Sometimes a novel’s originality is less a matter of affirmation than an act of refusal. Refusal to go along with received ideas of how to tell a story or create verisimilitude or even how words signify. Saying no opens up new space, or at least points towards what has been neglected by complacence.

Craig Rodgers’ Drift (Death of Print, 156 pages) is such a novel. A dystopian tale of a bible salesman named Charlie, it will defy the ingrained expectations of many readers. Plotwise, Charlie has no trouble making a sale: everyone seems to want his product. He has no idea why. Women like Charlie—no struggles there, either. Other characters include a clown on a rampage and a mysterious goon in a dented bowler hat who seems to be following Charlie. There’s a bearded lady, with whom Charlie has sex, and a young boy afflicted by plague who becomes his travel companion. Then the boy steals Charlie’s car.

At the semantic level, Drift is similarly unmoored. For instance, a server at a steakhouse, mentioned only once and who has no particular bearing on events, is not referred to as a server but as “a skeletal apparition who may work here or may just be trapped, unable to leave this luminous, hallowed place.” In a gas station convenience store, a girl doesn’t simply buy “flavored water,” but “water flavored how someone somewhere thinks lemon tastes.” On page after page, sentence after sentence, the language is relentlessly estranging.

This kind of prose isn’t afraid to be strenuous, and I admit that by page 100 I wanted the author to let up a bit. But I stuck with Drift and am glad I did. The demands of the novel remind me in some respects of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, a novel of cultivated frustration that constantly postpones closure. Rodgers sends Charlie on a trajectory of sales, binge-drinking and moving down the road. Each stop is another trap door to fall through. He can’t stop and smell the roses in an existence where roses have no scent, or if they did, they would reek of something foul. Imagine Manley Porter, the nihilistic bible salesman in Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” but unleashed in an urbanized, strip mall world, forever in pursuit of the next freeway exit.

But Charlie, unlike Manley, hasn’t been able to shed metaphysical dread. The narration often employs deadpan or gnomic descriptions of the quotidian that can also be read allegorically. When Charlie phones the office, he’s informed that “there’s no message from upstairs.” During a sale, Charlie asks a prospective customer, “What am I here for?” In a hotel, “the bathroom is heaven bright.” Graffiti tells him and passerby: “SAVE YOURSELF.” Charlie professes no beliefs but the universe he inhabits is not necessarily godless; rather, it seems to be a place where God is decidedly Not-Your-Friend. For instance: “[Charlie] looks into the sky, into the sun, ignorant of the ruthless presence returning that look.”

A particularly memorable conversation occurs when Charlie meets a man in a dilapidated mansion who is busy typing in the dark. This man is a very good customer—he’s ordered ten thousand bibles—and Charlie observes:

“Ten thousand is a lot.”

“Ten thousand is just the right number,” says the typing man.

“What will you do with ten thousand books?”

The typing man considers the question, or he pretends to as he types.

“There is a hole in men. They fill it with drugs or with work or with the lie that it isn’t there, that there’s no hole at all, but it is there, and I mean to address that. Civilizations have been built on a common idea, and no idea unites disparate peoples like hope. Hope is purpose. Hope is something beyond the maintenance of everyday life. Do you believe that?”

Charlie answers with absolute sincerity.

“I don’t know.”

 

The closest that Charlie comes to self-definition is when describes himself as a piece of “living, breathing spam.” I can only guess how much the author Rodgers might identify with the man typing in the dark—is there a prospect for hope, for instance, in art? The closing chapters of the novel are apocalyptic, and occasionally (to me) inscrutable. Like the Book of Revelation, they are strong on image but ambiguously hermetic.

Still, by any measure, this is a very original novel, not afraid of risk, and in its best moments, a stylistic tour de force. Drift is a refusal to play nice with the conventions of fiction, and it leaves a lasting impression.

–Charles Holdefer’s latest novel is Don’t Look at Me