[For some years—it seems like many—I’ve been expecting Tom McCarthy to write a monsterpiece. An effusive admirer of Pynchon, a writer unusually knowledgeable about various sciences, a novelist uncannily familiar with postmodern literary theory, an essayist conversant with the visual arts, a Briton with a great appreciation of American fictional excess, McCarthy has now published six medium-length novels of high artistic and intellectual quality. I’ve been disappointed, not in the works but in McCarthy’s “failure” to write this century’s Gravity’s Rainbow. The following linked review of The Rhyl Poster—240 pages—is my confession that my expectation and desire were wrong. This new novel, about a lawyer probably as smart as McCarthy, is a deconstruction of the law (think Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own) and an autometafiction about McCarthy’s career (think a more lucid and indirect Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt). Given the novel’s subject, the law all the way back to Hammurabi, The Rhyl Poster may well be McCarthy’s most profound book yet.

The Rhyl Poster has, as if to twit me, numerous references to the “monstrous.” The villain in the novel is described as “monstrous,” he talks to the protagonist about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and says there are “monsters and mirages everywhere.” A corporation in the book’s crucial case is described as a “monster” and may be a legal mirage. The protagonist dreams of a “monstrous fish” rising from the depths, and his unusual method of conceptualizing his opinions is described as a “monstrous graphic system of his personal devising.” But The Rhyl Poster is neither long nor a monstrosity, though its density of information will remind readers of bigger books that are monsterpieces. The Rhyl Poster may even be an anti-monsterpiece that questions the possibility of a comprehensive and culture-synthesizing novel.

Although I find it hard to believe, I have spoken with readers who don’t know McCarthy’s culturally ambitious and systems-aware work. So I’m posting this review and reviews of his two previous novels, reviews that explain why serious English-language readers anywhere should be familiar, not just with the American McCarthy, but also the British one, even though he is now a citizen of Sweden and lives in Berlin. I’m posting about The Rhyl Poster because I trust you will want to be ready if McCarthy does some day release a monsterpiece.

This just in: a friend has sent me a link to an essay by McCarthy—“Moby-Dick and the Indefinite Sublime”—newly published in The Yale Review. It’s a learned and meticulous reading of Moby-Dick, and offers a new term, the “Indefinite Sublime,” that can be applied to some monsterpieces—and the novel I wanted McCarthy to write.]

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/rhyl-poster-tom-mccarthy-gravitys-rainbow-pynchon-metafiction

Satin Island

Satin Island, Tom McCarthy’s fourth novel, is a cautionary tale about cultural generalizations, but I’ll advance one anyway: If the most popular British male novelists, such as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, are essentially artful sociologists, younger and more deep-diving authors — David Mitchell, Hari Kunzru, Tom McCarthy — are novelistic anthropologists. The trio have different interests: Mitchell in cross-cultural and historical homologies, Kunzru in modes of cultural disappearance and “transmission” (to use the title of his second novel), and McCarthy in the relations among technology, high culture, and pop culture (he has published a post-structuralist analysis of Tintin). In Satin Island, McCarthy’s anthropological approach to contemporary life is more explicit than ever, for his protagonist/narrator is a doctorate-holding, generalization-generating ethnographer.

The 40ish character, who calls himself “U.,” reveals next to nothing about his life before he became an anthropologist. He lives alone, has no contact with family, and works for an unnamed British consulting firm — “the Company” — on the Koob-Sassen Project, a massive venture of “network architecture” that “was very abstract,” even “invisible” to the populace. U. has never been to New Guinea or Amazonia. He sits in a basement office and conducts his “research” mostly by cruising media and intuiting memes before they trend. He reports his findings to the Company’s chief executive, Peyman, a cross between charismatic Steve Jobs and wonky Malcolm Gladwell, a powerful font of counterintuitive but highly marketable ideas. U. would be satisfied to follow his whimsical interests, collecting and communicating “data,” for example, on parachute accidents and oil spills, but Peyman has tasked him with writing the “Great Report,” a summation of the age. Since the contemporary period is as amorphous and murky as oil and sea water, U. becomes increasingly desperate to create an original form that would conceptualize the epoch. Changes in U.’s thinking, emotions, and language as he attempts to compose the Report supply McCarthy with a narrative, if not exactly a plot. Of “events,” U. says in chapter 2, “If you want those, you’d best stop reading now.”

Because U. has no name, tries to “map” an enigmatic phenomenon, and sees the gantries of a ferry as “the drawbridge to some castle” he will never enter, he recalls Kafka’s K, the land surveyor denied admittance in The Castle. But Satin Island has fewer characters, less conflict, and, I think, little religious resonance, even though “Peyman” means “god” in urban slang and U. thinks of him as a “god” who withdraws from his creation. U. mentions a colleague who shows him videos, periodically talks with a systems-analyst friend dying of thyroid cancer, and has occasional sex with a woman named Madison, but they elicit scant emotional response from U. Emerson said the scholar is “Man Thinking,” and that’s what U., Ph.D. is. “Protagonist Thinking” is a chancy gambit for a novel. McCarthy more than gets away with it for a combination of reasons. U. knows classical anthropologists and recent French theorists and works them into his narration to establish his authority. He’s a perceptive observer of cultural minutiae even when readers are rarely sure if his interpretations are insightful or wacky. Though economical with details of office politics, the novel efficiently satirizes the widening influence of consultants, the money-making mad men of blue-sky concepts. Most significantly, U.’s need to create a necessarily abstract “master-pattern” of contemporary culture cleverly represents the modern attraction to grand, totalizing intellectual systems, what Francois Lyotard called in his The Postmodern Condition “master narratives.” Like Lyotard in that influential book, McCarthy critiques this urge to abstract mastery and its commercial co-opting.

I value Occam’s Razor as much as the next guy. Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. Satin Island can be comfortably called a “novel of ideas,” but it seems to ask for new terminology. Since the beginning of his career, McCarthy has been closely affiliated with the world of visual arts, so I assume that he has chosen or approved his novel’s cover and that it points to the hybrid nature of his book: A grid is splashed with various colors, some of which shade into each other. Non-fiction terms — treatise, essay, report, confession, and manifesto — straddle boxes in the grid; all except novel are partly cancelled. Outside the grid are the author and title. The splotches imply Abstract Expressionism; most of the terms refer to writing about the real world. Like its cover, then, Satin Island is a work of Abstract Realism.

U. began his career as a phenomenologist, more a participant in real life than a detached analyst. His first book was about clubbing, for which he did several years of research tending bar, drinking, taking drugs, organizing raves, and hanging out with young people in London. But in the cubicle world of the Company, U. has little contact with people. McCarthy implies the danger of and an alternative to U.’s mediated and abstracted life with the longest continuous section of the novel, a narrative Madison relates about participating in the 2001 Genoa demonstrations against the G8 and globalism. This narrative has “events” and plot. Falsely arrested and assaulted like many others, Madison is taken by the police to a remote estate where she is tortured by a nameless mysterious man who uses a cattle prod to make her perform “postures” he dictates as he receives directions from an electronic device only he can perceive.

McCarthy’s concrete descriptions of demonstrations and their aftermath are a late, unexpected burst of history-based realism into the ruminations of Satin Island. Madison’s story about her torture, though, may have been invented by her to indirectly show U. the danger of his growing separation from flesh and blood reality, for the torturer is, like U., a cipher who seems governed by an non-human medium and who makes only ritualistic contact with Madison. It was in Genoa, Madison also tells U., where Nietzsche went mad after seeing a man beating a horse. That U. doesn’t heed Madison’s stories about emotional response and its lack is no surprise given his directive from Peyman to think globally.

U. wonders if he might pass off Satin Island as the “Great Report,” but McCarthy’s text is actually U.’s unreliable “confession,” to use a term from the cover. He daydreams about the “ecstatic reception” his ideas will receive. Not long after, he fantasizes about leading an attack on the “nefarious” Company that has financed the Report. He shows signs of paranoia, fearing the Report has already been written by a software program. His suspect epiphanies begin to seem “miraculous” to him. The climax of U.’s kinked thinking occurs on a trip to New York where U. is drawn toward Staten Island because it is close in sound to his vivid dream of a Satin Island. Because U. is interested initially in oil spills and since his Satin Island is a vast dump, readers may be led to believe the novel will have an ecological or environmental focus. But as the pages about Staten Island show, Satin Island is really more like the anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s classic Steps to an Ecology of Mind, which lists the multiple errors to avoid when trying to construct a linguistic system.

In the following passage, U. sits down to begin the Report. He has cleared his desk, made it a “tabula rasa.” Now he pictures himself as

an industrialist, viewing a clearing in the forest where his factory would go; or as an urban planner, given carte blanche to design from scratch a new, magnificent cosmopolis; a mathematician, a topologist or trigonometrist, contemplating space in its most pure and abstract form; an explorer, sea-discoverer, world-conqueror from centuries gone by, standing at his prow as his dominion-to-be hove into view; this virgin territory that he would shape after himself and make his own.

This excerpt is more obviously comic than much of the novel, but the passage does reveal the grandiose narcissism that, in an overloaded information ecology, leads a person to impose a master narrative, any master narrative. Occam’s Razor cuts both ways: it reminds one to accept the simplest possible explanation of phenomena but also encourages one to create the highest possible level of abstraction — which may be a fabrication. Because U. in this passage sounds as if he were under pressure to compose the Great American or Great English Novel, Satin Island also functions as a metafictional warning. Mapping mastery is the temptation of every novelist who wants his or her work to be more than artful sociology.

Satin Island resembles Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and several more recent novels about lonely Man Thinking: Teju Cole’s Open City, Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog, and Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You. McCarthy’s novel is the most abstract of these — and the most profound in examining the relation between conceptualizing and fictionalizing. Within McCarthy’s oeuvre, Satin Island is the flip side of Remainder, his first published and best-known novel in which the protagonist is Man Re-Enacting — minutely, elaborately, and obsessively replaying concrete scenes from his imagination and life in order to intensely experience their “reality.” In an influential essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” Zadie Smith praised Remainder for eschewing the “lyrical realism” represented by Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, yet another Man Thinking novel. McCarthy’s path was pressing an abstract conceit — reenactment — to risky, shaggy, and then absurd lengths. Satin Island is somewhat less willful in its narrator’s path toward interpretive mastery, and that path takes him only to foolishness.

McCarthy’s other two novels — Men in Space and C — are more traditional in the illusion they offer that characters, rather than the author, dictate plot, and may be his best work because of their balance between Abstraction and Realism. The first-written Men in Space treats a Bulgarian art forger in Prague and those who would possess the stolen original painting that he has copied twice to confuse his interpreters and pursuers. [Note to Tom McCarthy: yes, I noticed the submerged allusion in Satin Island to the Amsterdam shootout in Men in Space.] C is about an early twentieth-century Englishman who quests for authenticity beneath layers of cultural copies, as one meaning of its title implies.

Like Remainder and Satin Island, the novels are self-aware fictions — Men in Space through its references to visual art, C with its interest in early communications technology — but along with their philosophical concerns the books include various characters in conflict, and considerable ethnographic detail of life in several European countries. Because these novels do not seem over-determined by a theory-minded author, Men in Space and C — like Nietzsche’s beaten horse — can elicit the visceral response Zadie Smith objected to in works of “lyrical realism.” Since all of McCarthy’s novels before Satin Island end with violence or death, I think of this fourth fiction as the comedy performed after three tragedies in ancient Greek festivals. Aristophanes never gets the same respect as Sophocles, but Satin Island does give McCarthy a niche in the great tradition of intellectual satire stretching from that classical Greek mocker to Swift, Sterne, Kafka, and Beckett. And who knows but that on the higher frequencies, U. may even speak to you or for you.

The Making of Incarnation

“Action!” the director shouts. You may have been waiting, tired of characters in novels sitting around mulling bruised childhoods and recounting current microaggressions. Maybe you yearn for a fiction with people like pioneers moving across new spaces, a book like the hyperactive science fiction movie Incarnation being shot and edited in The Making of Incarnation. “Life is motion,” Faulkner pronounced, and Tom McCarthy, who reveres The Sound and the Fury, is obsessed with every kind of motion, from dancing photons to disintegrating spaceships. Eleven years ago McCarthy published an essay about the novel and Futurism, the mostly Italian art movement privileging movement. Now he has composed with impressive ingenuity a Futuristic and partly futuristic work that should add to his reputation as one of England’s most inventive authors.

Incarnation is a space opera with a hokey romance plot and characters as round as those in Star Trek, so the director needs some very special special effects for, ironically, the unmaking of Sidereal, the movie’s ill-fated spaceship. The CGI or pixel “rendering” job is farmed out to a company called Degree Zero that in turn hires the motion-capture firm Pantarey that takes its name from Heraclitus’ assertion that everything flows (πάντα ῥεῖ) A mid-level male employee with a Greek name—Phocan--is tasked with investigating and contacting various sub-specialists needed to create the effects.

What begins as a complicated job for Phocan turns into a complex quest as his new findings cause him to be as obsessed with motion as McCarthy the Futurist is. Fascinated by research into the work of one Lillian Gilbreth (a real and early time-and-motion theorist), Phocan eventually seeks out her (invented) collaborator, an aged Latvian physicist Phocan believes may have discovered the Platonic (or Heraclitian) Ideal Form of all motion.

Since Remainder, McCarthy’s first novel, he has been criticized for characters who lack interior lives. In this new novel unmaking ideas and inverting conventions, McCarthy initially gives little psychological development to his characters—though, ironically, we immediately know a lot about the motives and needs of the stereotypical movie characters. Following a motion-capture technique—“Faces are added later”--McCarthy in the second half of The Making of Incarnation does incarnate his characters, gives them physical qualities and desires and intimate relations. Phocan may fall in love in Latvia. An old spook named Pilkington, who is caring for a wife with advanced Parkinson’s, spends many pages admitting a costly error in the experimental deconstruction of an airplane. The aged Latvian scientist loves birds and has an aviary.

But one doesn’t come to McCarthy for love stories, any more than one comes to Pynchon for romance. McCarthy has said Gravity’s Rainbow is the novel writers must measure themselves against. The Making of Incarnation is an updated and slimmed down and more plotted version of Pynchon’s encyclopedia of motion, his rockets rushing across the skies and numerous characters chasing the secret of rocket 00000. McCarthy’s spaceship Sidereal is, after all, a glorified, inhabitable rocket. The Latvian’s presumed secret of all motion may exist in a missing archive box labeled 808—with the 8’s tipped over to suggest infinity on either side of the Pynchonian zero.

Like a Pynchon novel, The Making of Incarnation skips across European borders, shifts from one seemingly minor character to another, and jumps from one item of probably arcane (and possibly fabricated) information to the next. But in a short “Prolegomenon” that describes a technician in control of a chaotic wave propagation tank in Germany, McCarthy seems to assure readers that he is master of all the non-linear perturbations that follow. He is even, again like Pynchon, an occasionally chatty narrator who directly addresses his readers.

Phocan’s progress begins with watching how young lovers are nippled up (studded with light sensors) to have sex in as many positions as they can manage (this for the zero gravity intercourse scene in Incarnation). He visits a gait laboratory where a boy with cerebral palsy is treated, goes to a German wind tunnel testing bobsledders, and travels to Bern to watch acrobatic aerialists perform in sensors. From his boss, he learns about Gilbreth after a lawyer visits her archive in Indiana. At a sports conference in Rome, Phocan is contacted by a man Phocan fears may be on the same Latvian quest—one seeded by international politics.

Phocan loses sleep trying to connect all that he has come to know, and readers who expected to be moviegoer passive could lose patience with the effort needed to see how McCarthy’s disparate disciplines and data patterns do connect. If you wanted action, to process this novel your mind will need to be active—except when reading a précis of Incarnation about which everything is explained in both a send-up of sci-fi and the easy-reading realistic novel.

In McCarthy’s previous novel, Satin Island, an anthropologist is attempting to write the “Great Report” that would articulate the “master-pattern” of contemporary culture. He fails. In The Making of Incarnation, the single master-pattern of motion eludes characters, but McCarthy does no less than redefine what a human is, not a sidereal Cartesian cogito but—like the many athletes observed in the novel--a flowing participant in multiple systems of movement. A human is also not a closed mechanism trapped in a global cybernetic machine, as some critics of McCarthy say he believes, but rather a human is what the father of cybernetics--Norbert Wiener (discussed at length in the book)-- would call an open system. The sophisticated machines in The Making of Incarnation reveal just how athletic and unpredictable humans can be.

For some years, I have been praising what I called the “systems novel” represented by Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, McElroy, and, more recently, Wallace, Powers, Evan Dara, and Joshua Cohen. The Making of Incarnation is perhaps even more explicitly systemic than their works, McCarthy standing on the shoulders of giants and seeing the future in which ever more powerful technologies of recording motion and analyzing its patterns break down boundaries between the human and the other-than-human. Or, put more positively, to answer Yeats’s hundred-year-old question: “How do we know the dancer from the dance?”

In Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White, he has her say: “I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear.” There are many words in The Making of Incarnation that you will have never heard, specialized scientific and technical terminologies that not even Pynchon has heard. For readers who desire action presented in the seemingly transparent language of traditional realism (think Franzen), McCarthy’s numerous lingos will be an impediment . . . unless you realize they are the realism of the now and future. You don’t need to understand all the discourses if you’re willing to believe McCarthy does and if you also believe that linguistic special effects are necessary for scientists—and novelists--to describe and communicate processes far beyond the capacities of what Wittgenstein called “ordinary language.”

I hesitate to provide an example of McCarthy’s prose lest it scare you off from reading the most profound—that is, deep-drilling—novel that I have read in many a year. But here is an only moderately technical passage about Gilbreth that describes her presumed belief and Phocan’s hope:

There’s something abstract—almost devotional—about it all. She [Gilbreth] seems to come to believe that there exists, somewhere, hidden from our view, a perfect shape for every act—essential, almost preordained. And beyond even that, that there might be a kind of absolutely perfect motion-circuit hovering concealed behind even the perfect ones—the kingdom, as it were, containing all the phylums; sum of their possibilities, their infinite- and zero-point alpha and omega….

This desire for the singular ultimate, a unified theory of motion, activates McCarthy’s plot, but he knows better. Quite early, Phocan explains to an assistant what they are looking for on a video screen:

“It’s not so much the skeleton we want as the whole circuit of force and counterforce, balance and its limits. Here the root’s neither bone nor muscle, but something else, something more systemic.”

Systemic wisdom is incarnated in the body. With this novel, McCarthy scales up and out and around and back this wisdom in an intricate work of collaborating and conflicting information, action of a cognitive kind on every page. As my inclusion of other novelists suggests, The Making of Incarnation is a grand—yet compact, like the body—open and active system of systems, literary and scientific.

Novel Explosives is bigger than its page count implies, for the pages have narrow margins, rather small print, page-long paragraphs, and dialogue rarely set off in conventional fashion. Rather than exploding, the pages of Novel Explosives seem to be imploding into a dense black hole of print. Not the usual expansive method of most monsterpieces but appropriate for its initial first-person narrator who wakes up in a Mexican hotel with a knot on his head and with no memory of who he is or why he is where he is, a blank hole. His mirror suggests he may be in his mid-40s. His room furnishes few clues, but one is useful, a debit card in the name of Alvaro de Campos, one of many pseudonyms used by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. A one-time poet, the narrator knows Pessoa’s work but not who he, the narrator, actually is, the first of many improbabilities that he accepts but the reader may not. Although amnesia used to be a cliched device of soap opera plotting, Gauer doesn’t care, for it allows him many surprises as the narrator investigates his possible identity. But at first, the pages are filled with repetitious and therefore implosive and futile thinking.

Coincidence soon adds to improbability: a woman the narrator sees from his hotel window approaches him in a café and offers to help him identify the PIN to the debit card at a nearby bank where her uncle is the manager. He is happy to remind the narrator that he has twenty million dollars worth of Swiss francs and Chinese yuan in his account plus some gold bars in the vault, all of which the narrator seems to have brought in a duffel bag. The money may explain why the first-person narration had previously shifted to a bombastic and insufferable Los Angeles venture capitalist disgusted with his work and his existence. As the VC tries to write his life story, his part of the novel does explode with manic jargon-filled explanations of how his industry works, producing “absolute fictions” that often explode into gigantic losses for investors.

More extravagantly detailed inside information, from the illegal drug business, follows when the novel shifts to third-person narration about a couple of low-level dealers and debt-collectors—Ray and Gene--pursuing a man who has fled to Juarez with a lot of money their boss, Gomez, believes belongs to him. Ray learns this fugitive’s code name is “the Poet,” so after about 300 pages some of the book’s mysteries are clarified. The former poet called de Campos is the former poet VC (nameless but once identified as “JG,” the initials of the author who was a venture capitalist) who has unwittingly participated in an investment scam by Gomez, the high-end money launderer who employs the hit men. Now Gomez wants a share of the VC’s profit. Threatened with exposure and bodily harm, he withdraws the cash, follows directions to El Paso, crosses to Juarez—and eventually ends up in Guanajuato with the knot on his head. Thus ends the first half of the novel that takes place between April 13 and April 20, 2009, a period of implosion for the man with no names.

If you’re thinking, “This sounds like a movie,” you’d be right. But no movie would have the extended philosophical and literary ruminations of de Campos in Guanajuato, the extensive mathematical and financial lectures of the VC, or the drug-exfoliated meditations of Ray the Iraq war veteran. The movie might show the maze-like streets, poverty, and violence of Juarez, where Ray gets carved up by a rival gang, or the car chase when Ray and Gene escape from Mexico, but the movie would not have the novel’s voiceover, many pages of a sometimes arch harangue on the history of Mexican cartels and their effects, a rant that seems to come from an occasional super-narrator who is particularly knowledgeable about weapons and explosives. Written during a time when telenovelas in Mexico and drug-smuggling movies in America were popular, Novel Explosives may be an attack on those media, offering “real” novel information left out of films.

On page 578, after the VC has survived a couple of crossfires, a double-cross, changes in gang loyalties, and double substance abuse, he says that he’s “in the middle of a B-thriller plot, shot in black and white from an improvised script, using live ammunition and imaginary film stock, involving drug lords and gunmen and possibly stolen loot, and a femme fatale. . . .” In fact, though, in the second half of Novel Explosives action slows down, gradually implodes, basically ends with all the characters in the same room--and the reader concludes the “movie” is just a pretext (literally “preceding” Gauer’s text) for him to create a book of riffs that occur, mostly, in the mind of the VC and in the somewhat less febrile consciousness of Ray. Initial improbability of plot and thought explodes into the novel’s discourse. The riffs resemble nothing less than the loopy routines that make up Part IV, “The Counterforce,” in Gravity’s Rainbow. When the VC is under mortal threat in Mexico, Gauer riffs with his character’s knowledge--of science, both theoretical and practical; of weapons, traditional and “novel”; of poetry and philosophy, recent and old—to radically slow down the VC’s consciousness, “time dragging around at an absolute crawl,” when quick thinking might be more likely.

