomplishment of The Kindly Ones is the author's thoroughly successful ventriloquism of Dr. Aue, a performance that requires we abide this character in all of his true-believing, sadomasochistic, murderous horror or else the effort is subsumed into the usual safe moralizing provided by "balance." Balance would only produce a cop show-like view of evil, which is comfortably softened by the presence of reassuring outrage at human perfidy. It could be argued that this sort of easy portrayal of the conflict between decency and depravity is false to the actual content of evil, a sentimentalized response. It seems to me that, precisely to the extent Littell has avoided "balance," he has given us a more persuasive representation of evil, something that we must experience for ourselves in its half banality, half degeneracy through Aue's recitation. Only this "unremitting immersion" gets us anywhere near the reality of evil.

Some reviewers focused their criticism of The Kindly Ones more on its deficiencies of plot than on a moral repugnance toward its narrator. Lalami observes that "like Forrest Gump, [Aue] conveniently manages to be wherever the most significant events of the war take place, at the time in which they take place, and to interact with all the relevant figures of Nazism," a plot progression which Zak M. Salih describes as "a collection of the Nazi regime's greatest hits." Peter Kemp further complains of the "pitiless prolixity" with which Aue tells his story and doubts "Aue's prodigious capacity to recall in profuse, minute detail all that was done and said. . . ." That a fussy bureaucrat like Maximilien Aue would remember his actions in great detail--that he might even have records of them--doesn't seem that far-fetched to me, but the question of whether Aue knows too much brings us back to Aue's status as narrator. Perhaps he does too conveniently recall the details of his wartime experiences. As far as I know, no one has questioned the accuracy of the historical details in which Aue's fictionalized story is embedded, but of course there is no way to "verify" the details of the fictional story. Ultimately, it really makes no difference: these are the things that were "done and said" that Aue wants us to know, and the impression they leave about him is presumably the impression he wants to leave.

The same is true of the plot developments that place Aue at so many of the crucial events of the war's waning years. Perhaps Aue is manipulating the historical record in order to give himself a role in all of these events, but again it doesn't really matter. The self-portrayal that emerges is the one Aue must intend. That this portrayal is a damning one suggests either that Aue is (consciously or subconsciously) submitting himself for judgment or that his particular involvement in the Final Solution is to be taken at face value. The former is not impossible, especially given his willingness to reveal all of his psychosexual problems as well. However, accepting that Aue happened to be in a position to witness so much of Nazi Germany's dissolution, at least for the purposes of the novel his fictional existence makes possible, doesn't seem to me such a difficult concession. His presence at the decisive stages of this process could just be, in fact, the reason he decided to write his memoir, following up on the less comprehensive accounts of other ex-Nazi colleagues.

Whatever degree of artifice Littell has brought to the plot of The Kindly Ones--at least that part of the plot devoted to chronicling the extermination program as it leads Aue from the Ukraine to Hitler's bunker--I found it riveting. Unlike some commentators who concluded that through the recounting of these events with their frequent expressions of dismay with the program and its methods, Littell was attempting to "humanize" Dr. Aue, I found the portrait of SS officers manifesting a degree of struggle with the task they'd been assigned a compelling alternative to the usual image of Nazis as unambiguously malevolent. To this extent, a character like Aue is humanized, but this only makes his and his fellow officer's actions more appalling, since they arise from recognizable human beings rather than caricatures. Some of these actions, such as the Babi Yar massacre, are hard to take, but their depiction commands attention.

One element of the novel's narrative structure does threaten to become overly artificial. Overlain on the story of Aue's war journey is a parallel association with Aeschylus's Oresteia, featuring Aue as Orestes (a device similar to the "mythic method" of Joyce's Ulysses). Ultimately these parallels might be a little too neat. Daniel Mendelsohn does a good job of teasing out the implications of this strategy in his review of The Kindly Ones (the title being a direct reference to the "furies" of Aeschylus's play, who are transformed at the end of the play into "kindly ones"), and while I agree with Mendelsohn that Littell employs the strategy skillfully, I can't agree that the problem it causes is that, in portraying Aue as "a sex-crazed, incestuous, homosexual, matricidal coprophage," it works against the historical portrayal of Aue as a "human brother." I just don't perceive any effort on Littell's effort to affirm Aue as a "human brother," as opposed to simply a "human being," and it does not make him into something other than a human being to imply, metaphorically, that Aue is a man pursued by his own sort of "furies."

