Although Animal: Notes from a Labyrinth by Alan Fishbone (Heresy Press, 111 pages) observes many of the conventions of the novel—representing life thematically, describing characters in Dickensian detail, and drawing upon classic literature as a guide to interpretation—it is, properly speaking, a diary. The reader must grant the writer the leeway to record unresolved episodic events and to introduce characters who never cross paths and to allow some jotted down thoughts to stand alone as chapters. Continue reading →
Tag / experimental literary fiction
Drift by Craig Rodgers wins Dactyl Award
Nominated by Charlies Holdefer with this excellent review, Rodgers’ novel, Drift delivers what the title promises. The hero of the story is a traveling Bible salesman who is unclear about the purpose of life and slides, with the lubricant of drink and cards, into the abyss.
The novel is written in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, if McCarthy were to write a Coen Brothers screenplay, with maximal scenic description and elaborate stage direction guiding the actor’s motivation and thoughts.
“Vast signs stretch over streets to form crude tunnels in whose shaded interiors trespass mortal wanderers. One sign stands beside and not over the expanse of street, a mammoth billboard seemingly related to none of its squalid surroundings and decorated by its single cryptic word. JESUS. Vultures line telephone poles, one after another looking down on the world and somewhere nearby something is dead.”
The close third person narration knows more than the character who studies a woman he is about to seduce,
“Two hours of white knuckles among the dizzying fray of impromptu midday traffic leads to this place and this moment, untold variables aligning to allow now to transpire. He watches the secretary in the glow of her monitor. She reads things she’s read once, twice already, lips moving with the words so that for fractions of a thought there appears a glimpse into that mouth, that dark place where those whispered words are born. He sees in her the ephemeral trace of all loves that a ghost of memory touches, the pang of the past that means something underneath the skin. He sees hot summers and movie theaters and grass more green than grass could possibly be and he loses himself for just a second and no more in the velvet fall of that memory’s hold.”
If religion were the only thing that gave life purpose, it’d be easy to drop into nihilism, but in Rodgers’ prose there is a Wallace Stevens-like intoning that turns his art into a philosophy, upon hearing a
…banshee howl that scrapes away the lucid layers of the mind. The infant imagination underneath understands this subhuman sound not at all but accepts it with the immediacy of the truly unbiased.
Those quotes speak for themselves. Congratulations to Craig Rodgers, thanks to Charles Holdefer, and my apologies to Dactyl Review readers for the four-month delay in deciding this award. There were many excellent books to consider and I am a very slow reader.
VN Alexander
Child of Light by Jesi Bender
What do we really know when epistemic parameters are fluid? This question is central to Jesi Bender’s historical novel, Child of Light (Whisky Tit, 318 pages), set in upstate New York at the end of the 19th century. It centers on Ambrétte Memenon, a clever and dutiful young woman whose father is a French scientist immersed in his studies of electricity, and whose mother is a Québécoise enthusiast of Spiritualism. Papa seeks to illuminate cities at night, Maman to communicate with the dead.
These are rather different agendas, to put it mildly, but the story dramatizes how, within the context of the period, both pursuits are cutting edge. And Ambrétte, in an attempt to mend her broken family, tries to reconcile the two.
Continue reading →The Melancholy of Resistance, by László Krasznahorkai (translated by George Szirtes)
Part One: “An Emergency: Introduction”
The Malaise
[Note: the part in quotes above is Krasznahorkai’s. These brief titles for various sections of the book are all he gives the reader to go on. I see this as a kind of perversity on the part of the storyteller, a middle finger stuck up in the face of the reader. Figure it out for yourself, sucker. Therefore, in my review—in aide of the reader—I sometimes provide chapter numbers and titles, the things the writer himself should have provided. A few breaks for paragraphs would have been a nice thing too. The words are crammed together in huge glomps on every page, so as to squeeze the tender brains of any reader. Dialogue is not set off in separate paragraphs, but placed in quotation marks in amidst the glomps.]
Continue reading →Hope and Wild Panic by Sean Ennis
Some writers refuse to get in line with linearity, or take up common cause with causality. In Sean Ennis’s Hope and Wild Panic (Malarkey Books, 202 pages), the reader finds a depiction of life in the contemporary U.S. with recognizable settings and characters—realism, in a word—but it is also fundamentally destabilized, relying on non-chronological fragments (chapters? flash fictions?) of only one or two pages to explore the lives of a middle-aged narrator and his family. One section begins as follows:
“Rejoice with me, I have beaten psoriasis. There’s this trick I have of not watching the news. Most things don’t happen, and there’s been some debate internally about the order of events. I keep losing things and the obvious answer is that they’ve been stolen! But the investigation is finished—it is what it is. A black government helicopter is circling, and I’m just reading my big heavy book like that’s just a ceiling fan. Our neighbors behind the house, across the gulch, have been growing marijuana. I wonder what for. A family of foxes is our other neighbor. Is there some apophenia going on here? Doot-dee-doo.”