For Gauer, events are occasions for language he will make happen at the pace he chooses. The riffs are improbably lengthy. Gauer doesn’t seem to care. Sometimes the riffs are humorous. Other times they offer unique and maybe even profound ways to think about the thinking that the VC is supposedly doing. Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard often get the VC’s mind to whirling round and round, backward and forward—a recurrent theme in the novel. Mathematics, relativity, and quantum mechanics also create loops. For all I know (for sure), Gauer may be inventing some of the more exotic sources for his riffs. But what I do know is that they become repetitive, not just their digressive, associative structure but their material. When Gauer’s focus shifts to the mind of Ray, the riffs are just as frequent but more banal, the thinking of a former soldier suffering from blood loss. At least some of Ray’s wandering thoughts are caused by physical reality, the knife wounds on his chest.

What follows is a brief excerpt from the VC’s thinking (about implosion) while in the middle of a firefight between narcos and the police. Notice the present tense, as if the VC is having these thoughts when hunkered down in a car. The “we” and the “you” increase the unreality of this patch of thinking, interesting as the concepts may be.

What’s happening to me here, however, is a common enough occurrence, an instance of stumbling upon a spacetime boundary, and reaching what cosmologists call the event horizon, where everything freezes in a redshift tableau; we don’t need to be wandering around the General Relativity field equations, searching for enough true degeneracy pressure to keep things from literally just totally collapsing, to be able to spot the signs of a spacetime deformity, or to know what it feels like when a place implodes; I’ll tell you one thing, you ever go through this, you won’t care at all that it can’t be considered a literal implosion.

As in Pynchon’s Book IV, the climax of Novel Explosives comes with the launch of a rocket, in this case a shoulder-held with a thermobaric pay load, a “novel explosive.” Time and the novel reach their slowest state as Gauer describes over many pages the sequences of nanoseconds involved in the thermobaric process and its effect, which monstrously exceeds traditional weapons’ power to kill humans. The pages are not a psychological riff of a stressed or damaged consciousness but a set of technological facts about the physical damage such weapons inflict. Given some of Gauer’s comments on environmental damage in Novel Explosives, I think its thermobaric explosive is the summary symbol of humans’ destruction of the planet, as rocket-delivered nuclear weapons were for Pynchon. The poverty and drugs and violence of Juarez represent a slow-acting past. The thermobaric weapon is the fast thermobarbaric future.

Novel Explosives definitely practices what I used to call “the art of excess.” The VC’s term is “information-excess absorption overload.” But is the novel a monstrosity and monsterpiece? Gauer occasionally uses the word “monsters,” usually referring to drug cartels and investment cartels. But three alternating narrative strands are not all that formally provocative or inventively monstrous. True, the discourse is almost always monstrously hyperdeveloped, massive passages of worldly information, long digressions of consciousness back-tracking, forward-imagining, and etymology-tracing. But a monsterpiece? My term is meant to echo “masterpiece.” I don’t get that echo with Novel Explosives. It’s a first novel (as well as an only novel). Pynchon, author of V., is mentioned. Gaddis’s The Recognitions is longer. DeLillo’s Americana bears some similarities. But despite their length and excesses, these three first novels have an underlying aesthetic discipline and proportion. Perhaps they are what Gauer aims to explode, but the page upon page of dense and often context-trivial information frequently exist to no point except, it seems, to flaunt the author’s arcane knowledge. Even more off-putting: Gauer delivers culturally important information in the second person with a hectoring tone of condescension, suggesting “you” readers should have known all along these facts about capitalism and drugs and the relation between the two. Readers are also expected to recognize the relevance of the many allusions to Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, the poets whose work the VC has memorized (see the list on 371), and even some quotes from—of all works!—Pound’s obscure Cantos. These references Gauer may have dropped in to demonstrate that he could have written a different book, one more conventionally artful. But he has chosen to weaponize the novel form—not to kill but, possibly, to save humans from themselves.

Novel Explosives is a strange combination--the density of Gauer’s journalistic information and the frequency of his high culture references, his altruism and narcissism. Gauer obviously empathizes with impoverished Mexicans and the dump dwellers of Third World cities, but there’s another strange--and estranging—quality of the novel: no such individuals have roles in the book. Although Gauer describes himself as a Marxist, the poet and the VC, one and the same, hog the stage, and the workers are an off-stage class of victims. This lack is a crucial difference between Gauer and Pynchon, who includes individual members of the “preterite.”

Gauer has said he never intended to publish Novel Explosives (which reminds me to look up Lawrence’s exact phrasing: “Never trust the teller, trust the tale.”). Gauer’s assertion might be true. The novel could be taken as the outpouring, the explosion, of a prodigal amateur or over-stimulated hobbyist because Novel Explosives has certain qualities of the probably unpublishable. It’s partly autobiographical, partly self-congratulating, and partly politically enraged (like Roberto Bolano in 2066). Add in the possible influences of Hunter Thompson’s self-asserting gonzo methods, of Burroughs (referred to in the novel), and maybe of Vollmann’s appearances in his own fictions—and you may have a drawer-bound manuscript.

Of published novels I consider monsterpieces, Novel Explosives is probably closest to Infinite Jest—its density of information about the tennis academy and AA meetings, its pleasure in the characters’ bullshitting about anything or nothing, its joy in specialized, often technical languages. Gauer’s de Campos thinks language is “the stuff out of which we are mostly made.” In his discussion with a learned hermit, the poet hears numerous scientific words about abnormal language use including “circumstantiality.” Gauer quotes Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” What Gauer can say about almost anything seems limitless, but his “lexical tangentiality” and “logocentric derailment” and “logorrhea” (all from the hermit’s conversation) limit his readership and--more importantly and unfortunately--limit a rhetorically effective communication of his political passions. Gauer frequently quotes Kierkegaard on “patience.” I believe that I’m unusually patient with novelists who create radical forms of excess, but I admit to skimming and skimping some of Gauer’s longest riffs, particularly the ones about weapons even though I owned a pistol, a shotgun, and two rifles when I was sixteen. If you go to a shooting range every weekend, you may feel differently about Novel Explosives.

At the novel’s beginning, the poet is self-cancelling. By the end of Novel Explosives, it seems self-defeating. Not like a Beckett novel with its epistemological and ontological nihilism, but like, say, a Grapes of Wrath so encyclopedic about kinds of dust and makes of jalopies that no one would finish it. Monsterpieces that have the masterpiece echo, mature works such as Gravity’s Rainbow, J R, and Underworld, use Brechtian alienation effects and recondite information to solicit new ways of thinking from readers. Gauer often appears to be just alienating readers that he considers too dumb or too comfortable to be solicited. Maybe he’d associate soliciting readers with prostituting his art. Intentionally, aggressively, and repeatedly unsolicitous, even anti-solicitous, Novel Explosives is a daredevil fiction. I’m more impressed with the author’s risk than the book itself. You don’t run much risk giving it a try, testing your patience. You’re not the one jumping your motorcycle over 50 crushed cars. Or change the metaphor: Novel Explosives is like one of those monster truck shows where huge and noisy machines, Frankensteins on four wheels, drive round and round crushing cars. In those performances, the audience risks being hit by exploding car parts. You don’t want to sit too close. Gauer keeps you at a distance.

Stories, Like Illnesses

In the conclusion to Walden, Thoreau fears his expression has “not been extravagant enough” and breaks his key word into its Latin roots “extra” and “vagance” to suggest “outside” and “wandering.” About a man who bemoans wandering away from his childhood innocence in nature (near a pond) and then regrets losing clear memory of a day in that “paradise,” Stories, Like Illnesses is the third volume of James Elkins’ five-volume Five Strange Languages novel, completed after two decades of work but appearing serially in the last several years. Like William Vollmann’s four-volume A Table for Fortune, each of Elkins’ three books to appear so far is long, dense with factual information, filled with interesting visuals, digressive, sometimes oppressive, consistently audacious. And yet Five Strange Languages has been inexplicably ignored—neglected might be more precise--by reviewers. Therefore, you probably missed Weak in Comparison to Dreams and A Short Introduction to Annieliese, but not to worry because Stories, Like Illnesses is the backstory--or backstories--of Elkins’ protagonist and narrator in those two volumes. Why didn’t Elkins release Stories, Like Illnesses first? Perhaps because it provides relatively straightforward ease of access, and he didn’t want to mislead readers about how far the following volumes would wander from the path of conventional fiction into wildernesses of nature and thickets of typography. For Thoreau, “extra” meant “outdoors.” For Elkins, extra also means excessive, another similarity to Vollmann.

Stories, Like Illnesses is a multi-story metafiction with a 10-page index of stories at book’s end. For Elkins, the stories that create the most dangerous psychological and even physiological illnesses are origin stories. His protagonist--Samuel Emmer, a mid-40s microbiologist whose wife and daughter have left him in “disquietude”—eventually realizes his memory of a paradisial origin is defective, but he insists on holding onto it into his 90s when he’s writing the ending of this “autobiography.” Forty years ago, he imagined what a psychologist would say about his depressive state but discounted the therapeutic story of early trauma. Much of the novel is about other unwelcome information and distressing experience that Samuel also refused to accept. In its exploration of psychology and memory, Stories, Like Illnesses has a modernist feel, but Samuel is not Bloom wandering the streets of Dublin, talking with others, and taking in the varieties of lives there. Samuel is socially isolated like a decomposing Beckett narrator, but Samuel is most like someone who has wandered in from Franzen’s realistic fiction to be overwhelmed by postmodern “strange languages.” Not an everyman but close enough to be a sympathetic sieve.

Samuel eventually understands being raised by a widowed mother obsessed with cataloguing mushrooms and calculating comets probably affected his disengagement from people as an adult. Thinking about his wife and daughter as parts of a microscope he could adjust didn’t help his family situation. His boring job analyzing water samples in a small Ontario city finds him talking to the amoebae he sees in his microscope. In the early chapters, stories Samuel tells on his sad-sack self are rather comic as Elkins invites readers into Samuel’s first-person, stylistically innocuous narrative. In those chapters, Samuel’s story about himself shares page space with numerous illustrative photographs--of mushrooms, comets, microscopes, and amoebae. So far, so “factual,” so visually relevant.

But about the time that a new intern named Viperine (a self-chosen name by a non-binary young person) shows up in his lab, Samuel feels increasing cognitive and emotional pressure, and the pages of the story he is telling about himself get compressed by specialized texts running down both margins. One text is about fracking that Samuel converts into a metaphor for his headache. Then there’s a multi-page discussion of a jet engine breaking down, another metaphor for his stressed self. Both texts are mechanical. Viperine is full organic but not from Walden; she has studied parasites, even amoebae that turn into parasites. Samuel believes in common-sense bodily autonomy (another origin story). Viperine tries to disabuse him with her knowledge, her conclusion that the original state of a human is illness, even if it’s not recognized. Nature is not red in tooth and claw, but gray, miniscule, sneaky, energy sapping, illness producing.

Samuel tries to deflect Viperine’s origin story by originating an affair with a fellow worker named Rosie who believes in the healing power of crystals and goes to great lengths—with Samuel as accomplice—to save her family by hiding the crystals (like parasites) around their home. Stones are an even earlier part of nature than organisms to tell an origin story about. Samuel’s narrative surrenders more page space, now to many columns of documents about different crystals, their contributions to health, and their humanizing names--comic relief from the danger posed by Viperine’s eccentric ideas and strange personal appearance.

The novel has a dying fall plot. In the intellectual and psychological climax or nadir of the book, Samuel has to listen to Viperine’s presentation on hyperparasitism in a Borneo bat cave where young bats fall from the roof, pick up earwig parasites that have amoeba parasites that are hosts to viruses. Now Elkins’ pages resemble densely cluttered pages in Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Samuel’s “realistic” life-story is ultimately squeezed into a small box in the center of the page, compressed by sometimes four columns of scientific texts, other characters’ voices, Samuel’s own mewling, Viperine’s ideas, and some ditties Pynchon might have written. Some of the marginal texts also have footnotes—like the endnotes in Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Here is postmodern excess, the marginal texts going hyperparasitical to press in on Samuel’s mind and story. Samuel feels assaulted. So will some readers, but this section of simultaneity and ambiguity is the most thought-provoking—and in a way representative—part of Elkins’ novel. Samuel summarizes in sentences that include “strange” and “languages”:

“My life is like writing that is turning from English into languages I don’t read. Each day appears to me as a page from a strange document, crowding me with voices, recounting frantic airless stories and odd images, giving them back to me as noise.”

In William Paulson’s The Noise of Culture, a book about the French theorist Michel Serres and his concept of the parasite (the French word for noise in an information channel), Paulson argues that literature is the noise of culture because literature’s essential ambiguity resists the pure communication function of messaging and computer coding. For Paulson, noise--Elkins’ “strange languages,” specialized discourses far from ordinary language—is creative, causing mutations in cultural systems. In the terms of Stories, Like Illnesses, noise in a novel’s story may disrupt readers, if not characters, to tell and write and read stories about themselves that are not as delusional and harmful as many stories of the past. Even Dante gets taken down: he “must have had a terrible fear of wandering in forests,” says Samuel, to tell a story about devils and angels, though it worked out okay for him.

Noise becomes more excessive and oppressive to Samuel in the next two novels. In A Short Introduction to Annieliese, Samuel is conversationally and conceptually bullied by the title character who resembles a much older Viperine. Annieliese repeatedly insists he read her roomful of unpublished notebooks about the origin of humans’ understanding of life in ancient languages. Samuel refuses. In Weak in Comparison to Dreams, he thinks a new job assignment to investigate the treatment of animals in world-wide zoos will provide an escape. The travel story doesn’t work. Samuel observes animals’ strange body languages and suffering, becomes increasingly erratic, has recurrent nightmares of burning forests, melts down, quits his job, and moves to a remote area of northern Ontario where he is unbothered by people and the noise they make. So far, Five Strange Languages is not White Noise, a filmable novel in which the professor and his family are together watching a sunset at story’s end.

According to Samuel, he wrote Stories, Like Illnesses and the two other published “autobiographies” 40 years ago, put the manuscripts in his basement, and only recently rediscovered them at age 90 (in 2061). This seems like a story, a very old story from the beginnings of the novel as a form. But at the end of each recovered manuscript, now a book, is a long section entitled “Notes” in Samuel’s present in which he describes in no less than 50 pages how he plays the notes of difficult modernist compositions on his piano, activity that gives him only a vague and therefore harmless feeling of what his past experiences were like. Now he’s the parasite, burrowing into and gaining sustenance from non-linguistic compositions. His pages don’t have to share space with marginal texts. The body of his text is autonomous. For most readers, the plethora of notes pictured will be another strange language, visual noise, an odd and puzzling parasite within the main text, not in its margins. Do the “Notes” show Samuel has recovered from his old resistance to new stories or is he now using music to evade rigorous thinking about his past or is the past at age 90 so nebulous for him—even when “recorded” in his manuscripts—that thinking about it would serve no purpose? The noise that Samuel makes at his piano and in his “Notes” is ambiguous--as Paulson said literature is.

But Elkins is not through yet with parasitical ambiguity. In the “Notes” to Stories, Like Illnesses and to Weak in Comparison to Dreams, Samuel discusses the lives and plays the works of two composers who do not exist. Given Samuel’s feeble imagination, it is very unlikely that he invented these stories about the composers. Suspicion multiplies like parasites. In fact, if I can use that word this deep in ambiguity, I think it’s also unlikely that Samuel was capable of writing the manuscripts he discovers. Maybe he could have done the basic first-person narrative, but not the textual noise in the margins. Yes, Elkins wrote or collected all of the texts and visuals, but the invented composers treated as real suggest to me that some other character might be the secret, originating author parasiting into Samuel’s life and using it to represent the dangers of stories, including the one being told by Samuel in Elkins’ volumes. He has said the books are not like the difficult jigsaw puzzles Samuel’s mother put together, but there are enlarged photographs of puzzle pieces in the last chapters of Stories, Like Illnesses.

In a book about origins, a puzzle about authorship would be appropriate in a fiction as layered and as postmodern as Elkins’ is. In House of Leaves, the reader must wade and wait through hundreds of pages before learning the possible origin story of the novel’s scarred narrator. Some fundamental secrets of Infinite Jest are revealed in its endnotes. Postmodern suspense is not what the protagonists will do but what they and readers might learn if willing to fall into a possibly infinite regress.

Only Viperine has the education, scientific knowledge, passion, and interest in Samuel to be a likely author. He calls her a “masterpiece” and says, “her stories were carefully constructed. They included things that would be hard to make up.” On page 344 of my ARC, there’s a marginal text on Moulins, Viperine’s hometown, that it would have been impossible for Samuel to know or “make up” (if one thinks of Samuel as the source of the marginalia). For Viperine, a “tower of parasites” is “the perfect story.” Because of his passivity and story illnesses, Samuel is an easy host for Viperine the parasite, the source of the book’s noisiest noise—much of which she in turn cribbed from the Britannica and scientific journals. She could be the internal analogue or avatar of the author. If she is the “author” in between Samuel and Elkins, she, like a clever parasite, conceals her presence until, perhaps, the end when she invents those un-Samuel stories about eccentric foreigners (like her) and puts the stories in Samuel’s mouth. The fictional composer in Stories, Like Illnesses, Elnar Valen, reminds Samuel of Viperine. He says Valen’s “strange language goes on and on, filling entire pages, without changing its style. It must be saying something very serious . . .[but] it becomes more and more obscure.” Stories, Like Illnesses is serious, not just a Nabokovian game of authorial hide and seek. This volume and the ones that follow can be “obscure” and are noisy, but in his Babel tower of parasites Elkins is presenting a comprehensive and inventive deconstruction of the faulty stories that people live within or that live within people.

But again, Elkins is not done with parasitism. A much-published art and photography historian who reads a lot of long novels and high literary theory, Elkins offers on his website a 100-plus-page document called “Ideas and Materials” (which will become a printed book, a “companion volume,” when Stories, Like Illnesses is released). It reveals in detail Elkins admits is “excessive” what went into the making of Five Strange Languages. There are graphs and statistics and linkages about technique. More important are the many pages about his impressive readings in literature, literary theory, and philosophy that generated his volumes. In a note to reviewers about “Ideas and Materials,” he warns that “a reading of just the fiction alone would be incomplete, the same as reviewing a novel without finishing it.” Can he be serious now? This non-fictional Elkins sounds like that fictional parasite Kinbote in his foreword to Nabokov’s Pale Fire: “without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all.” This reviewer takes “Ideas and Materials” as a dense and learned parasitical origin story about many of the works that influenced Five Strange Languages. But in its textual obsessiveness and numerous visuals, the “companion volume” also resembles Stories, Like Illnesses. “Ideas and Materials” could be a parody of critical analysis, something like an unreliable fiction, or a revealing joke like Nabokov’s wacky index to Pale Fire with its ambiguous authorship.

In all of the pages in “Ideas and Materials” about how Elkins wrote the volumes, not once does he say why this non-fiction-writing art professor turned in late middle age to fiction, and not just some modest starter fiction but a sequence he would work on for decades without publishing a single volume. The whole, so far, of Five Strange Languages flows from one day in Samuel’s life. No such origin story from Elkins. Wisely not telling the story of his original motivation, Elkins leaves a hole in “Ideas and Materials” and returns us to the books themselves, those excessive exercises in literature’s healthy ambiguity. Literature, Elkin says, has no prime-mover origin, and any novel published now is a parasite on the history of the novel—and, somewhat less persuasively, on the criticism and theory of the novel. Perhaps Stories, Like Illnesses and its “companions” require a new literary term: hyperparasitism.

In “Ideas and Materials” Elkins says his books are about the failures of systems, showing, I’d say, that even an author as learned and sophisticated as Elkins may not fully understand the parasitical books he has created or may be planting a Samuel-like error in the companion. No, not “created,” like a God, but “assembled.” The failures of what Lyotard called “master narratives” and the minor story-machines of popular culture, yes but not, I think, the failure of some science. Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the many long novels Elkins has said he read. It is about the failure of systems but also includes flashes of ecological wisdom. I believe the same is true of the three Elkins volumes I’ve read. What fails in Stories, Like Illnesses are religious notions, romantic ideals, unexamined expectations of normal life, outmoded scientific systems, pseudoscience, entertainment, and the human users of more sophisticated systems. Samuel’s mother became obsessed with cosmology and mycology at the expense of her children. Samuel’s brother Tee is fixated on financial success. Samuel’s boss twits him with travel stories he can’t understand. Some of the composers Samuel tries to play failed because they attempted to invent a new system of music. Elkins makes numerous value judgments about success and failure in “Ideas and Materials.” Readers will need to make similar judgments about the stories within Stories, Like Illnesses and the novel itself. My judgment in a sentence: the novel is like what addiction counselors called marijuana--a gateway to much heavier things already published and, I presume, to come. And when the full weight of Five Strange Languages is available, reviewers will no longer be able to ignore the extra extravagant fiction of James Elkins.

Monsters

Two women characters, Samuel’s mother Martha and Viperine, are called “monsters” because of their power over little Sam. Viperine also appears monstrous because Samuel can’t tell what gender she (I think) is. Actually, for Samuel all people are “monstrous” because they are “intricate, fractured . . . and complicated.” He comes to project these qualities on nature: “The things in the world that seem to make sense,” he says, “are actually stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster, from scraps, and the stitching is hasty and uneven.“ Samuel doesn’t think of himself as a monster but says his “ideas had become monstrous and entangled. I needed to compress my thinking, squeeze out the leaky emotions stamp them into mineral and metal” —partly because of the influence of the book’s women. He thinks of the amoebae as “little monsters,” a nice alternative to the usual association of “monster” with great size—and a lead-in to Viperine’s horrifying “tower of parasites” in the bat cave.

Elkins’ use of monsters and monstrous alerts readers to think of his book as a monstrosity. Stories, Like Illnesses, like Samuel’s view of the world, is stitched together from many different sources, a collage of narrative and marginal texts and visuals. The early photographs of mushrooms are grotesque. The mathematical formulas and calculations in “Notes” are opaque, as are the many pages of notes and staves. If I’m right about Viperine’s authorship of the book, she is a natural (or unnatural) manager of its monstrosity, its hybridity and ambiguity and its hyperparasitism. In the “Notes,” a description of Johnston’s Sonata for Microtonal Piano serves as a description of Stories, Like Illnesses: the sonata “was a kind of monster. Johnston said he created something violent, a `monstrous parody-enigma, allusive, referential, sometimes derisive, distorted, a tissue of familiarity in radically strange garb.’” The quote is an even more accurate description of “Ideas and Methods.”