What makes me less enamored of the mythic method as employed in The Kindly Ones is precisely that it threatens to disrupt our "immersion" in Aue's fictional memoir, that it intrudes on the performance of Aue's narration a different kind of performance, one that makes us too conscious of the author--Jonathan Littell--as the puppeteer pulling Aue's strings. For an exercise in point of view like The Kindly Ones to work most efficaciously, it ought to commit itself fully to the discourse of the narrator, and in my opinion the narrative doubling introduced by the Orestes story detracts from that commitment.

Unless. In his review of the novel, Paul La Farge comments that "If it were only Aue making himself out to be Orestes, you’d dismiss the gesture as an unjustified but understandable bid for sympathy, but it’s Littell who puts Aue through Orestes’s paces, as if to give credence to Aue’s assertion that 'in this [life] I never had a choice,' that his free will was curtailed by 'the weight of fate.''' Of course it is finally Littell "who puts Aue through Orestes's paces" in that Aue is the narrator of the novel Littell has written. In this sense, Littell puts Aue through all of his "paces." But there's nothing really to prevent us from attributing most, if not all, of the allusions to the Oresteia to Aue himself, either through the many direct references he makes or through both the additions and omissions (such as the episode in which he kills his mother and her husband, which he subsequently can't remember) he brings to bear on the story he wants to tell. If Aue attempts a play on our sympathy through these allusions--"I never had a choice"--we can accept it as such without believing his resort to this grandiosity actually absolves him of blame.

I'm not really sure I fully embrace this interpretation. The heavy-handed allusiveness may just be an aesthetic mistake, a secondary flaw we have to countenance while otherwise acknowledging the narrative power of the novel as a whole. The Kindly Ones rather early on overwhelmed my own general disdain for history-based fiction not by "bringing history to life" but by bringing life to history.

Dashed to the Ground

Among those American writers who were originally identified as "minimalists," a group that would include Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Beattie, and Tobias Wolff, Mary Robison may have been the most minimalist of them all--or, to use the word she has said she prefers to describe the narrative/expository strategy employed by these writers, the most radically "subtractionist."

Readers looking for an introduction to minimalism in its most rigorous form could do no better than Robison's first book, the story collection Days (1979). In the book's first story, "Kite and Paint," two men and a woman hold a mostly trivial conversation while waiting for a hurricane to arrive. At the close of the story--which has taken up only six pages--the two men are about to go outside into the increasing windstorm to fly kites. In "Sisters," a college-age woman staying with her aunt and uncle receives a visit from her sister, a nun. They all go to a spagetti dinner in the basement of the local Catholic Church. In "Widower," a recently widowed dentist and his two children are visited by the father's new girlfriend, and as the children and the girfriend are heading to the beach, the father receives a phone call from a man with a dental emergency. There are intimations of larger significance in such stories, fleeting implications of backstory or future forward movement, but mostly they seem to be fixated on the depiction of present moments.

Robison's style is as pared back as her narratives. It is essentially restricted to brief expository statements--"Guidry was in bed, tangled in the oversheet"--and seemingly insignificant details--"At the firehouse, two men in uniforms were playing pinochle and listening to Julie London on the radio." The largest part of most of the stories in Days is dialogue, and much of it works by indirection as well, except for those moments when a character suddenly blurts out some incongruous statement: During the spaghetti dinner in "Sisters," we hear the college student sister tell a priest that "I'd like to be excommunicated. . .I want the thirteen candles dashed to the ground, or whatever, and I want a letter from Rome."

What really distinguishes Robison's fiction from that of her fellow minimalists is its humor. While occasionally a grim type of humor emerges from the stories of Carver or Beattie, Robison's are more unashamedly comical, both in tone and in execution. The atrophied narrative structure of the stories itself is inherently comic, giving them a kind of absurdist feel, and the dialogue is often explicitly funny:

Leah said, "Jack is the one person who shouldn't keep a revolver."

"He's so much worse since you've been gone," Barbara said. "My dad thinks it's because Jack reads so much. You know who Jack always liked, though?" Barbara leaned over and snapped one of the buttons on her galoshes. "Your sister, Bobby."