The Coincidence Plot by Anil Menon
Chances are you’ve never heard of Anil Menon. That’s a shame, but not your fault. Anil Menon is a brilliant Indian author writing wild, brainy and emotionally engaging stories and novels in English. His books, including the main one reviewed here, The Coincidence Plot (Simon & Schuster, 252 pages), are published by presses well known in the English speaking world, and his works can be found in online venues, but readers in the United States who would delight in his novels won’t find them in bookstores.
The Indian Constitution lists Hindi as the official language of the Union, but allows English to continue in use by the government, English being a legacy from British colonial rule. Today India has a growing population of 1.4 billion (it recently surpassed China in this) and of this billion, about 10.5 percent are English speakers. Anil Menon’s work is published for those millions upon millions of English speakers in India. Getting his novels from online sellers or by mail from India can be tedious, but it’s worth the hassle.
Continue reading →
There’s Something I Want You to Do, by Charles Baxter
The Short-Story Novel
There is probably a better term for this, but I don’t know what it is. I refer to a book of short stories, so put together as to feature similar themes and recurrent appearances of the same characters: Charles Baxter, There’s Something I Want You To Do, Penguin Random House, 2015, Vintage paperback, 2016, 221 pp. The result being, if not a novel, at least something resembling a novel. All of the stories in this collection have titles featuring one aspect or another of human character, positive or negative. Part One: bravery, loyalty, chastity, charity, forbearance; Part Two: lust, sloth, avarice, gluttony, vanity. The stories are presented so that—with one exception—each story in Part One has a companion story (same characters) in Part Two.
America in the Twenty-First Century: Full of Somethings Somebody Wants
Quotations from various stories in the collection: “something has happened, I need to say something to you, something was about to happen, something is out there, we’re going somewhere [or nowhere?], something will happen to me, something wants something from me, there’s a thing that’s come up.” And, of course, the line that provides the title of the book: “There’s something I want you to do.” That line appears five times in various contexts. Continue reading →
Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu, translated by Sean Cotter
In “he Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Louis Borges’s postulates a novel so complex it would become “a labyrinth in which all men would become lost.” Left unfinished by its fictional author, the novel is a legacy emblematic of the innumerable possibilities of existence. For Borges, multitude makes the case for universal elusiveness—a sublimity in extremis.
With celebrated Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu’s massive novel Solenoid, we are deep into Borges territory. Solenoid (Deep Vellum Press, 672 pages) is a chronicle told by an unnamed high school teacher whose Kafkaesque days are spent at public School 86 in Bucharest, “the saddest city in the world.” At night, the unnamed protagonist surrenders himself to the phantasmagoric spell of a “solenoid” buried beneath his house; the solenoid is a strange electromagnetic coil with dimension-bending properties. The solenoid causes the narrator to float above his bed. We learn how the mysterious contraption is built from concepts of Nicholas Tesla and the notion of the hypercube. Later, the solenoid is revealed to be one among an array of solenoids buried throughout the city. Ultimately, the narrator meets a woman with whom he falls deeply in love. In a finale that owes as much to science fiction as James Joyce, the couple, and the entire city of Bucharest, are launched spaceship-like from the surface of the earth, trailing a cone of infrastructure and debris. Continue reading →
Drift by Craig Rodgers
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. Continue reading →
Dead Souls by Sam Riviere
Believe the Blurbers
Dead Souls (A Novel by Sam Riviere, NY: Catapult, 2021, 289 pp.) is a rare example of a book containing believable blurbs. This wild gallimaufry of a novel, which runs a monologue through almost three hundred pages of text, without pauses for paragraphs or new chapters, is a tour de force of literary mania. Reviewers have pointed to possible influences: Roberto Bolaño, Georges Perec, Thomas Bernhard, Italo Calvino. One blurber, Nicolette Polek, describes the novel as “a rare and brilliant pleasure, a coiling, searing fugue of a book that takes our deranged culture and pulls forth from it a box of stars.” She’s right. Or, to put it in the fully neutered style in which the book is written, they are right.
There are chapters of sorts, but you have to figure them out yourself. In the front matter the author provides a kind of contents page—not labeled as such—listing names of characters as names of chapters, along with the pages where they start. Begin with an introductory chapter (not listed in these “contents”), then go, first, to “Zariyah Zhadan,” p. 32: this is, presumably, Chapter One. Proceed from there, filling in the chapter numbers beside the given name and page number. Chapter Six comprises two named characters. We end up with “The Scholastici,” p. 253, which is the last of twelve chapters. Continue reading →
Dactyl Review 