Is Stories, Like Illnesses a monsterpiece? Formally, moreso than Elkins’ first two published novels. The intellectual content of A Short Introduction to Annieliese is more original and, perhaps, profound. Samuel’s experience with caged animals in Weak in Comparison to Dreams probably has a more powerful emotional effect. But one should remember that these are parts of one long novel that from the extant evidence will be a monsterpiece of extravagant proportion and perhaps unsolvable complexity. Vollmann’s A Table for Fortune is one continuous narrative broken up into four volumes. Five Strange Languages will be five separate, stand-alone books “stitched together” like the Frankenstein monster referred to within Stories, Like Illnesses. The seams will show, but the connections at the information and image levels will be the equal of any monsterpiece I have discussed so far. And the range of Elkins’ imagination will, I believe, have reviewers saying Five Strange Languages belongs up on monsterpiece mountain with Gravity’s Rainbow and Underworld.

First Monsterpieces Post (slightly revised)

To paraphrase old mapmakers’ designation of the unknown: “Here be monsterpieces”—my reviews of recent long novels.

The impetus: I’ve just reviewed a new monsterpiece, A Short Introduction to Anneliese, that I bet you haven’t heard of, a 569-page novel about a monstrously egocentric natural scientist who dominates her story with obsessive and excessive monologues, a story interrupted by a hundred-page chapter on long books including long novels. If a novelist can find a publisher for such a long-shot work, a long novel that the author says is about the long novel form and is one-fifth of a longer novel, then I thought there must be some readers still around who will buy (if not always finish) the long novel, the literary version not the fan fiction version.

The novelist above is James Elkins, and the longer novel is, he says, “Strange Languages.” Elkins has been working on this project for twenty years but published the first of the five—the 605-page Weak in Comparison to Dreams—only in 2023. Though a distinguished art and photography critic, Elkins had never published any fiction before Weak in Comparison to Dreams. After its reception, his publisher, Unnamed Press, agreed to bring out the remaining four long works. I’m leading off here with reviews of Elkins because A Short Introduction to Anneliese has that hundred-page chapter on long books and because Elkins’ two published works represent some extremes of the experimental long novel, the type that aspires to be a monsterpiece.

Long fictions used to be common and are still in certain sub-genres, but the long literary novel is now almost by its mere existence experimental. Since one definition of monster is “thing of large size,” the unconventional length of a work makes the novel monstruous for some readers, but length is not enough to create a monsterpiece. Linear narrative must be deformed and reformed by interruptions, digressions, excess information, non-textual materials, the kitchen sink. Tristram Shandy is a good example. A more familiar example is Moby-Dick, an adventure story constantly deformed by Melville’s cetology that transforms the novel into ontology, a profound study of nature and being. Another definition of monster is “something unnatural.” Moby-Dick conveniently has two monsters within it—the unnatural white whale and the only partly natural peg-legged Ahab.

If “Monsterpieces” had a subtitle, it would be “Long Novels, Long Shots, and Longueurs.” About and largely by an overbearing, compulsive but digressive monologist named Anneliese Grul who has spent more than twenty years writing a roomful of notebooks on the philosophical origin of life, A Short Introduction, true to the protagonist’s make-up, has often lengthy, even, she admits, “boring” passages that illustrate her manias. These passages are necessary for “showing” psychological reality, but readers accustomed to the “telling” of machined and oiled 200-page “realistic” novels may experience the passages as longueurs. Elkins’ risks at displeasing or alienating readers represent the chances most authors of monsterpieces take when they include material some—make that “many”—readers may find excessive, a failure of economy and efficiency. I won’t be claiming long novels, even those I’d call monsterpieces, are without longueurs. I’m saying that reviewers and readers should be careful judging what doesn’t fit a model of excellence based on The Great Gatsby.

After reading a raft of old and recent long novels, Anneliese says their authors become insane because they cannot control the complexities of their work and thus lose touch with the world outside their project. If by “control” she means organizing a linear plot or creating a predictable collage, she’s right, but long novels often have more subtle and demanding ways of connecting their materials. Anneliese did lose her grip during her long project, but given what I’ve read of Elkins’ non-fiction I don’t think he did.

A more common, less drastic charge against long novels is authors’ self-indulgence. After reading interviews with and talking with some authors of long novels, I believe the opposite is often true: authors self-risking, defying the odds against publication and sales by taking ambitious and often difficult long shots. Think of DeLillo in his study with 27 volumes of the Warren Report. The reviews that follow evaluate authors’ risks and readers’ rewards novel to novel. Unlike Anneliese and some academic critics, I have no enforceable theory of the long novel, just 60 years acquaintance with and interest in the form from Moby-Dick on.

Thirty-five years ago I published a book called The Art of Excess about monsterpieces of the 1970s and 80s: Gravity’s Rainbow, Something Happened, J R, The Public Burning, Women and Men, LETTERS, and Always Coming Home. Thirty years ago I published an essay on “Prodigious Fiction” that discussed then prodigies William Vollmann, Richard Powers, and David Foster Wallace as authors of monsterpieces. Twenty-five years ago I published an essay called “False Pretenses, Parasites, and Monsters” about women novelists rewriting novels about monsters by men.

As I said, my hobby-horse. Giddyup.

A Short Introduction to Anneliese

Let’s say you think of yourself as a Marine of literature, one of the few and proud because you love the challenge of long and excessive and even maybe crazed contemporary novels. You appreciated the bullshitting digressiveness and odd endnotes in Wallace’s Infinite Jest but not all that tennis. You admired the multivolume connections and off-beat illustrations in Danielewski’s five-book Familiar series but not the fantasy elements. I have a writer for you—James Elkins, who refers to both Wallace and Danielewski in a hundred-page chapter on long books in his A Short Introduction to Anneliese, which has all those features you enjoyed in Wallace and Danielewski. Semper fi.

Every day for the past twenty years, Elkins has said, he worked on five interlocked books he calls a single novel entitled “Strange Languages.” One of them, the 607-page Weak in Comparison to Dreams, was published in 2023. Now comes the 569-page A Short Introduction to Anneliese, while I’ll shorten to Anneliese here. That first to be released—and Elkins’ first published fiction after a career writing art and photography criticism—was about a sad-sack public health functionary, Samuel Emmer, whose daughter leaves for college, whose wife leaves for Bratislava, and whose supervisor makes him leave his undemanding job to investigate possible animal suffering in zoos world-wide—a triple whammy that causes Samuel’s psychic meltdown and strong, persistent dreams that Elkins illustrates with numerous photos of burning forests. When questioned about his increasingly outrageous behavior with zoo directors, Samuel quits his job, moves to a small town, writes most of Dreams, puts the manuscript in his basement, runs across it forty years later, and adds more than a hundred pages of endnotes about the manuscript and his present life.

At the same time that Samuel is visiting those traumatizing zoos, his supervisor Catherine arranges contact with Anneliese Glur, a septuagenarian Swiss former professor with whom Catherine collaborated when both were graduate students in biology. In an act of apparent revenge for Anneliese’s stealing a crucial formula from Catherine, she recommends the barely functioning Samuel as a reader of Anneliese’s life’s (unpublished) work, a whole roomful of large notebooks. Most of Elkins’ book is composed of Anneliese’s monologues explaining why she is hectoring Samuel to take on the task. Like Dreams, Anneliese purports to be a manuscript Samuel wrote long ago, rediscovered, and again appends notes to.

Under the pressure of family and work events in Dreams, Samuel becomes floridly obsessive compulsive. Anneliese has been so since she was a child. Samuel has little emotional and intellectual life. Anneliese has always been enraged by the stupidity of most people and the ignorance of scientists and famous writers. She talks so much and at such volume that the elevator operator at her university asks her to stop, just stop. That was before Anneliese was fired for breaking into a colleague’s home to correct errors in her work and before Anneliese spent most of every day and evening writing her grand unified theory of biology in her notebooks. Anneliese knows that she may be demented and therefore dementedly analyzes various forms of insanity that may plague her, but she still wants someone—actually anyone, even a weak slug like Samuel—to read the 20,000 or 30,000 pages of those notebooks and, perhaps, arrange their publication.

With its pervasive and dominating voice, Anneliese less resembles the work of Wallace and Danielewski than the angry, unfiltered, run-on first-person narrator of Lucy Ellmann’s thousand-page Ducks, Newburyport (to which Elkins refers) and, more familiarly and briefly, professor Kinbote/Botkin of Nabokov’s Pale Fire in which the visiting Russian professor imagines himself the escaped King of Zembla, believes he has found an ideal interlocutor in the American poet John Shade, and writes a long wacky commentary (with index) on Shade’s 999-line poem.

I mention these similar works with obsessive narrators to suggest there’s considerable comedy in Anneliese—satire of academic discourse, doctors and hospitals, Wikipedia, movie credits, popular culture, and writerly ambition along with burlesque of the elitist know-it-all who does everything to excess: over-sharing details about her body scabs, over-ordering in a diner, over-engaged with worms and ticks, over-reacting to real and imagined slights. Overweening Anneliese puts a new spin on Nietzsche’s “ubermensch”—over-doing even the most trivial activities.

For Elkins, employing such an overbearing protagonist and narrator is about as risky as walking a tightrope stretched between Manhattan and New Jersey. Every long novel has longueurs. Because of Anneliese’s repetition compulsions, Elkins’ daredevil book often lurches toward the Hudson but is repeatedly saved by his mimicry, beady wit, unparagraphed riffs, quite amazing anthropological learning (if authentic), and equally amazing inventions, which may seem like learning. Anneliese has fewer visual materials than Dreams, but some important ones emerge near the end and in Samuel’s notes. Anneliese also has less contact with the naked-eye world than Dreams, but Anneliese has much to say about the world seen through a microscope.

Elkins arranges his own possible pitfalls. Unlike realistic novels, Anneliese sacrifices character conflict because Samuel is barely present and Anneliese is not so much a character with an explanatory backstory as she is an overflowing font. Traditional fictional setting is reduced to various sites of hours-long conversations. For so long a book, the plot is simple: will Samuel read the notebooks and, if he does, what will he find? Some overwhelming philosophical/biological synthesis, some evidence of recovery from the author’s madness, or maybe materials that will influence his frightening dreams of burning forests?

What replaces these novelistic conventions is language. “Strange Languages,” as Elkins’ overarching title says: foreign sentences and made-up words, specialized discourses from the sciences and humanities, fulsome meta analyses of disparate styles, a wonderful parody of epic poetry, voluble takedowns of that great philosopher of language, Wittgenstein, and that great massager of language Proust. Eventually we find that Anneliese’s whole project of understanding the origins of life begins with language, the words ancient cultures had for the phenomenon. Like dormant bacteria, dead languages come back to life in Anneliese’s notebooks and connect them with all humans, living and dead.

Given Anneliese’s fascination with, suspicion of, and dependence on language, it’s odd that she calls William Gass’s The Tunnel, a lengthy novel about a self-absorbed and unstable professor, “bats,” odd because her “book” (her collected notebooks) resembles Gass’s high-wire linguistic performances in that novel. Furthermore, Anneliese thinks of herself as occupying a well that she, like Gass’s narrator in his basement, hopes to escape. “It seems a country-headed thing to say,” Gass wrote in a 1979 essay, “that literature is language, that stories and the people and the places in them are merely made of words.”

Given Elkins’ metalinguistic passions, metafiction can’t be far behind. At the physical and conceptual center of Anneliese is that hundred-page chapter on long books—scientific, historical, medical, philosophical, religious, and fictional—that Anneliese reads and criticizes. She comes to believe in “Long Novel Insanity.” Her chief examples are Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and exceedingly long works by Arno Schmidt and Marianne Fritz. Perhaps projecting her own vexed relation to her notebooks on these and other authors, Anneliese concludes that writers of such works disappear into them, become inhuman, insane.

Here is a short introduction to Anneliese’s conclusion in her inimitable, extravagant, hyperbolic style:

“Long complex books are slow-acting poisons, everything in them is coated with a thin lacquer of poison, every stone in those opalescent worlds has been licked by the author’s poisoned tongue. The writers of long books do not stand outside their books like carnival barkers, striding confidently on stage, basking in applause…because they are sunken into their books, they can no longer step back, they can’t climb out.”

In Anneliese’s statement, one can hear Elkins’ anxiety about his own decades-long and five-volume long experimental project (that was completed before one of the books was published). Anneliese claims to have discovered “uncultivable organisms,” “completely new forms of life that had never been cultured.” She wanted her notebooks to create something similar, a new understanding of life, an intellectual wonder. On the strength of these two published novels, Elkins seems on the way to creating a new version of or, at least, a radical bricolage of the long novel, an aesthetic wonder. His chapter on long books both explores some possible influences and distinguishes his differences from them. In a way, A Short Introduction to Anneliese would seem to be a long introduction to “Strange Languages,” but Elkins was probably wise to publish the more conventional and solicitous Dreams before the “uncultivable” Anneliese.

At what cost the cultivation of wonder? The many pages of “Notes” that end both Dreams and Anneliese imply that Elkins survived or maybe will survive “Long Novel Insanity.” Samuel returns to the two manuscripts but cares little about them or the past they contain. Now in his nineties, Samuel occupies himself, in Dreams, playing dissonant notes and scores on his piano. In Anneliese, he plays and comments on demanding, almost impossible pieces by Stockhausen, whose difficulties sometimes remind him of Anneliese and her notebooks. Samuel believes he wrote the manuscripts so he would remember life back then, but now he seems to agree with Anneliese (when she discusses Proust) that such recordings of memories are inauthentic, made-up, fabricated—no matter how maniacally a writer such as Anneliese tries to capture experience. So Dreams and Anneliese are Samuel’s fictions within Elkins’ fictions as the frames within frames within frames on both covers imply. Live long enough, Samuel—and perhaps Elkins—imply and the largest and longest memories, even “systems of outlandish intricacy” will seem insignificant. The music stops, only the notes remain.

Anneliese says she did not read long novels by Gaddis and Pynchon, writers to whom I compared Elkins in my review of Dreams. Elkins’ novels won’t attract the kind of youthful cult following that formed around novels by Wallace and Danielewski, but if the remaining three works in “Strange Languages” are equal in complexity and profundity and pleasure to Dreams and Anneliese, I predict Elkins’ work will receive—like the novels of Gaddis and Pynchon—intense and continual study by academic critics. Disappointed academic Anneliese hoped for something much more, but Elkins, a long-time professor, may be happy with attention in universities where, somewhat counterintuitively, literary Marines are often found. “Oorah,” as the leathernecks shout.

Weak in Comparison to Dreams

James Elkins is a 68-year-old much-published historian and theorist of visual arts, a professor who holds a chair at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Weak in Comparison to Dreams is his first work of fiction, and it is the most courageous and fascinating debut I have read since Mark Z. Danielewski’s multi-media House of Leaves in 2000. Other precursors --- obsessive and excessive first fictions --- include William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Thomas Pynchon’s V, and Don DeLillo’s Americana, all concerned with images as Elkins’ novel is. I hasten to add that the origin of “fascinating” is negative, all the way back to a definition as an “evil spell.” Elkins’ courage is casting a binding spell some readers might consider a curse: writing a 600-page novel about obsessive compulsion in the voice of an obsessive-compulsive character. His first name is Samuel. Whether or not Elkins wanted the name to remind us of that master of repetition --- Samuel Beckett --- he is another one of those courageous fascinators.

Elkins’ Samuel Emmer grew up in natural surroundings in Watkins Glen, New York, the son of a “corrosive mother” about whom Samuel says next to nothing. In one of the novel’s two presents, Samuel is a near-40 part-time professor and scientist testing drinking water for amoebae in Guelph, Ontario in 2019. His wife has gone back to Bratislava, his daughter has gone away to college, and Samuel is going off the rails, even off the trails he has followed in his routines both inside and outside his lab. He is, for example, methodically deconstructing the furniture and electronic devices in his apartment. His supervisor, sensing Samuel’s incipient derangement, sends him ---maliciously, neutrally, or charitably --- on a series of visits to zoos to check on their handling of animals presenting troubling patterns of repetitive behavior.

Samuel empathizes with the animals and tries to imagine the lives of the zookeepers at the first two sites. But his imagination becomes progressively active and then aggressive. He fantasizes his host in Finland is a cyborg, does an existential analysis of a monkey’s mind in Nashville, talks to a host in the voices of spiders in Salt Lake City, and in Basel indulges in total fabrications, insisting at length that his host see suffering animals within a Freudian psychoanalytic framework, and encouraging the children of visitors to pretend to shoot the animals. Samuel feels he is losing his mind and control --- and he is, but he is also coming out of his former isolated routines to make connections with others, both humans and animals.

Think of Samuel as Bellow’s professor Herzog forced to visit problematic zoos rather than retreat from his loss of family to the Berkshires where he writes zany letters. Samuel becomes wackily inventive about his credentials (he has none) and charmingly crazed in his identification with animals: “I used to be safe with my amoebas. Little gluey animals, tiny spots of sick. Now animals demented by despair shuffled across the stage of my imagination.” Elkins pushes Samuel along toward paranoia by including documents about animal compulsive behavior that are sent to him between zoo visits by his intern and by Samuel’s former student whom he calls “Viperine.” The more those documents are supposed to help Samuel recognize his own compulsive behavior, the more he imagines hearing the two “helpers” whispering and plotting behind his back. My spot check of the documents finds some are invented, so perhaps Samuel is right to be suspicious of the senders.

When reports of Samuel’s behavior at the zoos get back to his supervisor, Samuel is offered a leave of absence but chooses to abruptly quit his job, take his pension, and leave Guelph. Here there is a break in time in which Samuel writes a manuscript about his breakdown. Never published and almost forgotten, the 500-page manuscript is discovered by Samuel in his basement 40 years later when he is moving from his home in a rural area of northern Canada where he has been living alone. In the last 100 pages of Weak in Comparison to Dreams (entitled “Notes”), Samuel reflects back on the manuscript and describes his present life. Ah, the old discovered manuscript trick, a timeworn way to show a character’s change. Not for Elkins. Though superficial features of Samuel’s life are different now, he is psychologically essentially the same, still obsessive-compulsive. Maybe he’s even worse off than in his zoo days, for now he doesn’t recognize his problem, has almost no imagination, and cares little about contacts with living creatures. “Notes” may make Weak in Comparison to Dreams look like a recovery narrative, but it’s actually a re-coverup story. As I said, Elkins has courage, perhaps because he’s not a young guy trying to lift off a career as a novelist.

In both parts of the novel, Elkins himself seems obsessed --- with the writing workshop’s mantra “Show don’t tell,” and his way of showing reflects his long interest in photography. In What Photography Is, Elkins suggested it’s “a good time to say goodbye to photographs of people.” When Samuel remembers Watkins Glen, Elkins includes a few photos of nature. Then come many photos of ugly zoo cages and enclosures without animals. Stressed by his visits, Samuel most explicitly reveals his repetition compulsion by describing over and over nightmares of forest fires. For each of these dreams, Elkins provides numerous photographs of fire and burned over land. The documents Samuel’s helpers send also stimulate visuals included in the text: diagrams of animals’ repetitive pacing, of planetary motion, and of Samuel’s routes around his apartment, all of which have a vague figure-eight or infinity form, perfect for OCD. The only humans pictured in the novel are threatened individuals such as Icarus in a few old woodcuts. An “Envoi” has nine pages of individual animals.

The photographs are all black and white, generally about a half page in size, and not particularly artful. Most of the photographs “illustrate” dreams, which are usually frightening to Samuel and yet praised as a release from his daily life, which he says is “weak in comparison to” dreams. Since the sleeping mind is not yet capable of taking photographs, Samuel hunted around for images that would show what he was experiencing at night. Samuel’s accompanying texts follow along, words telling and interpreting what is “shown.”

The photos are numerous and repetitive but, because of their pedestrian quality, are not particularly affecting. Maybe I’m missing Elkins’ intention, but it seems Samuel’s obsessive inclusion of images in his manuscript is yet another sign of his separation and desperation. The photographs don’t connect him to the world, only to its dull and miniaturized simulacra. Elkins’ photographs don’t create a sense of mystery as those of Sebald or Catherine Lacey in Biography of X. Instead, Elkins uses the images to imitate his character’s reductive mania. Although the photographs are not what I would have expected in a novel by Elkins the photography critic, they do again demonstrate his courage, his dedication to a unity of subject, style, and media.

“Notes” also has visual materials, not photos but partial representations of scores by experimental composers that Samuel repeatedly plays for himself in his isolated home. He describes the sounds as discordant, harsh, noisy. I don’t read music, but if Samuel is right then the music-producing visuals in “Notes” have an effect similar to that of the earlier photographs. From composing a manuscript often ugly to the eye, Samuel has “moved on” to collecting and playing music even he admits is ugly to the ear. His location and his medium have changed, but Samuel remains locked (like the animals) into himself, trapped in a fugue-like state, a musical term become a psychological one.

Weak in Comparison to Dreams fortunately has several stylistic registers. Even post-Pynchon, the scientific reports, graphs, and formulas would be considered --- though ingenious in invention --- ugly in a literary novel. Samuel’s commentaries on his dreams are thankfully not surreal; the style is that of an earnest but mystified scientist who can be quite eloquent:

“It became difficult to think. It was hard to keep seeing the world on fire, to keep trying to make sense of the onslaught of images. The fires meant something, they needed to be understood. They were like people waving frantically at me, trying to get me to understand something.”

In “Notes,” Samuel, now in his 90s, writes in a rather banal, washed-out late style. The novel’s language is most vivid (and novelistic in the manner of those precursors I mentioned) when Samuel is talking to zookeepers or thinking about their animals. That style is not weak in comparison to the style he uses to describe his forest fires and his life in retreat. Either Samuel or Elkins has not, however, lost all imagination, for near the novel’s end are seven pages about one Asger Gaarn, a Danish composer who compulsively wrote throughout his whole life hundreds of preludes and fugues to memorialize other composers, friends, strangers, even pets. Google could not locate Asger Gaarn, the final symbol of obsession.

Because of “Notes,” which is much about the art of experimental music, Weak in Comparison to Dreams has a self-referential or metafictional implication. Once Elkins decided on repetition compulsion, he seems to have adopted exhaustiveness, the stacking of analogues as important as plotting. Musical scores are piled high in Samuel’s home. Speaking of an animal, Samuel says, “The more it becomes disturbed, the longer its behaviors last.” Writing about Protopopov, Samuel says the music is “compelling, and then after a while, it’s boring. It’s fascinating because it’s so alien.” Weak in Comparison to Dreams doesn’t have the worldly variousness of first novels by Gaddis, Pynchon, and DeLillo, but its repetitive excess makes it more alien --- and fascinating. Seen as a whole and from some distance, Weak in Comparison to Dreams does connect to a world wider than Samuel’s mind. Humans are like pacing and punding animals, the planet is burning, artists like those Samuel plays are creating work that may be innovative but without content, the music even further from representing the real than the visuals. Elkins is not one of those artists.