"Yes, I think he really did," Leah said. She sighed, and turned the shard of bone with the toe of her shoe. "You can tell him Bobby's wonderful. Just remarkable. She takes a lot of speed still. She's chewed a nice hole in her lip."

"Bobby's disturbed," Barbara said. "You can tell that just from the way she walks."

Robison further developed the humor of the stories in Days into an even broader kind of comedy in her 1981 novel Oh! (described on the back cover of my copy of the book as about "a madcap Midwestern family"), but in my view the slyer, more surprising moments of humor in the stories of Days works much better and makes this, in its blending of minimalism and jokiness, one of the more significant books published by an American writer during the 1970s.

Robison largely disappeared from the literary scene after her 1991 novel Subtraction but returned in 2001 with the novel Why Did I Ever, about a Hollywood writer trying to cope with her disorganized life, and in 2009 has published One D.O.A One on the Way, set in New Orleans and the aftermath of Katrina. Both of these books employ a collage method of composition, offering snippets of action and/or dialogue that range freely over time and place. Both feature a harried female protagonist loosely tied to the film business whose unraveling lives seem well-captured through the collage strategy. Ultimately this strategy seems a more rewarding expansion of Robison's gifts into the novel (as brief and brisk as each of these two are) than the more continuous narrative structure to be found in Oh! and Subtraction.

Why Did I Ever seems to me the more successful use of the fragmented form to to portray its protagonist's attempt (mostly unsuccessful) to pull her life together. Eve Broussard, the protagonist of One D.O.A., seems more artificially the fleshing-out of the bitterly comic concept of a location scout responsible for identifying suitable spots for movie and television productions in post-Katrina New Orleans. Her conflicts with her rich parents-in-law and her affair with her husband's identical twin brother don't seem as urgent as Money Breton's relationships with her emotionally scarred children in Why Did I Ever, although they are presented with Robison's signature humor. (And Robison's humor, especially as provoked by her witty dialogue, is retained in both of these novels.) In general, her character has to compete with the novel's depiction of New Orleans in tatters for primary attention, and finally she only barely wins out.

On the other hand, Robison's collage method does prove rather effective in portraying New Orleans's agonizingly extended present moment. "Subracting" seems an appropriate strategy in representing a city from which so much has already been subtracted. Comprehending the totality of the effects of Katrina and the government's criminal inaction seems an overwhelming task, and the glimpses into the city's devastation provided by One D.O.A One on the Way perhaps add up to an overall perspective sharpened by the smaller details.

Although one might hope that Robison would again concentrate more of her attention on the short story, the form in which I believe her best work is to be found, it nevertheless will be interesting to see if she can continue to apply her miniaturist skills to compelling effect in whatever future novels she may write as well.

"So Set Against the Notion of Convention That I Should Attack It"

I enjoy reading the novels of Percival Everett, but ultimately they participate in the form "novel" primarily as extensions of the much older mode of satire, which requires no particular form or genre for its more general task of comic deflation. Satire targets behaviors and attitudes that are implicitly marked as so unacceptable or pompous they are deserving of the deflating mockery satire provides. The essentially corrective message of satire--this behavior needs to be eradicated or changed--thus always takes precedence over the purely formal and aesthetic niceties over which some other practitioners of the form at hand often dwell, even when the satirist him/herself might be taking extreme liberties with form and style.

Everett certainly does take liberties with form in his novels, and they are liberties frequently accomplished to hilarious effect. However, these efforts seem mostly directed toward simply dismantling the novel as "form", without much interest in aesthetically reconstituting the text, Everett's text, as at least a temporary alternative to established forms, as a new iteration of form in fiction. The first target of Everett's satire is the writing of fiction itself, which is portrayed implicitly as an enterprise saturated in pretension and moribund assumptions. Although intellectual and academic fraud and pretension in general, as well as the cultural frauds historically perpetuated by white American institutions, are the ultimate objects of satire in most of Everett's fiction, the force of this satire is so intense and thoroughgoing it seems irresitably to extend to the literary/philosophical underpinnings of fiction as an "institution" of intellectual practice.