Elkins has said his novel is an outtake from a twenty-year project that includes four other, apparently finished novels that he has described in extravagant detail on his website which is --- no surprise --- obsessive. I mentioned House of Leaves earlier. Reading Elkins’ website, I see that his novels resemble Danielewski’s multi-volume Familiar project, which is now unfortunately stalled. I hope Weak in Comparison to Dreams receives enough attention so that his small-press publisher will bring out the remaining volumes that will, it seems, add material about Samuel’s life and introduce other characters.

Samuel is a desperate man. I admit I may be desperate --- to “recuperate,” as the French say, Elkins’ novel, to give its obsessiveness a useful social function. Or, as someone who has written five novels about the same character, I may be desperate to interest readers in a book that casts a spell by repetition. Or after reviewing hundreds of novels, I may be desperate for one that risks a “splendid failure,” as Faulkner said, to make something new, even if that “new” is about humans’ and other mammals’ resistance to or escape from the new.

---end---

Not treating House of Leaves and Gravity’s Rainbow at the outset of Monsterpieces was a mistake . . . but I wanted to begin with new monstrous works and House of Leaves was published in 2000, Gravity’s Rainbow much further back in 1973. Still a mistake because no novel that I have discussed—including Danielewski’s Tom’s Crossing and his first two volumes of The Familiar—is as explicitly and instructively (formally and stylistically) a monsterpiece as House of Leaves. As for Gravity’s Rainbow, I have so often compared novels here to it that I should have explained why I judge it to be the most profound and influential monsterpiece of contemporary fiction. So on this anniversary, I’m correcting my error and offering these slightly revised and moderately expanded versions of earlier writings, the Pynchon originally in Open Letters Review, the Danielewski originally in Electronic Book Review.]

Gravity’s Rainbow

“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there’s nothing to compare it to now.”

Those are the first two lines of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow released fifty years ago. Although “too late” (for many humans) is a refrain in the novel, I believe it’s never too late to urge people to read what I think is the most important American novel published in, yes, the last fifty years.

The screaming is the sound of rockets raining down on London in World War II. Nothing to compare that sudden death from the air to then, but now we can see daily photographs of the death and destruction rocketing down on Ukraine. Palestinians occasionally launch rockets into Israel, but Ukraine seems to be the first extended rocket and drone war, asymmetrical until recently when Ukraine began sending armed drones into Russia. We don’t need Gravity’s Rainbow to feel the horror of death without warning, but on this anniversary of its publication we would do well to read or read again a novel that predicted and continues to illuminate fundamental forces of our own time.

Writing about 1945 in the late 60s and early 70s, Pynchon was using the then recent past to comment on what he called, in German, the “Raketen-Stadt,” the rocket city or state that the United States had become—with the assistance of German engineers who launched the V-2s--in response to Russian success with rocketry that could deliver nuclear payloads across vast spaces. In the novel, Hiroshima is alluded to only on a found sheet of paper, but Pynchon imagines a potential future apocalypse when the novel ends with a rocket bearing down on a movie house in Los Angeles. For the patrons, it is too late.

Perhaps MAD—Mutual Assured Destruction—has made nuclear holocaust unlikely, but rocket terror persists in Ukraine where fear of guided and random missiles has displaced millions from their homes and country. Pynchon wrote about that, too. The beginning of Gravity’s Rainbow describes in affecting detail the nighttime evacuation of children from London. The rest of the novel follows displaced other Europeans, even Americans, Africans, and Russians who wander through what Pynchon calls the borderless “Zone” beneath the rockets’ paths. The characters are like the London children, Hansels and Gretels out too late in the night without their happy ending.

Gravity’s Rainbow is a massive novel dense with historical, economic, political, social, and religious analyses of how rocket states came to be, but Pynchon’s most profound perspectives are anthropological and ecological. The “World just before men,” Pynchon writes, was “Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was such a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth’s body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God’s spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures.”

Primitive technology was invented to promote life, extend life. But, for Pynchon, the rise of technology—like the thrust of the rocket escaping gravity—ultimately led in the twentieth century to new and efficient and uncanny ways to “promote death.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, rockets are not just advanced weapons but metaphors for all corporate industrialism that mines the coal and pumps the oil to build towers and fuel machines that seem to promise rising above the “living critter” planet Earth to achieve a high-tech transcendence (which some of our grandiose billionaires are proposing now with off-planet life).

The climactic event and symbolic summary of the novel is the launch of a German rocket with a young man inside, an act of murder and suicide. Humans have been committing murder for millennia. It’s the suicide that our industries have now enabled on a planetary scale that is new. For Pynchon, World War II was just an accelerated incident in humans’ long-running global war on nature. If this seems a truism to all but Republican lawmakers now, remember please that Pynchon was writing his radical environmental novel five decades ago. It is indeed getting late here on this planet heated by that coal and oil.

And rockets are still screaming across the sky from east to west. Ironically and tragically, Putin is using the Nazis’ rocket power to, he has said, “de-Nazify” the government of Ukraine that is led by a Jew. Like the Nazi characters in Gravity’s Rainbow, Putin uses phallic rockets to demonstrate Russian macho mastery and to reclaim territory for the sacred Russian empire that was dissolved when the Soviet Union fell. Pynchon anticipated rocket mysticism, showing through his characters’ erotic and spiritual obsessions that rockets are more than weapons. They are symbols of godlike patriarchal power like the Biblical plagues sent raining down from heaven.

Gravity’s Rainbow is most essentially about masters, but it has plenty of monsters, some of whom are masters. An architectural folly offers “different versions of Homo Monstrosus” and becomes a metaphor for Gravity’s Rainbow. The towering rocket is a monster. So is the Reichstag building. The globe-controlling “They” is a monstrous system of control. Technology is a “monster by the tail.” The Nazi villain Blicero is called a “fabulous monster,” and his former lover, Enzian, is called Blicero’s monster. Even the comic protagonist Slothrop is termed a “monster son.” King Kong is mentioned, as is a huge octopus. A giant sci-fi Adenoid is a “lymphatic monster.” A character attentive to the sky imagines clouds are a monster. Numerous monsters don’t make a novel a monstrosity, but Pynchon does with his radical mix of genres, forms, and styles—prose and poetry, science fiction and historical fiction, linear quest for a secret and patchwork collage of information, high lyrical and low comical. Gravity’s Rainbow is an “elegant chaos” like the pinball machines it describes (they use solenoids, by the way) and a massive literary Frankenstein which is referred to twice.

Lest I scare you away with the profound gravity of Gravity’s Rainbow, know please that it is also an encyclopedia or rainbow of humor, what scholars call “the carnivalesque.” Pynchon includes a Huck Finn-like Innocent Abroad as protagonist, a large gallery of fools and frauds, slapstick chase scenes, movie parodies, Catch-22 absurdities and Monty Python stupidities, as well as bawdy songs, Proverbs for Paranoids, and word play worthy of Nabokov, with whom Pynchon studied. I should also mention goofy conspiracies and plenty of sex scenes to please just about every taste (and tastelessness). But be not fooled: the hurdy-gurdy carnival is present to conduct you into the big tent, where gravity-defying high-wire acts of human rocketry occur.

In the space I have I cannot begin to describe Pynchon’s plot in which several main characters from different nations quest for the mysterious rocket 00000, a kind of Grail in the rocket state. As in a medieval romance, the characters move through settings both super-realistic and magical and ultimately hallucinatory. Some get close to the 00000, but they are too late. It has been launched.

I also can’t summarize or even list all of the essays and books that have been written about Gravity’s Rainbow, ways of supporting my assertive thesis about its importance, both philosophical and literary. I think those critics who say that Pynchon belongs only to professors (like I was) and that the novel is heartless are wrong. Pynchon deeply empathizes with the victims of rocket states, those he calls the “preterite,” the unchosen. Many of his characters are like Hansel and Gretel, away from home and out too late at night.

I can mention forerunners such as Moby-Dick and William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and coeval admirers such as the systems-influenced novelists Joseph McElroy and Don DeLillo, whose Underworld is the closest in orientation and achievement to Pynchon’s novel. For literary influence, I can report that Gravity’s Rainbow is referred to within four of the most ambitious American novels of recent decades: Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, and, yes, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. If you have read and appreciated one or more of these science-influenced monsterpieces, consider that it may be time to go back to the writer Powers called “Pop Pynchon” and Wallace called the “patriarch.”

It’s not too late. In the final words of the novel, “Now everybody--”

House of Leaves

I gave the novel a rave review in Book Magazine, long defunct and without an internet archive. I used the novel in my university classes for many years, and students always voted it the most important novel on the syllabus. No archive of LeClair notes. Because I believe that many who signed up for Monsterpieces probably know about and/or know House of Leaves, I’m not going to try to reconstruct my decades-old commentaries. If you are an utter newbie to the novel, you can find reams of analysis on the Internet. The few paragraphs that follow are an attempt to compensate for my initial mistake and to encourage you to get your hands on House of Leaves.

In House of Leaves, a young Los Angeles tattoo artist named Johnny Truant finds a manuscript in a trunk. The manuscript, by a dead man named Zampano, is a fictional description of and commentary on a photodocumentary by one Will Navidson. The documentary is about an uncanny house which has beneath it a constantly shifting, possibly infinite labyrinth in which some monster, such as the often-referred-to minotaur, may live. Characters who explore the labyrinth find no beast there, but the dark unknown spaces consume the characters, physically or psychologically.

Johnny Truant edits the manuscript, and it comes to have an effect on him like the house has on its explorers. Johnny has horrible nightmares, leaves his West Coast home, and travels to Virginia where the imagined house stood and where Johnny’s mother was confined in a mental institution. His narrative ends with a story of an infant born with holes in its brain, a metaphor for Johnny’s disintegration and, perhaps, monstrousness. A few pages later, on page 528, the book proper ends, though it is followed by 150 pages of “Exhibits.”

Even without the last 150 pages, House of Leaves is a monstrosity: from the beginning, footnotes displacing text, footnotes nesting in footnotes, commentaries interrupting narrative, blank spaces, black spaces, mirror writing, upside down or skewed texts, crossed-out texts, and lists—many very long lists. Like Moby-Dick, to which Danielewski refers on page three, and like the labyrinth that House of Leaves describes, the novel swallows and literally disorients the reader forced to shift the book around into different reading positions. Danielewski quotes Heidegger and Freud on the uncanny, the feeling of being “not-at-home,” and this is the use—and abuse—value of House of Leaves.

In The Monstrous and the Marvelous, Rikki Ducornet says “the monstrous is unsettling because it appears to belong nowhere but its own boundless category.” This too describes House of Leaves. All of Danielewski’s numerous references to the minotaur are lined through in the text. If there is no monster in the novel, the text itself is the monster and it appears boundless.

From Navidson and Zampano, to Truant and Danielewski, House of Leaves seems an all-male parasitical production with mostly male hosts—Nabokov, Borges, Escher, Melville, Poe. But if Johnny Truant has invented the whole text, as is possible, then a woman may be responsible for the monstrosity of his creation. When Johnny was four, his mother Pelafina spilled boiling oil on his arms, thus deforming Johnny. When he was seven, she may have tried to strangle him. Shortly thereafter, Pelafina is placed in a mental institution and Johnny’s father dies. Among the “Exhibits” of the last 150 pages are more than 50 pages of Pelafina’s asylum letters to Johnny. In one, she warns him of her “questionable genetic bequeathal.” Increasingly disordered in their style and in their format, Pelafina’s sheaf of letters may be the formal model for Johnny’s House of Leaves.

Danielewski surrounds the letters with seemingly random elements that extend the monstrosity of the book proper: sections entitled “bits” and “pieces,” poems, collages, epigraphs, polaroids, photographs of manuscript pages, delayed epigraphs. The final section is a thirteen-page index. It is the supreme list, metaphor for the novel as a whole—an abyss—and a non-whole, a non-organic construct.

Danielewski has said that he believed his core audience would be “younger readers used to working with web pages with multiple texts,” and he said he persuaded his publisher to serialize House of Leaves on the Internet. This is an interesting experiment because the future medium for monstrous fictions may well be electronic, where space is cheap and distribution can be world-wide. It’s through the Internet that Danielewski created a large and loyal band of readers sometimes referred to as a cult.

Of recent works featured on Monsterpieces, House of Leaves is closest in its uncanny monstrosity to Helen DeWitt’s Your Name Here. Not her obsessive self-reference but her book’s formal derangements and stylistic variations. Danielewski would use these deconstructive—or construction-resisting methods—in The Familiar, but the methods are more radical and more relevant to the psychological matter in House of Leaves. Its disorder creates a paradoxical density, as if the abyss in the plot of the novel extended out to make it a black hole into which all of its elements were being sucked and concentrated. In the extreme emotions it treats and elicits, House of Leaves is similar to Solenoid. That novel’s several descriptions of horror beneath some buildings in Bucharest may even have been influenced by Danielewski’s abyss.

I say all this knowing the danger that once you have read House of Leaves, you may depart Monsterpieces saying to yourself, “After this, who needs all those recent or earlier novels on the site?” Maybe think of the earlier ones as interesting forerunners, the recent ones as supplements. House of Leaves is intensely philosophical and psychological and metafictional, but doesn’t have the political leverage of big novels by Pynchon, DeLillo, Vollmann, Coover, Powers, and Ellmann. Or even The Familiar. But for pure and excessive monsterpiece monstrosity you can’t beat House of Leaves . . . unless you want to go even further back and re-read Moby-Dick.

Someone I know, but didn’t know me very well, told me I should read Mircea Cartarescu’s 639-page novel Solenoid (translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter) for Monsterpieces. The book is full of monsters like the “teratological” museum the narrator/protagonist visits: “adolescents with two sexes, androgynes with conical breasts and purple penises, a uterus sliced open to reveal the infant that seemed to threaten you with its fist” and “countless other effigies of human unhappiness,” all functioning as the “counterweight” . . . “to the sunlit side of the world.” That last also describes the weighty Solenoid.

Cartarescu’s narrator, a native of Bucharest writing in the mid 80s, says early on that he doesn’t fear “beastly monsters,” only the “void, the nothing, the unseen.” But the narrator continually has monsters on his mind. He uses “monstrous” to describe his body, his dreams, strange mechanisms he discovers, ruined buildings outside his room, the universe, the imagination of the Creator. He believes we face a long line of monsters after death. Poe, Carroll, and Nabokov are “illuminated monsters” because of their interest in young girls. Worst are the “absolute monsters, monsters of the psyche” that appear even in daylight. One exhibit in that museum mentioned above is the exceedingly long penis—a “veiny monstrosity”—of a dead bandit named Terente. On the penis is a “tattoo of a long and flowery obscenity.” I wondered if the penis was a witty metafictional metaphor of the lengthy, small-print Solenoid.

Cartarescu takes a monstrous rhetorical risk with his obsessive and hyperbolic narrator who early on discusses the attraction of a magnet and the repulsion of two magnets brought near each other. A solenoid is a device using magnetic force. The first half of Solenoid repels, true to the masochistic/aggressive persona of its narrator. Some of the second half attracts, and I’ll explain why. But just so you know what and how much you will need to survive (or skim), I’ll describe the first half in detail.

The narrator admits to what he calls “anomalies” as he writes his autobiography over several years. “Anomalies” is one of his few understatements in this encyclopedia of exaggeration, and I wondered if the word was the narrator’s or the translator’s euphemism for “abnormalities.” The never-named narrator resents being born, mourns a twin brother who died at one, dislikes being dressed as a girl for several years, repeatedly describes being traumatized by simply being a child, suffers multiple health problems, hates his body and his father, obsessively reads every kind of book, and has no friends. And all this is just while he is living with his parents. Then, in his more recent past, and in the present of his writing he has a paranoid imagination and dreams that exceed it. Many, many dreams from childhood on that he recorded in his diary and is now retelling in this “notebook” that is Solenoid but not, he insists, a novel. Since an epic poem he wrote was mocked by fellow writing students, the narrator mocks literature and prizes only investigations of “reality.” Maybe that should be in double quotes because the narrator’s reality (once amusingly misprinted as “realty”) is quite obviously distorted or clearly imagined and is presented in a style of too-late-Romantic decadence, not obscene like the penis tattoo but “flowery,” florid, prolix, and abstruse. He often piles on adjectives as in my last sentence. Without any apparent irony, the narrator dismisses earlier proponents of dream revelations—such as Poe—because they “often wrote too affectedly and poorly.”

Solenoid has numerous early references to nineteenth-century and twentieth-century European masters of surreal horror and hyperreal despair with Kafka most often mentioned. But Solenoid kept reminding me of the American who did that material first—Poe—so I was happy to see him name-checked in the novel. Reading the first half of the book is like reading Poe’s collected stories, including his pseudo-science essay “Eureka,” over and over and over. Even the detective stories because the narrator thinks of himself as a cosmic investigator. Throw in Poe’s essay on “animal magnetism” that discusses galvanic electricity dictating human activity. Poe was a hoaxer and parodist. Could the frequency of the monstrous in Solenoid make it a parody of the doomed American parodist? And a send-up of those European imagineers of emotional pain and intellectual suffering? That would be a monster anti-literary project for sure, but maybe too narrow to be a monsterpiece.

Solenoid has a sequence of events over a few years but not really a plot. Other humans are caricatured by the narrator, but he is the only character. Time is flexible. The narrator gives two different birthdates, but he appears to be in his mid 30s in the years of the book’s present. Space is also flexible. The house where the poor narrator lives has, he says, an uncountable number of rooms. Bucharest is like a Gothic fiction with dark threatening streets, decaying houses, run-down schools, abandoned factories with mysterious objects, dangerous gypsies. The narrator’s home is built over a solenoid producing energy that somehow allows his lover and him to float above the bed when having sex. In a way, the narrator’s abstraction and paranoia have him almost always figuratively floating above and looking down on the city, his life, and the lives of his colleagues at the school where he teaches children he fears. Come to think of it, he fears everything now that, like the fetal and fearful narrator of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” he is born.

I love Poe a little at a time, his ability to deceive readers and engage psychoanalysts. But the kinds of information that move Poe’s characters and stories and Solenoid—the stuff of delusions, nightmares, and fantasies—are not (in my not so humble opinion) the kinds of information that give contemporary monsterpiece fictions their intellectual weight and substantial effect, their relations to masterpieces. Consider the difference between Poe’s only novel, the sea-faring fantasy/hoax Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the cetology-dense Moby-Dick. Of works on this Substack, the two Elkins novels about crazed scientists are probably closest to Solenoid. Though obsessed and sometimes manic, Elkins’ protagonists are grounded in contemporary scientific information and exist within social circumstances that keep their narrations from floating off, like Cartarescu’s, into the realm of dark fantasy. In monsterpieces—with yet again Gravity’s Rainbow as the best example—varieties of actual specialized information cause complexity and ambiguity—and uncertainty in the minds of their characters. The mind of Solenoid’s narrator is not uncertain. It is fixated, horrified by its certainty that human life is monstrous. Trapped within this mind for a long while, readers may identify his delusions, sympathize with his desperate sadness, understand why Cartarescu might want to create such a hyper-sensitive character as a critique of Ceaușescu’s Marxist and materialist Romania, but ultimately the protagonist is—for this reader— alien, not just alienated from everyday life but like a literal alien dropped down from some other planet and searching for a way to escape earth (without dying). The irony is that this tortured alien with the overwrought prose is like the energy-producing but unreliable solenoids around Bucharest. After a long assault of wired prose by a solitary narrator, I thought of “solenoid” as a portmanteau of “sole” and “paranoid” even though Cartarescu’s title identifies the work as science fiction.

Cartarescu doubles down on the risk of creating an alien character by choosing an alienating method of excess. Throughout Solenoid but particularly in the first half that method is repetition. Cararescu repeats situations, observations, interpretations, hallucinations, and other -ations in a monstrous display of obsessive compulsion. These repetitions are appropriate for the narrator but of limited artistic functionality after about 300 pages. Repetition reaches its extreme nadir with seven pages filled with only the word “help.” Writing his notebook comes to be the purpose of the narrator’s life, but he states he has no interest in possible readers, so he goes on and on, with apparent impunity. But readers may not. They may not repeatedly accept the gambit of early repulsion. As the responsible proprietor of Monsterpieces, I pressed on and on to the end through a surfeit of passages like the following, which is a mere excerpt from a longer disquisition:

“Why, in hypnagogic moments, when we are lying in bed between two worlds, incompletely free from the dream of reality and incompletely captured by the reality of dreams, do frightening monsters and visions of hell rise from this room? Fangs, gaping jaws, eyes injected with hate, giant crab claws and venomous scorpion tails, devils and dragons and terrible beasts flood our incendiary visual field, hordes coming from the depths of forests and the cores of stars and the ends of the earth, in order to tear out mind to pieces.”

[Don’t tell anyone I said so, but at times Cartarescu sets off in italics the narrator’s dreams, which allows for easy skimming or skipping.]

In the novel’s second half, attractions do periodically break through the narrator’s Sturm und Drang. He describes a group called the Picketists who stage protests against mortality. “Down With Death” one of their signs says. It’s a populist movement that predated our current billionaires’ immortality projects. [The novel was published in Romania in 2015.]. The narrator also spends numerous pages describing in, for him, almost documentary fashion the many months he spent in a tuberculosis sanitarium, a mini Magic Mountain in which nature does not horrify him and he makes a friend. The narrator even gives some pages to a few months of happy life with his bride. The flashbacks may not be monsterpiece material, but they do partly explain the melodramatically morose earlier sections.

It’s in lengthy sections praising the books of intellectual forerunners and influences that Solenoid most resembles the varieties of scientific theory and dense information found in, for examples, Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, the novels of Richard Powers, and a chaos theory-influenced work not discussed on Monsterpieces—Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men. Cartarescu and his narrator devote relatively objective pages to the work of Charles Howard Hinton who coined the term “tesseract” and theorized a possible fourth dimension—and even more solid pages to the Romanian psychologist Nicolae Vaschide who worked with Binet and who wrote books investigating the phenomenon of dreams (before he developed schizophrenia). Both scientists earn respect from the narrator because their works attempt to escape the mundane and mortal reality he finds monstrous. For the narrator, Hinton and Vaschide are like solenoids: they offer intellectual elevation, floating above the quotidian like the sexual elevation the narrator has experienced. Even if the narrator is not in his right mind, Cartarescu can use his reading as information to suggest that transcending the “saddest city on earth” might be possible. Is that a good idea? Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow would say transcendence is a desperate and destructive delusion, a judgment perhaps recognized at the novel’s end when the whole of Bucharest horrifically rises above the earth.