Glyph (1999) well illustrates both the pleasures and the limitations of Everett's approach. It has a typically outrageous premise: a baby is born with the ability to read and to think (although not to speak) at a near-genuis level. When this is discovered, the baby is abducted from his parents (an artist mother whom the baby rather likes and a clueless literary academic he decidedly doesn't) by a series of academics, scientists, and government goons, all of whom want to harness the infant prodigy to their own personal and professional agendas. Along the way, all of these character types are thoroughly mocked, shown to be concerned only with their own personal and professional aggrandizement. But at the same time the baby, Ralph, is also inclined toward his own kind of self-absorption and intellectual pretension:

. . .My dreams became so transparent that they became devoid of meaning. Jung would have been proud of me. Freud would have gone to sleep during our sessions. My dreams became an exercise in boredom, though I was actually impressed with my imagination and its ability to create so many characters, even if they were stock and repetitive. I thought I knew how it felt to be Louis L'Amour or James Michener or even Dickens.

Ironically, the actuality of my having subverted my dreaming practice made the fact of my dreaming of great interest. I wondered what indeed it meant about me that I was so set against the notion of convention that I should attack it. So, I replaced the dream with the novel, stripping the stories of my dreams of any real meaning, but causing the form of them to mean everything.

Later in the novel, we are presented with "Ralph's Theory of Fictive Space," a long list of propositions that as they accumulate become more and more nonsensical:

B._E) Story is self-determining and therefore conceptually finite, but fictive space has no boundaries and only boundaries.

B._F) The world, story and, by extension, fictive space make up reality.

B._FA) Realities are dependent on fictive space.

B._FB) Fictive space contains, controls, and contributes truth in reality.

B.A) A story cannot be seen at once.

Such passages are very funny, but not only do they make it difficult to muster up much sympathy for Ralph as the novel's protagonist, they work to extend Glyph's mockery to itself as a text, as one struggles to discern how Ralph's various assertions and pronouncements relate to the text we are reading, only to decide that this very struggle is one of the novel's satirical targets.

To some extent, Everett's practice in a work like Glyph is an illustration of M.M. Bakhtin's concept of the "carnivalesque," in which an attitude of "radical skepticism" makes it impossible for anything to be taken seriously. But Bakhtin makes a distinction between carnivalesque comedy and satire--the latter takes nothing seriously except its own, its author's, authority, which is invoked to ridicule that which requires amelioration. My sense of Everett's fiction is that finally it does not fully relinquish that authority, that its attack on literary processes and pretensions seeks to evade comedic reduction where the work of Percival Everett is concerned. That Everett, or the text at hand, at least, depicts the assumptions behind literary representation to be risible does not mean that Everett's text is also risible. The alternative to "causing the form of [novels] to mean everything" is causing Everett's satire of it to "mean" at least something.

The essentially satiric character of Everett's fiction is even more pronounced in his latest novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier. This novel is much less metafictional than Glyph or Erasure, its most outrageous gesture in this direction being the introduction of a characer named "Percival Everett," although this Percival Everett is an Atlanta-based professor teaching a course in the "Philosophy of Nonsense." As such, he is in the line of academic frauds to be found in his namesake's fiction, but he doesn't really act as a focus of satiric attention on literary creation per se. His role instead is as a kind of advisor--whose advice is mostly nonsensical, of course--to the novel's protagonist, Not Sidney Poitier. The novel chronicles Not Sidney's travails as he attempts to find his place in the world after inheriting a fortune from his mother, who made a lucky investment in the Turner Broadcasting System just before it rose to prominence, along with its founder, Ted Turner.

The novel gets most of its laughs, such as they are, from Not Sidney's rather loopy conversations with Ted Turner, as well a series of episodes in which Not Sidney finds himself, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in reality, acting out the scenarios of Sidney Poitier movies such as The Defiant Ones, Buck and the Preacher, and, ultimately, In the Heat of the Night. Unfortunately, as a character Ted Turner falls flat, the satirical intent motivating his portrayal being rather fuzzy at best. The parodies of the Poitier movies come off rather better, although ultimately they seem rather obvious in their satirical ambition to illustrate that the obstacles to civil respect and equality encountered by Sidney Poitier's characters in these "social problem" films are still with us these many years later. And this ambition seems to be the novel's primary motivating force, even if it is leavened with the sort of "nonsense" one expects from both Percival Everett and "Percival Everett."