Also near the end of Solenoid are many pages about the Voynich manuscript, a copy of which is given to the narrator. The manuscript is a real fifteenth-century hybrid document of more than 200 pages of undecipherable writing and strange illustrations. [It’s interesting enough to read about on Wikipedia; one theory is that it was a hoax]. In the seventeenth century, the narrator says the manuscript was “new evidence of the world’s baroque monstrosity.” Cartarescu doesn’t do much with the manuscript his narrator calls “monstrous.” It is a model of the world as unknowable cipher for the narrator. But not really a model of Solenoid because, despite its many monsters and existential conundrums, the novel is too knowable, too repeatedly reported and explicated by its narrator, too similar to other literary works of disgust and despair. Cartarescu’s repeated use of “monstrous” and “monster” is one indicator of the novel’s knowable reductivism despite its apparent multifariousness.

Before Cartarescu’s apocalyptic finale, he provides one last solenoid-enabled tour de force or farce when the narrator agrees to be strapped into a solenoid in order to join the kingdom of mites. Even these extremely small beings are described as “monstrous.” Down in miteland, the narrator, now himself a mite, understands mites’ bodies, their ways, and their “tenderness and abjection.” Among the mites, he becomes a Jesus figure who is misunderstood and eventually torn apart—but fortunately the solenoid can save him, bring him back from his mission, perhaps a better large being, one who appreciates his new lover and daughter and is therefore given an unlikely happy ending by Cartarescu. At the end of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the protagonist and a few shipmates in an open boat are saved (we know since Pym survived to tell the tale) by a mysterious huge white figure, Poe’s deus ex machina surprise happy ending. I’m not claiming influence, just saying to have some suspicion and a sense of humor if you choose to read Solenoid.

Cartarescu has reportedly said that he never revised Solenoid. That’s easy to believe. I’m a sucker for imitative form, but given Cartarescu’s narrator and materials I finally found Solenoid a monstrosity of repetition but not a monsterpiece because I came to believe that authorial self-indulgence, rather than formal and intellectual ambition, was responsible for much of the novel’s excess and length. Cartarescu several times alludes to the non-linear scientist Benoit Mandelbrot, describer of fractal organization. In decades to come, scholars may be able to train A.I. to uncover elegant and exquisite and unrecognized—and even profound—fractal orders in Solenoid. I won’t be around to quibble with the scholars, but they will still have to defend an overheated and overextended Poe-tic prose. In a way, this science fiction is an historical fiction treating a slightly removed past (the 1970s and 1980s) in rather far removed style that blurs the impoverishment of Romanians in the decades depicted.

Judgments such as mine here exist on a sliding scale. From Solenoid, I slid off. But if you think Solenoid might be just the kind of novel that will keep you fascinated with Romanian abjection, you can find online much more informative and sympathetic reviews than this short notice. The reviews are consistently positive, so my judgment of Solenoid is a minority position. It could, of course, be wrong. Another possibility is that reviewers—when assigned a huge and extremely literary novel, particularly one critical of a Communist tyrant—compare such a work to the usual run of what I call “midfiction” or “commercialit” and leap on the rave train. Here at Monsterpieces, I compare long literary novels to the best long literary novels. Solenoid is definitely long like that exhibited penis, but comes up short in performance, in originality. To my surprise, none of the reviewers I read thought Solenoid might be a parody, a hoax. If it is, Cartarescu was laughing, as it used to be said before direct deposits, all the way to the bank with his 75,000-euro Dublin Literary Award.

Thinking about hopeful monsters and finding no monstrosities to write about in August, I decided to post this review of Don DeLillo’s Underworld though it is twenty years outside my planned ten-year range. I’ve considered it the best American monsterpiece since Gravity’s Rainbow, but Underworld ends with the word “peace.” For that and other reasons, maybe the novel is a hopeful monster, certainly more hopeful than Gravity’s Rainbow with its rocket bearing down on America. Books have been written about Underworld, but if you haven’t read it maybe this relatively brief review in the Atlantic will pique your interest—in August or some other month.

Underworld

“I Don’t Want to Talk About It” read the engraved card that Don DeLillo handed me in Athens in 1979, after I’d crossed seven time zones to interview him. “It” was his youth, growing up with Italian immigrant parents in the Bronx. Even about his books DeLillo was secretive. “When you try to unravel something you’ve written, you belittle it in a way,” he said in the interview. “It was created as a mystery, in part.” Though still suspicious of talk, DeLillo has stood up to accept awards for his previous three novels: the American Book Award for White Noise (1985), the Irish Times-Aer Lingus Prize for Libra (1988), and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II (1991). DeLillo may again have to appear before a crowd, to say a few words about Underworld--for this huge novel, which reveals the secrets of Nick Shay, a middle-aged Italian-American from the Bronx, is an underhistory of the cultural repressions of mid-century America.

In 1982 DeLillo told another interviewer that Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis were the contemporary American novelists who “set the standard.” The author of ten previous novels, DeLillo has now produced a masterwork to rank with Gravity’s Rainbow and J R. Like them, Underworld is an encyclopedia of native delusions and a handbook of authorial ingenuities. Revisiting the American bedrock of his younger, underclass life, DeLillo has also returned to his early artistic influences to give Underworld an experimental, breakout vigor. Films by Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini, progressive jazz, and Abstract Expressionism--rather than literature--were the young DeLillo’s guides out of the Bronx, his Jesuit education, and a corporate job. In its auteurist control, dissonant solos, and spatial form, Underworld resets the standard for those fiction-writing prodigies--David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen--who count DeLillo as a father figure.

Lest these claims and comparisons frighten off newcomers to DeLillo’s world, Underworld offers ease of access, like hell, and a leisurely tour unified by a dark-woods wanderer, like Dante’s Inferno. The novel begins with a fifty-page prologue titled “The Triumph of Death,” which retells one of baseball’s greatest games--the Giants-Dodgers playoff on October 3, 1951, the day Bobby Thomson hit his “shot heard ‘round the world” and the Soviet Union exploded its second nuclear bomb. For Nick Shay, a dejected Dodgers fan, Thomson’s home run ended innocence and marked a violent future. For America, DeLillo suggests, the Cold War elicited fake innocence, the repression of dread, and the expression of substitute emotions.

In Part I the novel shifts to 1992 and Phoenix, where Nick, a globe-trotting executive at Waste Containment, lives. Now in his late fifties, Nick has paid $34,500 for Thomson’s home-run ball and uses it as a charm against late-night panic attacks. Traveling in the western desert where his brother, Matty, once worked as a weapons designer, Nick visits a former lover from the Bronx, the painter Klara Sax, who is transforming junked B-52s into a gigantic art installation. She prompts him to meditate on his present and to face shades from his past.

Nick considers his youth to be hazardous waste. Perhaps DeLillo shares that feeling--he has adopted a risky approach-avoidance narrative structure. From 1992 Underworld moves backward through five more parts set in earlier time periods until DeLillo rewinds to the Bronx in 1951. While delving into the private lives of Nick and Klara in each part, DeLillo takes the further risk of giving equal or greater time to the voices of their relatives, friends, and contacts, and to historical figures such as Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover.

Reverse chronology and multiple perspectives work to create DeLillo’s underhistory. Digging into the secrets of Nick and Klara, we encounter public revelations of earlier decades--such as Watergate and Hoover’s sexual orientation--and, more important, what DeLillo implies are the actual but unseen undersides of the periods he surveys. For example, Part II, set in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, is dominated by televised tape of a highway murder and a serial killer, a nightmare become media. Operating daily and perhaps more subversively is the characters’ longing for miracles--a pornography of salvation. In Part IV, set in 1974, subway graffiti and pop art bloom, while systems analysts like Matty sit in basement bunkers locking politics and economics into coded information.

After DeLillo unearths 1951, an epilogue springs us back up to 1992 and sends Nick to an underground test site in Kazakhstan where radioactive waste is atomized with bomb technology. In its largest outlines Underworld is about the nuclear age–when governments exploded weapons aboveground and citizens burrowed into bomb shelters. Since 1971 and his first novel, Americana, DeLillo has taken sometimes blunt instruments to the age’s cultural excrescences: television in Americana, sports in End Zone, rock music in Great Jones Street, big science in Ratner’s Star, and fascination with terrorism in many of his other novels. In Underworld, DeLillo gives his most profound subject--apocalypse--his most subtle treatment, using all the novelist’s devices to examine nuclear malaise and compose a narrative of its displacements. DeLillo awards readers a peace dividend--millennial hope.

Klara Sax’s spray-painted B-52s express that hope, and are one of several metaphors that represent the ambition and methods of Underworld. Discussing the scale of her installation, which she calls Long Tall Sally, Klara explains that her title comes from a nose decoration on one of the planes, the hand-painted picture of a young woman named after the song. Klara insists on the personal note, and on the pleasures of color. So does DeLillo. The novel has numerous hand-drawn minor characters--the African-American Manx Martin, father of the boy who first owned the home-run ball; Marvin Lundy, the aging Jewish-American memorabilia dealer who investigates the ball’s provenance; and colorful celebrities such as Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor. From all of them, as DeLillo alternates personal and public realms, we get the pleasures of speech that sounds overheard.

Watts Towers, the huge Los Angeles construct of found objects assembled by an Italian immigrant, is also a metaphor in and for Underworld. Visited separately by Nick and Klara, the monument of rubbish is “riddled with epiphanies.” Trained by Jesuits to find secret connections, personally and scientifically detached, Nick intuits the bomb as sacred and American culture as landfill in the abyss opened by the bomb. More outgoing and more secular in her vision, Klara records the jagged, crazed beauties of the same American dump. Like eyes in a whale’s head, which look in opposite directions, these two characters see everything that DeLillo needs to see through.

A third internal metaphor, a film titled Unterwelt, which DeLillo attributes to Eisenstein, reminds readers that even the most profound epiphanies have undersides--and that for DeLillo a novel should be “a mystery, in part,” a world to explore but never wholly comprehend. In the film a mad scientist “in some netherland crevice” shoots an atomic-ray gun at “cripples and mutants,” the “actors trailing their immense bended shadows” behind them. In the novel the shadows are also verbal--for example, DeLillo’s reference to the 1927 gangster film Underworld. Like his punning title--which includes Dante, the Mafia, hollowed earth, humankind’s sediment, ghetto life, underground politics, the subconscious, and linguistic roots--the novel piles up undertexts so dense and multiple that a first reading is only a test bore.

“I had not thought death had undone so many,” Eliot translates Dante early in The Waste Land. The wonder of Underworld is its prodigality, its breadth and depth. But unlike Unterwelt--and like the bombers, Watts Towers, and Eliot’s collage--Underworld does not move. Characters travel from place to place and perform sometimes violent actions, but the novel doesn’t proceed along a plot line. Instead the reader moves through the book, connecting the pieces the author has arranged. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” a voice says at the end of The Waste Land. DeLillo’s fragments are larger, reveal more about sympathetic characters, and more concretely represent their time than Eliot’s shards from all history, but Underworld does require an archaeologist’s patience. Not all the pieces are equally interesting, but detritus can be put aside for later examination. The final words of The Waste Land are “Shantih shantih shantih,” the “Peace that passeth understanding.” The last word of Underworld is “Peace.”

Now that the world has global peace and local wars, DeLillo has made peace with his past. In 1979 he told me about his father’s wearing paper shoes when he arrived from Italy--and then cut this revelation from the transcript. I thought then that he didn’t want to brag about the distance he had come as a writer. Reading Underworld now, I think DeLillo has spent decades wondering what artistic achievement could equal his parents’ accomplishment of life in a strange new world where, in Nick’s mother’s words, “family was an art”--perhaps Klara’s painted bombers; maybe this novel. Courageous, ingenious, and demanding, Underworld is a book to be talked about--by critics and readers, if not by its author--for years to come.

In his preface to A Table for Fortune, Vollmann says he’s not so much “against” the CIA as the “overreach” of presidents who have ignored or politicized the agency. Between the writing of my review and its publication, Trump started his war against Iran. Early journalistic reports suggest that he discounted briefings by his intelligence agencies and decided to begin the war based on—he has said—his “feeling” an attack by Iran was “imminent.” We may never know what the CIA told Trump about Iran or the truth of why he went to war, but his action, for various reasons much discussed, does seem to be the kind of executive “overreach” Vollmann catalogues in his novelistic history that includes the first Trump administration. Trump is mentioned in the novel and review, but we—the Book Review and I—decided not to insert into the review a paragraph like the one you are reading. While the novel and maybe the review of it are prescient, neither was influenced by 2026 events.

For subscribers to Monsterpieces, here are two teaser paragraphs from my review:

Some of the book’s features resemble those of other hefty and heroically chancy American novels — the documentary experiments of Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.” trilogy, the fragmentary logorrhea of Gaddis’s “JR,” the paranoia in Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” the hyper-patriotic voice of Uncle Sam in Coover’s “The Public Burning,” the descriptions of tedious government bureaucracy in Wallace’s “The Pale King.”

If you’ve been defeated by one or more of these books, “be not afeard,” as Caliban says in “The Tempest.” “A Table for Fortune” continually pulls you back in with the gravity and magnetism of Sept. 11. From his early pages detailing the chaos of 2001, Vollmann keeps the attacks in our sights throughout, even as he works back to Vietnam and then through the decades of faulty intelligence and executive malfeasance that caused the catastrophe — and others afterward.

Below the link to my review of A Table for Fortune is another link—to my review of Vollmann’s National Book Award-winning 2005 novel Europe Central, which is partly about intelligence and communications in Eastern Europe during World War II. The protagonist of A Table for Fortune begins his career at the CIA on the East German desk, and the new novel can be thought of as a continuation of Europe Central, a relationship I could have discussed with some of those months and more space.

In the novel and in recent interviews, Vollmann has said he is terminally ill with cancer. I am pleased that the review is being published now. As I say in the review, A Table for Fortune is a worthy pyramid.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/books/review/table-for-fortune-william-vollmann.html?searchResultPosition=1

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/books/review/europe-central.html

In The Coast of Everything, some characters in different and distant eras are seeking the source of stories, all stories. Other characters, also in different eras and places, are telling stories. And yet other characters in several futures are attempting to suppress all stories. One of the telling characters is named Sherry Zade, and The Thousand and One Nights is mentioned in several of the many fictions that make up this 749-page novel—or collection of stories.

The Thousand and One Nights has no single source or author. The versions are compendia from different eras, cultures, and authors. The versions are also, I found when reading about them, wildly various in the genres and narrations the books contain. One even includes, like The Coast of Everything, science fiction. Some of the stories have concrete relations; most do not. To imitate the Nights as a model of creative multiplicity and still, maybe, manage a novel must have required from Stitch something like the long heroic effort of Scheherazade.

One method of connecting some stories in the Nights was embedding or nesting, and Stitch uses this device throughout The Coast of Everything. I found that the often unlikely handoffs from one story to the next diminished the plausibility and effect of even those stories set in something like a realistic present. But the embedding does create a challenging paper chase for literary detectives. If you follow numerous segues and clues all the way to page 654 (my ARC}, you will find that Sherry Zade, the genius daughter of the founder of the Zade information and media empire, is the probable source of Stitch’s first story—and maybe all the rest. This is not a spoiler because of the “probable” and “maybe.” Elsewhere, Stitch offers clues that two (I think) other characters may be the source. Or maybe there is no single source besides Stitch who, by the way, incorporates his own previous work into this new book.

The Sherry Zade revelation comes at the end of the book’s longest story, a contemporary tale about a bumbling Irish private eye named Liam who is hired by one of the Zade twin sisters to find her sibling. This “Tale of Three Voyages” is 324 pages and moves Liam from California to Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt, three locales where he undergoes or imagines or dreams some improbable, even fantastic tests of his gumshoe resolve. The tale has some parallels with the history-rooted missing-heiress-in-a-foreign-land story in Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, but Stitch’s story is an over-the-top and over-long parody of both detective fiction and what might be called “exotic quest” stories with their globs of travelogue. The tale also has a long and awkwardly inserted Zade backstory told by the twins’ mother. Unfortunately, the “Tale of Three Voyages” occupies almost half of The Coast of Everything.

Sherry’s last word takes readers with good memories back to the second word of Stitch’s first story that is untitled and may, therefore, be the frame tale of The Coast of Everything. Here a young woman named Clara, an invalid like Sherry, is being carried up a mountain to see, we find much later, a glasshouse from which Clara can view the world or replicas of it. The era appears to be the late 19^th century. To amuse the people carrying her, Clara tells “The Tale of the Enchanted Road,” set, perhaps, in our too near future when literature is outlawed and when stories are being mass produced and used, apparently, to surface highways or propel cars. The tale has a plot featuring two resisters to book destruction--Billy a journalist and Vince a bellhop—and has the most satiric point of all the stories in The Coast of Everything. It’s almost “realism” is somewhat undermined, though, at the end when Vince tells Billy “The Tale of the Porter and the Gin” about waking up one morning and finding the ghost of Charles Dickens in his room.

Stitch’s Dickens, a drunk who speaks like a contemporary bro, reads a manuscript by Vince, dismisses it, and insists that Vince listen to his newly written “Tale of the Isle of Truth,” which has a small verbal connection to the tale about Clara. At 210 pages, “Isle of Truth” is the second longest story in The Coast of Everything and required astonishing imagination from Dickens because it is set in a far-off sci-fi future that extends the theme of story suppression…and begins the theme of source investigation. A few characters are exiled to an island where they review a governmental archive to see if there are stories (“toxins”) to be removed. In an act of modest resistance, one character is searching for the “paradigm” of stories. After he is relieved of his duties, his daughter listens to fragments of a transmission from a distant past or very distant future about a man searching for the “Stone,” the bedrock and source of all stories including the ones held sacred.

Like the detective story, “The Isle of Truth” has a plenitude of dramatic events and plot twists, along with Dickensian melodrama. There are betrayals, romances, a murder, two apparent suicides, a plucky female protagonist, and a villain described as “monstrous.” The ghost of Dickens must have been reading modern fiction (his story mixes third-person, first-person, and stream of consciousness perspectives and styles)—and science fiction for help with the embedded transmission that reminded me of Poe’s hoax novel, The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym, which revealed a polar truth or mystery on the coast of the known world.

In the nested transmission story, the searcher recounts his adventures to his mentally ill wife and then somewhat improbably segues backwards in time to “The Tale of the Three Voyages,” the detective story that takes the reader to Sherry Zade and eventually to further short pieces told by Clara that conclude earlier stories with mostly happy endings and give The Coast of Everything a circular structure. The endings imply that Clara is the source, but maybe she is invented by Sherry. A detective within the stories would want to know who the party guilty of all the storytelling was, but, like The Thousand and One Nights, Stitch’s book has several possible perpetrators of fictions.

For Scheherazade, the stakes of storytelling were existential. In several of Stitch’s longest stories, the stakes are very high for characters who write or disseminate or just possess stories: imprisonment, exile, or execution depending on the time frame. And yet for this reader the stakes of The Coast of Everything are low because of its fantasy genre. Even to the story supposedly written by that old sentimentalist Dickens, I had little response beyond “Yup, I see what you’re doing here, Stitch.” I’m not sure why. Maybe because the plot is repetitive. Perhaps because the situations and characters are too distant, or the author lacks the craft or disposition to bring them near. A character in the story says, “Recognizing patterns is what I’m good at after all.” Because of the book’s formal and stylistic artifice, I was concentrating on the patterns, was not feeling immersed in the stories. I had a similar reaction to another highly imaginative, Thousand Nights-influenced series of stories, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse. But those stories are short, and Stitch’s are long, requiring more engagement to succeed independent of the patterns.

Stitch partly anticipates my complaint in a passage about his detective Liam:

He was becoming acquainted with a cast of characters all of whom he found unrelatable and none of whom he could bring himself to like. Why then was he so sure that his problem wasn’t with any of that—it was with . . . the perspective. With the storyteller. But which one?

Liam is not the brightest bulb, so maybe his problem—to some extent my problem—is being mocked by Stitch who seems to believe that artifice is evidence of art and that aesthetic risks are proof of the imaginative freedom that The Coast of Everything wants to—and sometimes does—present and celebrate.

Scale may be more of a problem than Liam’s “perspective.” If the two long tales had been published as separate novels, the fictions might have managed more friction with the reader, more emotional and then intellectual rub. But the fictionality of the long tales is magnified by their context, their inclusion in The Coast of Everything. Stitch seems to want unfettered imagination and fettered readers. But I was tied to The Coast of Everything mostly because I wanted to see how it turned out. Not how the stories within it concluded but how the monument-sized aesthetic object Stitch was creating turned out. His first novel, Lake of Urine—with its wacky characters, one of whom has eight husbands—was an absurdist satire of village and city life, a punchy fiction that landed its jabs and moved on to the next flurry, keeping the reader curious about what foolery the characters would be up to next. The Coast of Everything is more grandiose, less consistently compelling.

One of Stitch’s major and representative characters is repeatedly described as a monster, but I don’t believe Stitch tried and failed to write a monsterpiece, a work using length and unusual means to produce a profound cultural effect, a work such as Gravity’s Rainbow or The Public Burning that mix Stitch’s fantastic with the historical and, ultimately, the political. Monsterpieces like these two novels are imaginative interventions in culture central. The Coast of Everything is more an imaginative manifestation, not central but peripheral, coastal. Stitch might well differ and assert that imagination is central, the fundamental human power that creates the various cultures in the novel and our own. His most heroic searcher of the source ventures deep into the anthropological past where he finds the edge—the coast—of the world where life after death is imagined. Even in this Arcadia, though, is imagination’s possible guilt: natives engaging in child sacrifice (or mercy killings) and suicide.

Stitch recognized that imagination can be monstrous, but he still chose to be its defender, be the source—the architect and builder--of a multi-storey, multi-story work, not so much a monstrosity as an imaginarium, a fictional “folly,” a non-functional but entertaining architectural form he refers to near the book’s end. Stitch has a crazed artist—who has built a mountaintop glasshouse from which he claims visitors such as Clara can see the world—say, “`Did you really think I’d content myself with a glasshouse?’ . . . `A folly?’” Most of the worlds Stitch presents can’t be seen from a mountaintop. For him, “non-functional” is the essential quality of storytelling. The enemies of stories in the novel first want to make stories functional—operational, pragmatic—and then want to expunge stories because they are functional in a deeper way, encouraging freedom of consciousness. Sixty pages before that reference to the folly, Stitch throws a voice hectoring the reader to “cleanse your mind of these follies, these heroes and villains and their fanciful tales,” but that voice is one last gasp of suppression. In a Substack post, Stitch calls the books on bookstore shelves “follies.” Nevertheless, he constructed the extravagantly varied folly that is The Coast of Everything.

Pynchon describes a “classic folly” in Gravity’s Rainbow:

Whig eccentricity is carried in this house to most unhealthy extremes. The rooms are triangular, spherical, walled up into mazes. Portraits, studies in genetic curiosity, gape and smirk at you from every vantage. The W.C.s contain frescoes of Clive and his elephants stomping the French at Plassy, fountains that depict Salome with the head of John (water gushing out ears, nose, and mouth), floor mosaics in which are tessellated together different versions of Homo Monstrosus, an interesting preoccupation of the time—cyclops, humanoid giraffe, centaur repeated in all directions.

This passage, part of a much longer description, could be a metaphor for the imaginative excesses and cultural penetration of Gravity’s Rainbow. Stitch’s folly novel is less grotesque, less threatening, less monstrous.

Stitch has been writing monthly Substack essays about The Coast of Everything. In his November (2025) post, he says:

It’s a failure of a book because it’s a book of failures, of bleeds and leaks and lapses and breaches, remembrances and forgetful redundancies. It was in its nature from the off to end in failure just as I suppose it is in mine, and in the nature of all quixotic efforts—which is to say, all art.

Stitch is too harsh on himself. I admire his ambition and respect his small publisher’s investment in such a big book. Pynchon ends his description of the folly with a view from the outside: “from a distance no two observers, no matter how close they stand, see quite the same building in that orgy of self-expression, added to by each succeeding owner.” This “observer” of The Coast of Everything hopes it’s a success for other “observers,” those readers who are more likely to enjoy a traditional folly—fantastical heterogeneity and whimsical connectivity, complicated mazes substituting for amazing complexity—and who want fictions—like Scheherazade’s but unlike Pynchon’s and Coover’s—that won’t interfere with a good night’s sleep. Her stories did delay and ultimately tame a monster. I wish I had faith that Stitch’s fanciful stories in The Coast of Everything could have a similar effect on the current American enemies of books, literature, and imagination.

https://openlettersreview.com/posts/rasputin-swims-the-potomac-by-ben-fountain

“Make the Novel Great Again,” Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha

Welcome Trump Sky Alpha. It is the Trump novel I’ve been waiting for: the novel I asked young writers to compose in Harpooning Donald Trump; the novel Coover and Pynchon and DeLillo (yes, “and,” all of them together) would have written last century; a “systems novel” that places Trump in global and historical systems of economics and technology and yet has the plotting and verisimilitude of more narrow realistic novels about Trump by Rushdie, Lethem, Shteyngart, and Lipsyte; a novel that dares to be simultaneously OCD topical and rigorously inventive and left-field profound and wholly accessible; a novel as dense and allusive and self-consciously literary as the sentence you are now finishing.

Trump Sky Alpha begins breathlessly like the paragraph above. After four “zero days” of the Internet, Donald Trump has ordered a “restrained” nuclear strike, World War III has broken out, and the president has gone rogue, piloting his luxury zeppelin — 224 seats, all the first-class amenities, gold everywhere — from the White House to Trump Tower in New York despite dangers from enemy planes. It’s a trip he and “Trump Sky Alpha” used to make every Wednesday, returning on Sunday. Always there was a full house of CEOs, celebrities, foreign lobbyists, the usual sycophants. Think of the zeppelin as Trump’s D.C. hotel in the sky. Also know that Trump zeppelins are all over the world and imitate his weekly flight while their passengers view on YouTube Trump’s monologues on the mother ship.

Like the Trump baby blimp in London, Doten’s invention is inspired, a symbol of Trump the person, a large and retrograde windbag detached from the earth, and representative of his branded empire subject to the fate of the Hindenburg. Doten has studied Trump’s gestures, his syntax and intonations, his tics and quirks, his hair, the praise that Trump demands and that his trapped audience, who pay top prices, provides. In its prodigal detail, high foolery, and rapid run-on pacing, Doten’s opening is, as Trump might say if he read, “fabulous,” a fable and a tour de force (a literal tour forced by the president) that resembles the final outrageous show in Coover’s The Public Burning where Uncle Sam electrocutes the Rosenbergs on a high platform in Times Square to the cheers of Americans as attracted then to performative old-man authoritarianism as Trump’s passengers are now. Risk-averse writers say it’s impossible to satirize Trump. Doten proves them wrong.

After this extended prologue, Doten skips ahead a year and introduces his protagonist, Rachel, a late-thirties tech and media reporter for the old New York Times, now reconstituting itself as a BuzzFeed. For 1/28, the one-year anniversary of World War III, Rachel’s editor asks her to write a piece on “internet humor at the end of the world.” What is left of the government had sent Rachel to a Minnesota data center where she uses drone photographs and facial recognition software to catalogue the dead, which presumably include her wife and daughter somewhere in Brooklyn. Rachel agrees to the Times assignment if her editor will get her out of her morbid job and help her find her family’s bodies. Thus begins a quest like that in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 where Oedipa Maas strives to learn about her presumably dead former lover. To succeed, Oedipa and Rachel must investigate an underground and oppositional communication system.

In Trump Sky Alpha, the government exerts pressure on the quest; they want Rachel to find a crucial Internet password. Like the bereft Oedipa, Rachel sorts through a plethora of possibly random information, what’s left of the Internet, kept in mothballs by USgov. Doten gives Rachel enough backstory with her family to make her a sympathetic character, but she is primarily an agent of the plot and window on the Internet — about which Doten appears to be as expert as Pynchon was about popular culture of the 60’s. Doten knows the Internet’s founding fathers, insider terminologies, architectural systems, and, more importantly for Rachel, its cornycopia [sic] of memes and jokes, photoshops and GIF’s, all of which he adapts to the nuclear apocalypse.

Even while people were dying from radiation (their eyes turn gold, Trump’s favorite color), they were posting on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, arguing on Reddit about the cause of the catastrophe, trying to elicit likes and retweets, pitching for the immortality they believed social media would provide. The posts are heartbreaking, absurdly humorous, and indicative. For Doten, Trump’s election would have been impossible without the degraded discourses — the rampant hate and sentimentality — of the Internet. After it goes down, then comes back for a day, Trump, no longer “restrained,” launches “the big one” from his blimp.

Rachel’s research soon takes her quest out of the Internet morgue. She interviews a dying writer whose novel, entitled The Subversive, may have influenced the Internet assault. And in genre detective fashion, she becomes the captive of the reclusive leader of the Aviary, the organization that caused the Internet to collapse. Here Doten enters the territory of the Unabomber and DeLillo, whose reclusive protagonist in Mao II says novelists have been replaced by terrorists. Doten’s villain “Birdcrash” sounds like the pedantic killers in Cosmopolis and Mao II, part profound in his analysis of Internet economics, part silly in his proposed replacement of the Internet with birds like carrier pigeons, a little tedious in his repetitions, and wholly crazed in his drilling (literally) into Rachel’s skull to change her brain. It was the ascension of Trump, Birdcrash admits late in his lecture to Rachel, that caused the Aviary to act with, as the Intelligence people say, unintended consequences. The password? A reverse spoiler: just as we never hear the actual “crying of Lot 49” at that novel’s end, we don’t know if Rachel ever discovered the password. Maybe Doten has encoded it in this text where chapter headings are enigmatic computer codes.

I realize that my trifecta of literary analogues and possible influences may seem to diminish Doten’s achievement, but I use these eminent novelists as a critical shorthand to describe and emphasize that achievement. I’ve called Coover, Pynchon, and DeLillo “systems novelists” because they were among the first American fiction writers to be influenced by cybernetic systems and because their books are like hard drives, repositories of information (often scientific) that most novelists of their generation wouldn’t include. Because systems novelists often arranged textual collages rather than linear narratives, their books were sometimes called “uneven.” Trump Sky Alpha is jagged. It includes lists of jokes and anniversaries, the synopsis of a novel, a facsimile of an interview, a lecture transcript in italics, first- and third-person narrations, a few visuals of memes and codes.

I’m not crazy about every part of the patchwork. Some of the sci-fi and detective conventions are tired (even when mocked). Birdcrash’s world-historical analysis (similar to Pynchon’s in Gravity’s Rainbow) is vitiated by being ultimately rooted (like Pynchon’s) in child abuse by “Pernicious Pop” (Pynchon’s phrase). And Doten aims to please with a desperate “happy” ending to the Rachel story when she and her editor disappear into the white of snow and the white of the final page.

But countering these late-breaking qualms is a Trump epilogue, now in first-person, twenty brilliant pages of stream of con-man consciousness as ventriloquist Doten works the mouth of his lying dummy while he pilots his empty and damaged zeppelin from New York to Mar-a-Lago. Golden Ivanka has turned against her father, but Trump persuades himself, against all evidence, that four billion dead people worldwide are his greatest success. Doten is no longer joking about the end of the world but scaring us with how it could happen with a gut-trusting boob at the helm. Trump babbles about a “botnet in the cyber.” I’m pretty sure Doten knows that the ancient Greek for “helmsman” is κυβερνήτης (kyvernitis) which gives us “cybernetics” and in modern Greek “governor.” The grand unifying theme of Doten’s multi-form, poly-styled novel is cybernetic or informational impoverishment, what Doten calls “terminal stupidity.” Rachel knows not where her loved ones are buried, news organizations are censored, the government lacks the secret password, the Internet is down and out, and the helmsman steering the airship of state is willfully ignorant, flying blind. Catastrophe ensues. “Catastrophe”: from the Greek for “down” and “turn.

Doten’s invented novel within his novel, The Subversive, had dramatic influence on the world of Trump Sky Alpha. Could its end-of-the-world ending affect impeachment voters in the Senate or public voters in 2020? Doubtful, but for those who want to learn more about the systems that, like the blimp, Trump coasts upon; and for those who desire literature to directly engage the present and not leave Trump to current pundits and future historians; and for those who wish to be entertained even when reading a novel about, in Neil Postman’s phrase, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”; and for those who may have missed Doten’s first novel, The Infernal, which is even more thorough in its takedown of public figures involved with the war in Iraq, Trump Sky Alpha will be a much-appreciated and long-remembered introduction to a young novelist worthy of comparison to those twentieth-century old masters of American politics and literary forms.

Reading the essay again, I’m surprised I didn’t treat Moby-Dick as a monsterpiece, for it’s about monsters—Ahab and the whale—and is in multiple ways a monstrosity, the quality I have found that most puts off readers who dislike Melville’s interruptions of the narrative with scientific facts, cultural observations, and philosophical speculations—all of which make Moby-Dick both a postmodern monsterpiece and an early systems novel. I suppose I put my title on the essay because I believed that if one knew Moby-Dick one wouldn’t need most of the novels that followed it and somehow treated the Trump phenomenon. I’ve read many of them, and only Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha has the knowledge and imagination that can be compared to Melville’s.

My publisher tells me he still sells a copy of Harpooning once in a while. Looking it over now, I think—and I thought then—that the most important essay is “Donald Trump Won’t Read This,” an analysis of his language (and thinking) as pre-literate, the kind found in the Iliad—not that of a person who read books. My favorite piece, though, is a fictional appendix to the essays, a story in which Trump is prepared for the presidency by Uncle Sam in the way that Coover described in The Public Burning. Unlike Trump, I have no profit motive in mentioning Harpooning, for my publisher keeps what he takes in. And I might say, I bring attention to Harpooning Donald Trump at some risk to myself should the Secret Service think I own a harpoon and am a danger to the bloated white monster that controls the ship of state.]

“The Only Book You’ll Ever Need”

Before using this title, I Googled it. Many books made this claim in their titles or subtitles. Books about runes and herbs and investments and guitars and numerous other subjects. But none in the first 50 entries about politics or whales. Wait. New e-book software allows me to see your hand moving to click away from this page. I know you. After teaching literature for 40 years, I know your objections to and resentments of Moby-Dick, your feeling that, in Ahab’s word, it “heaps” you, assaults and maybe even insults you with its mass and information, “insults” because it makes you know more than you thought you ever wanted to know about the “watery part of the world.” Wait now, because I’m about to make it easy on you. No, not to offer one of those humorous “Trump Book Reports” circulating on Twitter, but to say that if you don’t have time to read the books and writers I’ve recommended you can read Moby-Dick, a grand synthesis of the themes and forms discussed in previous essays.

Melville’s book, published in 1851 when whales were being harpooned so Americans could read at night, is an environmental novel for what I’ve called Trump’s “Age of Lead.” Like Coover’s The Public Burning, Moby-Dick is an epic, a democratic book of multiple American voices, ethnicities, and races. It is, like The Iliad, a tragedy with a protagonist who has regressed to a pre-literate obsession with honor and fate. Moby-Dick is also a “systems novel,” probably the first in America, for Melville refers in his “Cetology” chapters about whales and whaling to sciences and technologies, as well as humanistic disciplines, that demonstrate the planetary complexity that his monomaniacal protagonist would ignore or destroy in his quest for power. And for you--for us—Moby-Dick is a comprehensive early warning, a literary response to usurpation, a profound political novel that brings together all these elements--epic and tragedy, ecology and other –ologies—in its story of a ship, the Pequod, sailed to destruction by a tyrant, Ahab, who makes false promises to and emotionally manipulates his sailors in order to avenge what he sees as an insult to his person, his humiliation by the white whale. As he tells first mate Starbuck, “`I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.’” A whaler named for an Indian tribe, the Pequod is also the American ship of state, manned by Indians, blacks, immigrants, and native-born whites--the officers who attempt to check and balance the authoritarian executive, Ahab. But like Coover’s Uncle Sam and America’s Donald Trump, “magnetic” Ahab exploits the passions of the uneducated crew—for profit, for excitement—to prove his mastery and aggrandize himself. To help control his mates and crew, Christian Ahab brings aboard and conspires with Fedallah, a mysterious dark advisor associated with Satan and, for Starbuck, with evil. As the voyage goes on, Ahab alienates other captains he meets, distances himself in royal solitude from the crew, and leaves behind technical aids, such as the log and line, that would detract from the satisfaction of his egocentric mission. Mutiny is impossible, Starbuck decides against assassination, Ahab rages on. Maybe even Donald Trump, the non-reader, knows what happens in the end since the story has been filmed several times: Ahab is killed by Moby Dick, he destroys the Pequod, and Ishmael alone survives to tell the tale.

What my sketch of plot and protagonist leaves out are the novel’s psychological drama and the emotions it elicits from those readers who reach the book’s second half. In a remarkable admission, Donald Trump has said, “I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.” In Ahab’s late colloquies with Starbuck and in Ahab’s soliloquies, you will find the closest literary approximation I know of the psychological interior that I believe Trump fears to investigate: the feelings of a narcissist struggling to believe in his narcissism by imposing it on everyone else. Ahab “has been in colleges, as well as among the cannibals.” He has linguistic and conceptual capabilities that his precursor Achilles couldn’t imagine and that Trump lacks, but Ahab’s wrath is similar to that of the Greek demigod insulted and angered by the loss of a female slave. Achilles, Ahab, Trump—they are a triumvirate of men driven by pre-literate honor.

Ahab has suffered literal injury, losing a leg to Moby Dick. But, like the archaic Greek, Ahab sees the whale--not as Starbuck’s “dumb brute”—but as an agent of the gods. For Ahab, the personal becomes the cosmic, and the college man becomes the paranoid male because his body and ego have suffered a primal wound, his “dismasting” a symbolic castration for Melville. Unhappy on land with his wife, Ahab goes to sea to seek revenge and wreak his power on nature. There are no women on the Pequod. Around Trump there are always women upon whom he can inflict his narcissism and assert his dominance through sexual bragging, voyeurism, insult, assault, and asymmetrical marriage. Ahab is the villain of Moby-Dick. But as many commentators have said, Ahab is the novel’s secret hero because, in Melville’s words about Hawthorne, Ahab says “No, in thunder” to the Christian God with whom Melville was in a lifelong battle. Secular readers empathize with Ahab’s theological rebellion, and readers of Moby-Dick may well develop sympathy for Donald Trump as a man fearful of the unconscious that appears to demand he assert his power in every possible way. I would not be surprised to learn, if I can outlive my coeval and read biographers who no longer fear his wrath, that Trump suffered some sexual “wound” as a youth, some shameful failure or wooden leg experience that he has spent his whole life repressing and compensating for. My speculation, further developed in the last piece in Harpooning, is not a reason to read Moby-Dick. Read it to learn how even in the mid-nineteenth century, an age possibly more literate than our own, the pre-literate psyche can produce tragedy, can destroy a ship and community under its rule.

When discussing Moby-Dick with university students, my toughest sell was its Cetology, a word I believe Melville made up from the Latin for whale: cetus. Melville had to provide his landlubbers with information about a whaling ship and the whales it pursued to give ballast to his philosophical and religious meditations, and to prepare readers for plot developments. Of course we need to know the biology of the whale. But we also have chapters about the whale in zoology, geology, and archeaology, in sacred texts, in history, in literature, in visual art, in the sea and on land, alive and dead. We have the sociology of whales. We learn about the parts of the whale, its head and its tail, its very large penis, and we learn about the technologies that allow men to cut the whale into its constituent parts, to turn living substance into a commodity, to liquidate life. In short, we learn the systems of the whale and the systems used to process the whale. Melville’s seeming excess of information is the device that draws our attention to Moby-Dick as an early systems novel, an environmental fiction from which there are many direct lines to that great eco-fiction of the last century, Gravity’s Rainbow, including the line from whale oil to motor oil, the depths of nature transformed for man’s profit and convenience. Throughout Moby-Dick Melville plays with lines and circles, with the linear most often associated with the death plot of Ahab, the circular associated with the living interrelations of nature. The man who says “`all visible objects…are but pasteboard masks’” that humans must “`strike through’” dies roped to Moby Dick. The Pequod disappears under the waves, nature wins, the sea rolls on, but we now know Ahab’s imperial attitude toward nature is responsible for threatening whales with extinction. Melville’s was the Age of Oil, precursor to our Age of Lead.

As a systems novel, Moby-Dick has much to teach us about the role of human hubris in planetary ecology, but the novel may be even more important for its epistemological ecology. The novel’s subtitle is “The Whale.” Only one vowel separates “whale” from “whole,” and Melville wanted to get as close as he could to “comprehension,” in both its meanings. If you can see Melville’s Cetology as standing for the multiple ways we know any subject, you will appreciate Moby-Dick as a remarkable early example of intellectual pluralism, a book with enormous respect for science and fact but also a book that knows there can be multiple interpretations of facts. What does this have to do with Trump you may ask. Unlike Trump, Melville was a reader, an adventurer on the sea and in books, an autodidact who read widely and somewhat indiscriminately. This open- and large-minded man was often an economic failure because he wanted to spend his time reading, thinking, and writing. Like his creator, schoolmaster Ishmael is a literal and figurative reader, a curious perceiver and cautious interpreter—of the tattoos on his friend Queequeeg’s body, of the lines on a whale’s forehead, of the furrows in Ahab’s brow, and, most significantly, of the patterns on a gold doubloon that Ahab nails to a mast, an incentive and reward for the man who sights Moby Dick. After Ishmael describes the doubloon, Ahab has this to say of the images on the coin:

“There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here,--three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab.”

The novel’s other characters approach the doubloon and “read” it in their own personal terms. Ishmael records all their readings, but does not impose a reading himself, nor does he seem particularly interested in the gold, always Trump’s goal. Ahab is a monomaniac, and other characters are at least mono-cognitive. Ishmael learns over the course of the long voyage to perceive shipmates—particularly his “other” friend Queequeeg, and even Ahab—with objectivity and sympathy. Learned tolerance of others and their strange ideas is why the reader Ishmael survives, bobbing on Queequeeg’s coffin on the surface of the empty sea.

You may say, “Someone had to survive to narrate the story.” Melville could have told the tale, as he says, “omnisciently exhaustive,” as most novels were narrated in his era. And at times he forgets that Ishmael is his narrator, but I think Melville insisted on Ishmael’s first-person narration as a model of any person’s ability to see, like the whale with eyes on either side of its head, contradictory views. The chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” is the best example, for Ishmael recounts polar (no pun intended) interpretations of the color white. Ishmael is also a model of the ideal reader’s literary response to the novel. Ishmael’s multiple ways of understanding his experience should be every reader’s ways of processing Moby-Dick—as well as the complex world it represents and the world of today. Ishmael’s survival is a victory of the literate person’s open mind, tolerant of others’ points of view, not fearful of introspection, slow to decide, not quick to anger. That is, the utter opposite of Trump. Ishmael is patient in the face of all that he doesn’t know. He does not view difference and mystery as insults, as some impatient readers do when responding to Moby-Dick. Here, at a meta-level, is what Moby-Dick has to do with Trump. It warns us of the tragedies Trump’s pre-literate Ahabism can cause and offers the comedy, the happy ending, of Ishmael’s literate and literary mind as a saving alternative to the honor-crazed power of an Ahab or Trump.

Hundreds of books and thousands of essays have been written about Moby-Dick, demonstrating the intellectual pluralism of the novel. I’m therefore uncomfortable sucking from such an immense and complex work a few political, moral, and epistemological “lessons” for the Age of Trump--and then using them to claim Moby-Dick is the only book you’ll ever need. But not so uncomfortable that I don’t press Moby-Dick on you now that I am no longer able, like an Ahab of the classroom, to force students to read it. The Public Burning is indeed closer to our time, is more explicitly about politics, and also has multiple points of view, but in all its satiric wrath it has no Ishmael, no admirable figure to show how an Uncle Sam or an Ahab can be survived, if not defeated. The other novelists I’ve mentioned as possible fellow travelers with Coover may or may not choose to follow him into satire, epic or not. So we are left to extrapolate from 150 years ago if we want both an attack on monomania and a character who discovers how to resist it.

“Dollars damn me,” Melville wrote to Hawthorne when, under his influence, Melville was trying to turn his original adventure tale into the literary novel we now have. Dollars and lawyers put Coover in purgatory when he was trying to publish The Public Burning. Both books were courageous and heroic—and received mostly negative reviews. Melville never really recovered, became a customs inspector, and gave up writing fiction for many years. Coover had his university position and continued to write with some success. I mention the authors’ histories and circumstances because I believe books that take the time and knowledge displayed in both are newly endangered, not just by the corporate publishing but also by the Trump administration’s threat to do away with the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. They subsidize small, independent presses and give grants to writers (and other artists) to do the research necessary for information-rich books such as Melville’s and Coover’s. We think of freedom of the press in journalistic terms. The Endowments support the freedom of the presses.

Moby-Dick and The Public Burning are massive accumulations of facts. We may not think of the books as “non-fiction novels” such as Capote’s In Cold Blood or Mailer’s Executioner’s Song, just to name a couple about murderers. But in fact, Melville and Coover are as respectful of fact as historians. They do not attempt to deny facts or objective truths. When Coover makes Uncle Sam a fly-by-night superhero, we know it’s a fiction. When Melville puts Shakesperean language into the mouths of his sailors, we assume it’s fictive license. Clearly fictive elements are embedded in and arise out of the authors’ research, either on ships or in libraries. The dosey doe of fiction and fact takes place within the context labeled “fiction.”