Everett is certainly no ordinary satirst, but I Am Not Sidney Poitier reveals him as primarily a satirical writer. Its weaknesses, which perhaps result from settling for a more straightforward kind of satire, make one hope for more of the conceptually warped, metafictionally adventurous satire found in novels like Glyph and Erasure. Everett's deformations of form add an element of bracing insolence to satire that in I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a little too earnest.

 

Jim Thompson in Vermont

If I had never read Jim Thompson, I might think that Dave Zeltserman's Small Crimes (Serpent's Tail) is a neat little book, a provocative narrative of law-enforcement corruption and human depravity with satisfying doses of dark humor and an over-the-top conclusion that almost works.

But I have read Jim Thompson, and thus while reading Small Crimes I could really only register how derivative it is. A first-person narrator relates to us the story of his own dissolution from high school football star to corrupt cop and dual gambling- and drug-addict to ex-con trying to re-establish himself after serving a sentence for disfiguring, and almost killing, the local district attorney. His story includes his relationship with the local crime boss, as well as his former employer, the local sheriff, who if anything is an even bigger criminal than the crime boss himself. The narrator finds himself pursued still by the d.a., who in trying to get the mortally ill boss to implicate the narrator in his criminal operations also threatens to implicate the sheriff, and so the narrator only gets entangled further in the poisonous legacy of his past. That he won't finally escape it seems a pre-established certainty.

In its depiction of ubiquitous criminality and relentlessly sociopathic behavior, Small Crimes is a near-impersonation of such Thompson narratives as The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280. Zeltserman does try to outdo Thompson in a couple of ways, most obviously by transferring the Thompson crime narrative to rural Vermont, where the violence and other crimes perpetrated by most of the novel's characters (including a nurse with whom the narrator briefly becomes involved, who seems to be a serial killer) seems outrageously out of place. Unfortunately, so out of place does it seem that ultimately it comes to be rather cartoonish, a flaw Thompson himself almost always avoided. The second flourish on Thompson guignol is that the narrator appears to be narrating the story from hell, his descent to which occupies the novel's final scene. This actually does seem like a device Jim Thompson might have used, but again I couldn't finally accept it here as anything more than an attempt to compete with the master in the exploitation of extremes.

In most other ways, the novel can't compete with Thompson's books. The narrator has little of the creepy understatement characteristic of Thompson's unhinged narrators. He spends way too much time trying to convince himself, and us, that he's not such a bad guy after all, and it's ultimately hard to have much feeling for him one way or another, not even as someone who deserves some sympathy because he's clearly insane, or who should be feared because he's so inherently evil. Although it isn't a paricularly long novel, it still seems padded out with perfunctory and unnecessary dialogue, while the last one-third or so of the story seems very rushed and full of implausible violence, some of it made more implausible by being reported to us indirectly rather than dramatically portrayed. The constant trouble into which the narrator gets himself seems contrived, which isn't helped by the fact that the setting, against which this action ought to be heightened, is depicted cursorily at best.

I'm less disappointed by the limitations of Small Crimes, however, than I am puzzled by the effort to mimic a writer like Jim Thompson in the first place. There is inspiration and then there is imitation. This novel seems to me clearly the latter, although much crime/detective fiction I read seems largely imitative as well. Most hard-boiled detective fiction imitates Chandler, while most "noir" crime fiction imitates Thompson (or perhaps James M. Cain). This must be why I still read Chandler and Thompson with great pleasure and admirration but find most current crime fiction pallid and secondhand. Both of these writers were creating something new. The kinds of characters, plots, and narrative voices they developed were so compelling they came to define the hard-boiled crime genre, but this has become a mixed blessing, as the genre itself struggles to step out of the shadow of these writers' influence.

In her fawning review of Small Crimes, Maureen Corrigan asserts that "Zeltserman takes up all the familiar tropes of the formula -- femmes fatales, frighteningly dysfunctional families, self-destructive drives and the death grip of the past -- and shows how infinite are the combinations that can still be played on them." That Zeltersman "takes up all the familar tropes" of the genre is certainly true, but the novel demonstrates that the "combinations" available are far from infinite. More importantly, it prompts one to ask why recombining these tropes is a worthwhile activity to begin with.