From the Trump administration, we have “alternative facts” disseminated within the context of supposed truth. In that context, Chuck Todd of NBC was correct to label “alternative facts” as “falsehoods.” Other journalists called them “lies.” In the next four years, we will need intrepid journalists and independent scientists to establish facts and call out falsehoods since the Trump administration in its first few days appears committed to a policy of the big and repeated lie. But we also need novelists to deform some facts—make Uncle Sam fly—and to apply some magic to realism to perform two important functions. Reveal the systems, actual or mythical, beneath the surface of daily facticity and elicit emotional response to characters who struggle to separate knowledge from deception. Given Hillary Clinton’s popular vote and the historically low rating for Trump as he begins his residency in the White House, perhaps there will be a robust market for engaged and critical novelists. Philip Roth decades ago remarked on the novelist’s difficulty competing with the absurdities of American life. How much more difficult will it be for novelists to compete with a government in the fiction business of alternative realities and “alternative facts” and what Roth has recently called in The New Yorker a “river of lies” by the “con man” Trump?

Novelists are like the “Lying Cretan,” liars who admit they are liars. Trump is a liar who never admits it and appears to make lying an official, though unstated, policy. We will need writers to dispute him, correct him. And we will need literate readers—like Ishmael—to counter Trump’s unscrupulous monomania. Not just literate readers but literary, which is literate on Human Growth Hormone. Literary readers do not think any more carefully than literate people, but literature trains one to care about and care for language as a sensitive instrument, not just a blunt tool for propaganda and power. I’ll quote Wittgenstein again: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” The world of literature is large with possibilities of imagination and thought and feeling. The world of pre-literate Donald Trump is small, impoverished by ignorance and fear and anger. Literary responses to Trump may not bring down a president or even affect his policies, but literary artists still must continue to provide models of rigorous thought and rich expression—just as medieval monks preserved manuscripts in an earlier dark time.

end—-

I suppose I should go back, re-read, and re-judge these two, but am instead posting these old, thick reviews and offering you the chance (or challenge) to read the novels and comment on what you think here on Monsterpieces. For recent subscribers to the site, the reviews do discuss in passing some earlier monsterpieces and my concept of the systems novel.]

Garth Risk Hallberg

City on Fire

In this first novel set in the New York City of the late 1970’s, a central artist character nails together a “four-by-four frame” and thinks “blame New York: he still had the conviction that American art should be Big.” City on Fire is big: 927 pages, a dozen substantial characters, numerous plots and subplots, all five boroughs represented, seven books and facsimile “interludes,” 94 chapters. And it has had big buildup: movie sale before publication, huge advance, pre-pub comparisons of Hallberg to world-class heavyweights.

A novelist in City on Fire has the Tristram Shandy problem: in the novelist’s “head, the book kept growing and growing in length and complexity, almost as if it had taken on the burden of supplanting real life, rather than evoking it. But how was it possible for a book to be as big as life? Such a book would have to allocate 30-odd pages for each hour spent living.” Regarding scale, Hallberg has mentioned his fondness for 19^th-century triple-decker novels and for Bolano’s 2066. He has eloquently defended DeLillo’s Underworld against James Wood. So I expect readers, especially those residing in NYC, will wonder if City on Fire is really “Big” like Underworld or other American novels of New York such as Gaddis’s J R or McElroy’s Women and Men or even Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Or if Hallberg’s novel is, in the famous words of Ed Sullivan, who hosted a TV variety program during the period the novel covers, a “really big show.”

At the core of City on Fire is a traditional dynastic plot: elderly plutocrat Stuart Hamilton-Sweeney owns a skyscraper with his name on it in Midtown. After the death of his wife, the gold-digger Felicia Gould and her crooked brother Amory worm their way into the failing patriarch’s firm and his family. The patriarch’s son William is a gay, drug-using, one-time punk musician, a painter and photographer who hasn’t spoken to his father or sister for years. In the present William is involved with a naïve African-American would-be novelist named Mercer Goodman just up from small-town Georgia. The patriarch’s daughter Regan, who does public relations for the firm, is married to money manager Keith Lamplighter, with whom she has two children. The Hamilton-Sweeney children’s lives cross at a squat in the Lower East Side, where William’s former band lives and where Keith begins an affair with a college-age groupie named Samantha. Will the Hamilton-Sweeney heirs accept responsibility and save the company from the Goulds and from an insider trading charge? And then can the building and family be saved from a bomb manufactured by the band that has, under the new leadership of Nietzsche-quoting Nicky Chaos, morphed into a radical anarchist group?

As an appetizer for the slow-cooking succession story, Hallberg early on introduces an attempted murder mystery when someone shoots Samantha in Central Park. Her weeks in a coma allow Hallberg to bring in her father, a fireworks contractor; her high school boyfriend from Long Island, Charlie Weisebarger; various misfits from the music and drug underworld; investigative journalist Richard Groskoph; his neighbor, the young gallery assistant Jenny Nguyen; and a crippled old police Inspector named Larry Pulaski. Eventually, the dynastic and murder plots come together and reach a literal cliff- (or skyscraper-) hanging climax on July 13, 1977, the night of the famous blackout.

The number of elements that Hallberg eventually unites is impressive, but City on Fire is essentially a traditional, even a formulaic work with a very long and high Freitag’s triangle. Compare the novel with one that Hallberg says he admires, Coover’s The Public Burning, which ends with Uncle Sam’s electrocuting the Rosenbergs in Times Square, and you will see the conventionality of City on Fire. Coover’s novel was an anthropological carnivalesque work with documentary features. Hallberg’s book presents itself as a sociological “documentary” with a moviesque ending. The interludes include handwritten pages by Stuart Hamilton-Sweeney, two typed sections of the journalist’s “Fireworkers” manuscript, too many illustrated pages of Samantha’s zine, a long letter from the patriarch’s grandson, and some photographs. The 96 short chapters usually focus on one or two characters and are heavily expository and narrative. As the stories move forward, the novel also moves backward with lengthy flashbacks to the earlier lives of the characters. They are sufficiently realistic (maybe too realistic, too familiar and recognizable) to support the documentary illusion, and the 70’s mise en scene must have been heavily researched since Hallberg is only 39. But perhaps because his scale is so large, there is a paucity of dialogue and the drama it creates. In this regard, compare City on Fire with J R, which is almost all dialogue and trusts readers can follow complex relations without having their hands held by the author. J R seems more “documentary”—an oral history—than City on Fire, which is like an illustrated omniscient history. In his reviews and essays, Hallberg shows he knows modernist and postmodernist fiction, but in this novel’s plotting and character development, City on Fire could have been written by Dreiser had he lived long enough or Tom Wolfe had he damped down his style.

Hallberg’s “Note on Sources” mentions Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach and Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. I was very surprised to find him crediting these two works that influenced my study of Big American novels of the 1970s and 80’s entitled The Art of Excess. Surprised because the two works develop in great detail the importance of homology or analogy (form versus causality) as a means of creating conceptual systems and connecting disparate materials. Perhaps if I thought City on Fire mysterious enough to read again, I would find that Hallberg creates the kind of analogues that give, for example, Underworld, from its title onward, its original treatment of urban ecology, its inventive synecdoches and odd assemblages, crazed existential voices and potent abstractions. Hallberg knows DeLillo’s novel inside and out. But because Hallberg has chosen to commit himself to more accessible methods--old-fashioned character agency, plot causality, and documentary representation—City on Fire doesn’t provide a new and profound systemic understanding of the thick city that is its subject. Yes, Hallberg includes different meanings of fire—from fireworks in the sky to fire in the loins, from political arson to the fire of damnation—but for this kind of imagistic connectivity he didn’t need Hofstadter and Bateson—or DeLillo.

Given the number of pages Hallberg has written, it may be unfair to expect the kind of stylistic fire and variety we find in either McElroy’s Women and Men, which includes the voices of angels on high and of idiot savants on low city streets, or even the double-binding first-person banalities of Bob Slocum in Heller’s Something Happened. The sections of City on Fire that dip into the mind of Goodman the novelist are not so different stylistically from the sections about Regan the anxious mother or those that feature the teenage rebel Charlie. Different concerns, surely, but all expressed within a fairly narrow discursive range. McElroy and Heller, along with the other Big novelists of New York I’ve mentioned, felt, I believe, that the city as subject required some artistic deformation beyond mere supersizing—what I’ve called functional excess, formal and stylistic methods of defamiliarizing a place and people much depicted in every medium. Hallberg seems more interested in familiarizing his readers with the bad old days of New York City in the 1970s. Every year or two, the Times publishes a story about a person who has walked every street of Manhattan. In his prose, Hallberg is like that pedestrian until the final 120 pages when the blackout causes the pace to pick up and the style to rev up.

In 2011 I published an essay wondering why we didn’t have in the 21st century a New York novel that equaled those earlier works I’ve mentioned. The closest candidate was Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. Since then Pynchon has released Bleeding Edge, but it was a long, sappy entertainment, no Gravity’s Rainbow of the Big Apple. The last few years have seen some ambitious and excellent novels set in New York—Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life, Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World—but none combine the comprehensive vision and artistic originality of the late 20^th century works. So I was hoping for big things from City on Fire. It is certainly large and seems to this recent arrival in the city widely informed, but it’s that third dimension—depth—that I didn’t find. The novel has an ambitious (if ineffectual novelist) and an experimental artist, but the character who most closely approximates the sensibility of the author is a journalist.

City on Fire has numerous literary allusions and metafictional pointers, a reference to the Great American Novel, several mentions of that Great American Poet Whitman. The walls of the artist William’s studio represent the fiction that describes them. The walls are “covered in signs, the kind you saw on subway platforms, or taped to the bulletproof glass of a bodega. Something was slightly off about them… A stop-sign was skewed, its angles foreshortened. An Uncle Sam recruiting poster was taller than she [Jenny] was and missing an eye.” Observing this trompe l’oeil work, the gallerist Jenny “couldn’t tell if it was good, exactly, but no one could say it wasn’t ambitious.” The paintings are reminders, not inventions, facsimiles like the novel’s interludes. Hallberg’s characters and events are factsimiles.[sic] Like that part-time New York City resident Jonathan Franzen in Freedom and Purity, Hallberg offers reams of data about familiar people within a slightly fractured but eventually closed form. Unlike Franzen, Hallberg has at least attempted the Great New York Novel—“no one could say it wasn’t ambitious”--but Hallberg has placed too much trust in the throw-weight of his subject and his pages, so the “great” is less qualitative than quantitative, as in the phrase “the greater New York area.” A devotee of Excess, I’ve never used the phrase “less is more.” But fewer characters and plots might have given City on Fire more of the metaphoric density of The Flamethrowers or the emotional intensity of Preparation for the Next Life or the meta-artistic insight of The Blazing World. Now, take those three medium-length novels and jam them together, and you’d have a new Big Book of New York.

Joshua Cohen

Book of Numbers

A latecomer to writing fiction, I’m always on the envious lookout for American prodigies, novelists whose first books come fulsomely formed in their youth, prodigious works such as William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Thomas Pynchon’s V., Richard Powers’s Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, three published before their authors were 30, all before 35. Joshua Cohen began more modestly with Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto in 2007 when he was 27, but now—at 35—Cohen has published two prodigious novels: Witz, an 817-page mock epic about the last Jew in the world, in 2010, and Book of Numbers, a 580-page novel about the founder of “Tetration,” an Internet search company that resembles Google and has its New York City office a block away from Google’s.

The earlier prodigies’ novels were stuffed with specialized, often technical knowledge, were non-linear in form, and disparate in styles, more like strange systems of information than traditional narratives. The books asked readers to perform searches: comb through heterogeneous materials, find connections between historical or scientific information and personal experience, and develop a meta awareness of how systems are constructed. The most recent of the earlier five, House of Leaves (2000), is the most directly influenced by information processing: Danielewski’s inclusion of visual materials and an index make the book a print simulacrum of a searchable hypertext. Book of Numbers is the next generation of the systems novel, for Cohen combines prodigious knowledge and formal disruption to explicitly treat math prodigies who developed the hardware and software to manage massive information--and then surveil the wetware of private lives.

Joshua Cohen, the 40-year-old founder of Tetration and fourteenth richest man in the world, hires a failed almost-40 novelist named Joshua Cohen to ghostwrite the founder’s autobiography. Prevented from finishing that book, the character Joshua Cohen assembles the text the real author Joshua Cohen publishes as Book of Numbers, a combination biography of the founder and autobiography of the ghost. “Assembles” because the novel is a hard-drive collection of documents: interview transcripts, formulas, programming code, blog posts by the ghost’s estranged wife, emails by her current lover and the ghost’s agent, questionable first-person recollections by the ghost, photos of archaic female forms, fabricated epigraphs, texts that have been crossed through, and one crucial footnote that may deconstruct the whole kludged assemblage.

On the novel’s first page, the ghost says, “there’s nothing worse than description….No, characterization is worse. No, dialogue is.” Not a very welcoming or promising way to start a book. But the ghost soon elicits sympathy: because his novel about the Holocaust was published on 9/11/2001, it flopped. Since then he has been writing book reviews (like author Cohen, a staff reviewer at Harper’s) and doing anonymous hack work--travel pieces, restaurant reviews, and corporate speeches--while his wife supported him. In the novel’s present of 2011, she is seeing another man and is writing a blog revealing the ghost’s many flaws.

Back in 2004, Cohen the New York freelancer got a break from a “Cohencidence” [Witz] when asked to interview the celebrity who shares his name, but the piece was killed because it wasn’t puffery. Now the founder remembers that interview (which resembles one that author Cohen did with Slavoj Zizek) and offers to pay a huge amount of money to ghost Cohen to write a quick and dirty tell-all autobiography. He says “readable books” must have their research “wrapped like mummies, in the purest and softest verbiage, which both preserves them and makes them presentable.” Author Cohen uses about a hundred pages of soft verbiage to establish human interest in his narrator, but I found these pages in Part 1 familiar stuff from—or parody of--too numerous “confessional” novels by frustrated New York City writers.

Harder and much more interesting verbiage begins in Part 2 (which is entitled “0”). The setting moves from New York and Palo Alto to Dubai and Abu Dhabi where the two Cohens stay in luxury hotels and the founder, whom the ghost calls “Principal,” narrates his life. His father Abraham helped create the personal computer; Principal was a math prodigy who went to Stanford in 1989 but didn’t attend classes; Principal and two computer science whizzes created a marginally profitable list of websites, and then went on to invent the algorithm for Tetration (which refers, like googolplex, to almost impossibly large numbers and, in this novel about Jewish protagonists, may allude to the tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters transliterated as Yahweh). Tetration needed venture capital, and then an executive—Kori Dienerowitz—to manage the three prodigies, who were joined by a slightly older “computing genius” from India—Muwekma Ohlone or “Moe”—who added to the search algorithm “reversibility,” the ability to store information about the searcher, which led eventually to “adverks” and later on to government surveillance of and then entrapment of Tetration users. Dying of cancer, Principal has become an ascetic Buddhist with eccentricities, he realizes, like those of Howard Hughes, but Principal wants to publish his autobiography to cleanse his soul, to punish those inside the company who betrayed his vision, and to expose NSA-type snooping with which Tetration cooperated.

Cohen’s amalgam of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the less publicly known founders of Google seems informed and authentic, perhaps because the author gives Principal an authoritative and sometimes authoritarian voice. He uses the royal or CEO “we” when talking about himself, has little use for transitions or the ghost’s questions, has a prodigious memory, and spools out speech thick with scientific terminology and what the ghost calls “techsperanto,” neologisms such as “rectard,” “quadlingual” and “comptrasted.” Principal has conflicts with his colleagues, but the arguments are about ideas and rarely personal, for, unlike his ghost whose life is full of personal problems, Principal back then had little time for or interest in the quotidian. Occasionally impenetrable, Principal’s discourse is a remarkable tour de force for a literary novelist.

Part 3 (entitled “1” again to highlight the ones and zeroes of code) returns to the softer verbiage of the ghost now separated from Principal, impoverished in Germany, forbidden online access to protect secrecy, and trying to work on the contracted book, but there are distractions and complications. He searches in Vienna for a young Omani woman whom he rescued from spousal abuse in Dubai. He reports a threat from a Julian Assange figure—Thor Ang Balk of “b-Leaks”—or maybe from his rogue assistant Anders Maleksen, who wants to leak the information the ghost has before he can publish it in a book. The ghost’s agent dies of a heart attack, endangering payment for the book, and the ghost’s estranged wife comes back into the picture via her blog with a story about a betrayal he had not admitted earlier. The ghost, along with the reader, wonders what happened to Principal. These multiple plot points seem to be the author’s reward for those literary readers who may have struggled through Principal’s math-heavy history of Tetration. Or these plot developments could have been invented—the relation with the married Omani is particularly implausible—by the ghostwriter to make his combination biography and autobiography salable to a publisher if the ghosted book is anticipated by leaks. In a work about contemporaries’ unwillingness or inability to keep secrets, narrator Cohen may have “secretly” composed a fiction within author Cohen’s novel.

The final words of Witz are that being a Cohen “is steady work.” Book of Numbers employs three and links them by betrayal. The ghost’s purely motivated Holocaust novel is betrayed by circumstances. The ghost cheats on his wife, and she cheats on him. The founder allows his pure mathematics to be betrayed for profit and for governmental cooperation, and he is betrayed by his colleagues and, perhaps, his ghost. Author Cohen creates initial expectations of accessibility that are betrayed in part 2 and then restored in part 3. Then there’s the biblical Joshua. In the Old Testament Book of Numbers, Yahweh feels betrayed by the Israelites He has delivered from Egypt, continually punishes them in the wilderness, and denies entry to the promised land to Moses, the founder of the code. The spies who came back from the promised land with a positive report, Joshua and Caleb (the name given to a journalist turned fiction writer in the novel), are honored by Yahweh, and Joshua leads the Israelites into Canaan. Author Joshua Cohen reverses the Biblical Joshua for Cohen is the spy in Silicon Valley who shows it’s not all milk and honey. In a decade or so, another Joshua may emerge from a library to claim there’s an encrypted relation between Book of Numbers and the Kabbalah, where gematria turns letters into numbers, and Cohen’s novel will be “betrayed” by its interpreter. Or perhaps not.

Prodigies can be abrasive. Ghost Cohen’s and author Cohen’s first words are, “If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off.” Danielewski’s opening sentence in House of Leaves is “This is not for you.” Although Book of Numbers challenges readers who prefer what DeLillo has called “around-the-house-and-in-the-yard fiction,” this novel is for you if you love, as I do, moral complexities that an author scales up and out from personal life to the systemic, from individual identity and marital issues to politics, history, and religion—and then loops back down again to show the effects of encompassing systems on the personal. The following passage from one of Principal’s transcribed interviews illustrates his limited moral concerns, as well as his quirky style. Cohen the interviewer has asked Principal about Tetration’s “censorship of nonillegal sites”. Principal replies:

If we experienced guilt it was not from violating any ethics or morals but the magnitude of the second eigenvalue. Tetrate it. Do not. Deploying emotions without matrices distressed us. Human intervention was the crime. Lack of system was the crime. This is all about our eternal failure to have deved a viable semantic algy that translates, interprets, and reads between the lines to appreciate intent.”

“Eigenvalue” has to do with the number of variables. “Deved” and “algy” are short for “developed” and “algorithm.” “Tetrate” means “search.” Only later does Principal admit that it’s not the intent of a site’s creator that matters but the intent of Big Government’s search of the sites that the Big Data of Tetration can identify. Principal failed to develop the algy that “reads between the lines,” but author Cohen employs an archaic information system—the novel—that trains readers to do just that and to make subtle moral judgments about loyalty and betrayal, purity and profit, judgments that require thinking beyond the childish law of Google--“Don’t be evil.”

In Cohen’s previous book, Four New Messages, several of which are about the Internet, he has a New York novelist say that in an earlier time people “`wrote excessive books about excess that were never excessively read.’” These writers include some of “my” prodigies. Readers who resist or even resent prodigious novels may find Book of Numbers excessive, prodigal in its details about an artist’s failure and a mathematician’s success; in its digressions on mummies, mommies, and other subjects; in its geek wordplay and comic set pieces that include gibbering celebrities at a cocktail party in Palo Alto, pranks perpetrated by start-up boy geniuses, and an absurd political argument with a prince in Dubai. But behind the extravagances here, as in the even more manically prodigious and stylistically hyperwrought Witz, there is a caustic earnestness that pushes Cohen to exceed literary conventions of proportion and propriety to represent what he sees as an excess of access.

In the culture and in the novel, personal information is willingly made public through social media or memoirs to shame or promote or profit, and private information can be accessed by corporations and governments for gain and power. Here is Principal speaking, it appears, for the author:

We want to see and be watched, to listen and be heard, and even a cave needs to be famous if only among caves, or to the fighters it hides, to the fighters who storm it, if only to itself. Our appetite for secrets is our appetite for fame. How many we keep is how much we lack. Then we divulge around the fire. Then we only have others to live for.

Autobiographer Cohen and his over-divulging email correspondents represent the first excess of access, Principal enables the second, and novelist Cohen throws all their voices in what might be called sacrificial realism, the artist giving up accessible artfulness to imitate contemporary ugliness, the Age of Glut and Gluttony co-terminus with the Digital Age.

An early meaning of “prodigy” was “omen” or “warning.” Cohen’s is similar to that of the real Julian Assange in an essay entitled “Google Is Not What It Seems.” I worry that Book of Numbers may be dismissed as a tardy expose of overreaching corporate power, but Cohen’s achievement—and it is substantial as well as inventive--lies in his now ancient (in tech terms) history of Internet search, his presentation of local moral compromises in Silicon Valley that, like the butterfly wings of the chaos theory discussed in the novel, caused global illegal consequences. The book-producing character Cohen accuses the screen-displaying Cohen of ruining the codex book, but I believe author Cohen finds in the computer and the Internet models, as well as a subjects, for the density, range, and scope of his novel. Perhaps the greatest contemporary prodigy, Thomas Pynchon, said in Gravity’s Rainbow “Everything is connected.” But when he wrote his Internet novel, Bleeding Edge, it turned out to be a Mr. Softee entertainment. Book of Numbers is the hard-edged next stage forward. Like Joshua Cohen the mathematician, Joshua Cohen the novelist wants to “engineer the ultimate. The connection of connections.”

—end—

Books of Jacob

Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob was published in Polish in 2014 and was cited by the Nobel Prize committee in her award in 2018. When published in English, the novel received many rave reviews in both England and America, and The Books of Jacob was on the National Book Awards long list for translated literature but was left off its short list, prompting this somewhat belated review and small remedy.

Set in 18^th century middle Europe and clocking in at well over 900 pages with a cast of hundreds, The Books of Jacob is a monsterpiece and, perhaps, a masterpiece. “Monstrous” because of its size, its deformation of narrative conventions, and its relation to the etymology of “monster”: warning. The Jacob of Tokarczuk’s title is Jacob Frank, an historical character born in 1726—a Polish Jewish mystic who became a Muslim, then a Catholic, then a monster like more recent “sacred” leaders who became self-serving tyrants. Early reviewers struggling to describe the plot complications and formal excesses of the novel paid little attention to the warning element of the book. The 19^th century German sociologist Max Weber described the “routinization of charisma” in modern organizations and bureaucracies, but since Weber’s time charismatic figures as different as Hitler, Jim Jones, King Jong Un, and Donald Trump have wreaked havoc. Although the pre-Enlightenment world of the novel will seem alien—partly because of Tokarczuk’s obsession with theological and quotidian detail—a bogged reader can push though by recognizing the novel as a distant mirror of seductive and destructive charisma.

What is now Poland is the perfect setting for a boundary-crossing novel, for the boundaries of Poland have been constantly changing since the 18^th century. Characters wander across states that no longer exist or exist now within different countries. Tokarczuk’s plot wanders along with Frank’s movements. He lives for a time in Turkey, gathers followers, moves back to Poland, recruits more followers, spends more than a decade in a Polish prison, is released by invading Russians, and sets up a court in what is now Austria. While Tokarczuk may not have been aware of the word “bounder,” her Jacob fits the bill, an immoral man, particularly in his relations with women. In fact, Jacob’s radical theology demands immorality, the reversal of Mosaic and Christian laws, especially those governing sex. He directs his followers to have intercourse with those not their spouses, and he has something like a harem of concubines. His cultists tolerate his destruction of family bonds because of Frank’s magnetism and his not quite explicit promise that his loyalists shall live forever. They don’t, but the novel has something like a happy ending. Before Frank’s death, his patriarchal power wanes and women fill the void left by the monster/master.

Geographical and moral boundary crossings have their analogues in Tokarczuk’s quick shifting among genres and styles: anecdotes, journals, dreams, travelogues, songs, and more. There are seven “books” within the novel, and sections within these books are rarely more than four pages long. Some are about Jacob. More are about or narrated by his followers, not just their relation to him but their relations to their families, their homes, their clothing, their food, their language, their changing names. As a fragmented “encyclopedic novel,” The Books of Jacob can be compared—for American readers--to two huge American historical novels set in 20^th century middle Europe—Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Vollmann’s Europe Central. And yet Tokarczuk’s variousness of styles, as well as her inclusions of visual materials, is more like Le Guin’s spirit-filled anthropological fiction, Always Coming Home. Like Le Guin, Tokarczuk has a figure—Jacob’s grandmother Yente—who sees all from something like an angelic position outside of death. An intelligence described as “someone tenderly observing” characters’ lives, Yente is a stand-in for the novelist whose Nobel acceptance speech asked for more tenderness from fiction writers.

Most of Tokarczuk’s Jewish and Christian characters obsess about judgment, but she almost never explicitly judges her characters, even Jacob when he is beyond the boundary of sense and sympathy. Perhaps because there is a side of Tokarczuk that resembles Jacob, his ambition to destroy old values and to synthesize new ones, his insistence on his followers’ (readers’) attention to his unlikely and difficult stories. The difference: Jacob is interested only in his most faithful and useful followers while Tokarczuk attends to them and to some sceptics in the novel: a priest named Chmielowski who is compiling a secular encylopedia, a physician named Rubin who debunks mystic cures, Antoni Kossakowski, a fabulist who lies even more than Jacob. There are two literary and sympathetic noblewomen in the novel, and Jacob’s daughter Eva acquires substance near the end, and of course there is Yente, but despite all the sympathies that Tokarczuk displays for these figures The Books of Jacob is, like the books of the Bible, a male-dominated compendium.

Tokarczuk sometimes suffers from graduate student dissertation disease, including in her book information she discovered in her research that could have been left out. Not so much information about daily life as arcane theological theories and disputes. She also often uses letters between characters to convey information. I know the epistolary novel was popular in the 18^th century, but the formality of the correspondence sucks life from The Books of Jacob. A reviewer for a Jewish publication, The Tablet, said “A Polish Christian writes the great Jewish novel.” If so, she has done it while living in a country ruled by a Christian right-wing government that has passed laws forbidding frank (pun intended) discussions of the Holocaust. Yente and Tokarczuk are not ranting Cassandras, but The Books of Jacob is, I will repeat, a warning about both charismatic and bureaucratic orthodoxy. In 2013 the Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in a jagged postmodern building in Warsaw. The Books of Jacob is a worthy portable companion to that monument of memory.

Biography of X

“Ambition was the worst sin,” a minor character tells the narrator of Biography of X, “wanting any dominance over someone else.” Catherine Lacey’s novel is full of this “sin”: the life-long domineering actions of the protagonist, an artist who names herself “X”; the book-long revenge on X by her widow and narrator of the novel. And, perhaps, Lacey’s attempted dominance of her readers with her incessant literary game-playing. That former chess master Nabokov thought of his novels as games with and against readers. Perhaps the most ambitious was Pale Fire in which a crazed Russian émigré purports to interpret the life and work of an American poet who is the Russian’s neighbor. Intimate domination, the worst sin in Biography of X.

Lacey’s game begins right after her real title page: a fake title page that presents “C. M. Lucca” as the author of Biography of X. The former journalist Lucca decides to look into some lacunae in a doorstop biography of X by Theodore Smith, a book that Lucca finds banal and “worthless.” For Lucca, a “life” was disrespectful of the many lives led by the shape-shifting X—who used pseudonyms for her writing, work with famous musicians, and numerous art installations. Disrespectful also because X resisted and resented anyone, even her wife, who might delve into her past and secrets, of which Lucca finds plenty. After ferreting out the crucial secret of X’s birth and childhood, Lucca becomes extremely ambitious, traveling the U.S. and abroad to interview people who knew X at different stages of her life and to dig up presumably lost documents. Begun as a project of rage against Smith and grief for the recently deceased X, Lucca’s biography ends with anger against the sadistic X and a different kind of grief, that of never knowing the woman that Lucca loved and was dominated by.

Lucca’s scholarly project--that plods through the chronology of X’s life and is replete with a scaffolding of fake notes and altered sources--was easy enough for Lacey to imitate. What was not so easy was establishing the artistic genius of X and her ability to find wives, friends, collaborators—just about everyone she met—to dominate. X’s output was prodigious, but since her works—unlike those by, say, Kathy Acker who was a friend of X and perhaps one model for Lacey—don’t exist, Lacey’s creative ambition is tested. Readers get short descriptions of X’s visual works and critics’ responses, as well as Lucca’s, to them, but the works described never convinced me that X was a towering multimedia artist of the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps I would be a believer if I saw more of her novels. Excerpts could have been included (just as Pale Fire begins with a 999-line poem). And X’s paintings and sculptures could have been created and photographed—if Lacey’s ambition was equal to the “ferocious ambitions” of her subject.

Once I’m unconvinced of X as artist, I’m skeptical about her domination of or large influence on others’ personal lives. Maybe not Lucca’s, who seemed a doormat when she met X, but historical figures such as David Bowie, Wim Wenders, and Denis Johnson. When Lucca interviews X’s long-lost family or her former lovers or her gallerist or an Italian political activist, none of them is capable of explaining X’s magnetic power. It doesn’t seem to be erotic. More neurotic, her intense need to impress others while simultaneously alienating them. If I were interviewed, I might say—without really knowing X—that she was a monstrous three-headed fusion of Acker, Martina Obramaovic, and Susan Sontag on speed.

Since I don’t believe in X, I don’t believe Lucca. Biography of X may be a fiction—Lucca’s fiction—within Lacey’s novel. In Pale Fire, Nabokov signals his biographer’s unreliability by having him believe he is the escaped king of Zembla. Lucca is merely an escapee from a boring marriage, but she has plenty of motives to write a fictive takedown of X. Lacey’s unreliability tip is exaggeration—the obsessiveness of Lucca’s project, along with X’s hyper-protean character and Lacey’s own game-playing with actual quotes she has repurposed to describe X. A lot of ideas, invention, and research went into Biography of X, but ultimately its ambition doesn’t reach me—or dominate me as it seems to have some raving reviewers.

Lacey does herself no favors by setting her unreliable text in a counterfactual space. Yes, there are many realistic scenes in downtown New York City, but it exists in something Lacey calls the Northern Territory. Right after World War II, southern states seceded to become a theocracy (from which, spoiler alert, X escapes). Now the USA is composed of the former Southern Territory, the Northern Territory, and the Western Territory (from which X also escapes). The counterfactuals allow a good deal of easy (not very ambitious) satire and, I guess, fun since Emma Goldman is FDR’s former chief of staff in the North. Unfortunately, though, the invented setting diminishes the reality of the invented characters who occupy it.

X was a master of style, of unconventional costumes and disguises, a pre Lady Gaga. X was also very good at sophistical sentences and cutting remarks. She could do accents. The few journal entries that Lucca quotes about X’s unhappiness as a woman could be profound or sophomoric. Lucca, unfortunately, is a master of journalism with a conventional sensibility and reliance on the language of victimhood. If X had written her own autobiography in Lucca’s style, it would have been something like Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The biographer/interpreter in Pale Fire may be a schizoid academic, but he still sounds like a Nabokov creation. Perhaps Lacey chose a rather pedestrian style for her narrator as a way to elicit belief in her improbable protagonist, but Lucca’s prose is not a way to make this reader believe in X or her biography, no matter who wrote it.

Is it possible everything in Biography of X is a parody: of the performing celebrity (think Warhol), of the insider biography (like the one Roth wanted), of political clichés (the southerners are dumb), of Pale Fire (high art)? Biography of X even seems to parody Sebald’s inclusion of photos in his fictions. Lacey has numerous photographs that are supposed to suggest the mystery of X but actually manage only to satisfy the conventions of biography. Maybe even written language is a parody--of speaking, of live dialogue or performance, a notion suggested by the talk marathons that X has when she meets new intimates. Lucca and Lacey both throw up their hands at times and imply “you just had to be there.” I wasn’t.

I usually have a high tolerance for Lacey’s kind of literary ambition and game-playing, even that which extends into excess. I can say I finished the thousand-plus pages of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. I looked forward to the seventeen volumes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s “Familiar” project. But the parodic academic biography is a tough act to pull off at great length. Biography of X would have been a better novel, perhaps dominating my disbelief, had the book been half its length. Siri Hustvedt’s novel Blazing World about a radical feminist artist in New York is the same length as Lacey’s novel, but Hustvedt is more narrow in her purview—less ambitious, perhaps, but more believable, more emotionally engaging. Everyone in Biography of X--both women and men, straight and gay--finds X fascinating, but they might not if—like me--they read all of Lucca’s “biography.”

The initial impetus of Lucca’s research is the work of a male biographer and critic. Perhaps Lacey is playing a game against me, the male reviewer who, she may believe, will reveal gender bias with his lack of sympathy for the woman warrior, the feminist outlaw, the art monster. Since that’s a possibility, don’t write off Lacey. But I recommend getting on the wait list at the library and sampling fifty pages of Biography of X before you plunk down twenty-eight bucks. Visual artist and verbal provocateur, X was also a scam artist, relieving people of their money. Caveat emptor.

Reviewers in 2019 called Ducks a monster because it’s long and, for literature, chaotic. Let’s start slow. Ellmann has said Moby-Dick is the novel she most wishes she had written, not because of Ahab but because of the cetology that disrupts Melville’s narrative. She doesn’t like “the fact that,” a phrase that appears thousands of times in Ducks, reviewers mention that she is the daughter of the Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann, but she admits he talked a lot about Joyce at home. Very early in Ducks, the unnamed protagonist/narrator quotes a phrase—“love’s old sweet song”—that appears several times in Ulysses. It occurs over one day; the first half or so of Ducks occurs in one day. Almost all of the novel records the wandering thinking of an ordinary Bloom-like figure—a woman in Ohio—who processes everything she sees and imagines. In place of literary Stephen Dedalus, Ellmann occasionally inserts for contrast a few pages of a conventionally narrated story about a mountain lion. Like Ulysses, Ducks is a trove of cultural and commercial references—books the protagonist has read, movies she has seen, songs she sings when going about her daily tasks, and details of her business as a baker of pies that, like Bloom’s advertisements, she has to get out and sell.

A more contemporary and less encyclopedic analog of Ducks is Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Like the frazzled Babette of that novel, Ellmann’s protagonist lives in a small Midwestern town, is a one-time teacher, wife of a college professor, caretaker of a mixed brood (four ranging in age from four to fifteen). In White Noise there’s a singular Airborne Toxic Event. For Ellmann toxic events—in the air and water and food—are going on all the time. DeLillo occasionally and randomly inserts into his novel three-word phrases, bits of noise from television. Like toxic events, Ellmann’s random phrases, which expand to associative lists, occur all the time, on every page. “Panasonic” was DeLillo’s working title. Many of the words in Ellmann’s lists are plucked out of media air and correspond to but extend hypertrophically DeLillo’s noise quotient. For Ellmann, our bodies and minds are constantly being poisoned, one of many words I think are keys to understanding the monstrosity of Ducks.

Ellmann may have been influenced by Joyce’s stream of consciousness, but Ducks presents a more up-to-date representation of cognition. For Vonnegut in Galapagos, the big brain was the evolved monster that has ravaged humans and the rest of the planet. Ellmann would appear to agree and offers something like Daniel Dennett’s conception of big brain consciousness in his Consciousness Explained. One of his metaphors for consciousness is the multiple drafts of a novelist, but this is still Cartesian. His better metaphor is consciousness as a congress, a pandemonium of “speakers” clamoring for primacy, competition that goes on, like the pollution mentioned above, all the time, even when one is sleeping. A Joycean “stream” is reductive, ruled by banks. For Ellmann, consciousness is more like a sea, waves breaking and retreating, churning on and on, full of life . . . but also, she notes again and again, pollutants, the microplastics represented by her lists. Scholars tend to suck the political content out of Ducks without recognizing the originality of the consciousness that creates the form in which the content exists.

We are back to Melville’s ocean. Moby Dick is a mighty monster enraged by humans, but in Chapter 59 Melville describes a greater “monster,” known as the Kraken:

A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.

Like the ocean on which it floats, the Kraken is chaotic in its “chance-like” spread on the surface. When Ishmael walks within the skeleton of a whale, he can measure its width and height. Were it to stand on its tail, it would be, like most monster beasts, a vertical phenomenon. The Kraken is a horizontal mass, seemingly “formless.” So is Ducks, Newburyport. It observes some conventions of literary depth, particularly in its attention to the history of Native Americans, animals, and planet Earth. The novel also has psychological depth in the protagonist’s memories of her childhood and years leading up to her current age of 45. But Ducks appears to have no Odyssey giving it, like Melville’s whale and Ulysses, a skeletal structure. [The scholars should get busy on this.] If the word “radical” didn’t have its root in depth, one could call Ducks a radical manifestation of a new version of consciousness that seems monstrous because of its lateral, anti-hierarchical multiplicity, its constant clutching and “curling and twisting.” This conception of consciousness preceded the growth of the Internet, but it is the source of many of the “facts” in Ducks and is a real-world monstrosity that mirrors Dennett’s model.

Presuming that presenting novel consciousness is one intention of Ellmann’s novel, how does she get readers to tolerate her monstrous “pulpy mass” long enough to understand the importance of its representation—and how does she manage in her horizontal form to do the critical feminist and environmental work that she says in interviews is crucial to her? In its materials, its obsession with “the facts that,” Ducks is conventional realism with a massive dose of growth hormone, more various, mundane, and even more banal in its details than White Noise. Ducks resembles the two-page grocery list and lengthy freezer list that Ellmann includes, metaphors for her excess. In the future, Ducks may be read as a heroically comprehensive capsule of Trump time, an encyclopedia of easily recognizable but perhaps forgotten trivia. In this regard, Ellen often refers to Laura Ingalls Wilder and follows the example of her seemingly documentary works about an earlier time.

Ellmann also draws readers into her challenging factual monstrosity with humor and wit. DeLillo makes fun of his male narrator. Ellmann has fun with her female narrator, gentle humor in the interactions with her children, sarcasm about middle class foibles, witty takedowns of gun-toting American men, satire of provincial insularity—and sometimes an Amish-inflected mockery of modernity. The narrator also has fun with herself, most often by correcting some erratic pronoun reference or revealing her minor, laughable failures as a mother, wife, and baker. Though the narrator is a pie-woman, she sometimes sounds like the nursery rhyme’s simple Simon:

Simple Simon went a-fishing,

For to catch a whale;

All the water he had got,

Was in his mother’s pail.

At first, Ducks is the unnamed narrator all of the time, a contradictory monster of humility and self-reference. She thinks of herself as “shy,” as recessive in her relations with others, and much of the text is overwhelmingly her experience. But as the novel goes on, it has the appeal of traditional fiction, for other characters emerge—her children, especially her critical teen daughter Stacy; her husband Leo; the narrator’s siblings and parents, especially her mother whose long illness and death “broke” the narrator; a former husband; a few friends; even old pets. Conflict, though, is mostly with humanity rather than these characters—with industries and power brokers but also with the masses who, like her to some extent, are victims of their own passivity. In this, Ducks is similar, on a grander scale, to the protagonist’s sentiment in White Noise: “I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.”

These welcoming features continue throughout the novel, but from quite early on Ellmann guides readers toward a meta understanding of her formal and stylistic experiment. About a tenth of the way into Ducks, Ellmann has her own Kraken: a huge swarm of jellyfish, cousins of Melville’s squid and a horizontal menace. Jellyfish are, the narrator says,

like weeds, and their numbers are growing fast, the fact that they are moving around in huge gangs . . . the fact that a big swarm of poisonous jellyfish got tangled up in that salmon farm and 56,000 salmon died in agony, in about half an hour . . . the fact that jellyfish are five hundred and sixty million years old, and there are five hundred and sixty million of them wiggling through the world.. . .

Lacking apparent individual identity, jellyfish are like “mush,” another key word, like “poisons,” that occurs many times in Ducks. “All life forms emerged from mush and will probably turn back into mush pretty soon,” says the narrator. Composed of pages-long run-on “sentences,” Ducks is like formless batter before it is baked.

Ducks, Newburyport may not be as “formless” or mushy as it appears. Its title is a nod to the phrase “picnic, lightning,” which is Humbert’s laconic explanation of Lolita’s mother’s death. The novel appears to invite skimming, but readers who do skim risk missing some minute detail that points to a much larger pattern. Because Ellmann repeats “picnic, lightning” and her title numerous times in the novel, the words seem to be an abbreviated comment about randomness. Newburyport is where the narrator’s mother grew up. When she was two, she waded into a pond saying “Ducky! Ducky!” and was saved from drowning by her sister. The “Ducks” of the title refers to two intentional acts, not a random event—the child’s desire, the adult’s rescue. “Ducks, Newburyport” thus reverses the randomness of “picnic, lightning” and points to a pattern of references to saving children, action that ultimately governs the novel’s plot. Given the narrator’s obsession with her mother’s death and the narrator’s anxieties about mothering her children, it’s no surprise that the text includes multiple usages and meanings of “ducks.” Humans are “sitting ducks,” passive in face of poisons. Ellmann’s ducks are definitely not in a narrative row.

As for the choice of “Newburyport,” perhaps it implies a new port from which to explore a fictive ocean. The novel’s setting begins with “New”: Newcomerstown is an actual town in Ohio that, the narrator says, is not very welcoming to new arrivals. Newcomers to experimental fiction may have difficulties with Ducks, though it has much—even the narrator thinks “too much”—to offer if monsterpiece-avoiding readers recognize the novel’s hyper- or super-realism in what seems to be an unrealistic (that is, radically non-linear) form.

In Dennett’s conception of consciousness, notions in the congress of mind that may begin small accumulate weight as they are repeated and gather associations and attempt to rule the internal “debate.” One of the narrator’s favorite words is “nanoparticles.” She says “microbes rule the world” and refers to “microplastics.” Air and water pollution begin with microscopic quantities that become massive, with a monstrous effect on the planet. Ducks proceeds in a similar micro-accumulative way to do Ellmann’s environmental work. The facts she repeats either in her seemingly random lists or in her narrator’s more conventionally conscious moments get weighted. From brief mentions of water pollution, for example, we come eventually to a two-page list of the Ohio creeks and rivers that the narrator and her son test for contaminants. A more conventional writer would have summed the list with a sentence about the number of waterways. The list is not “about”; it is an analog of the facts. In the pages of the text, the list has space and, therefore, weight.

What might be called the analog form of the text is also employed to do Ellmann’s feminist work. Again, she initially offers scattered details about the misuse of or violence against woman, particularly by men with guns. Through repetition and then fuller development, the facts accumulate to a coherent position. Once readers take in Ellmann’s feminism, they can scale out to see how Ducks differs from male monsterpieces. They can also be chaotic but still tend to retain significant rhetorical and intellectual power over their readers. Ellmann “allows” readers of Ducks to follow the Kraken tentacles the readers want. With their attention, readers can weight the repetitions that become positions—on the rights of women, on the rights of labor, on the necessity of not forgetting history, or any other political issue that the novel introduces.

Ellmann’s environmental and gender themes are combined in the novel’s numerous references to Donald Trump, his choices of cabinet members in his first term, the policies that reduce the power of the EPA and increase the effect (and profits) of fossil fuel corporations. Ellmann also refers to his many episodes of abusing women and the language he uses to describe women. Although not as explicit an anti-Trump novel as some, Ducks has in Trump a symbol that brings together her primary political themes. References to Trump are not nearly as common as the explicit ecological and gender references, but one can bring the pattern out of the pulpy mass by reading Ducks, Newburyport, as I have, in digital form and using its search function to see how Ellmann weights the text with the obese president. Ellmann’s narrator notes that Trump once called Melania a “monster” and goes on to say that he is the real monster, the male monster.

The lateral and accumulative monstrosity of Ducks can be usefully compared to what is called “all-over” technique in painting. For such painting to make its pointless point, the canvas often has to be huge, denying the viewer the quick and easy comforts of center and margin. The margins are so far from the conventional center, the viewer has to scan side to side, up and down. Maybe the central purpose of the work is not at its center but emerges from collecting elements from all over the surface. What follows is an example of this all-over decentering work by Julie Mehretu at a San Francisco MoMA exhibit. The painting took up one large wall in the entry hall; the canvas was 32 feet wide by 27 feet high. The photograph represents only part of the work.

Like Ellmann’s “facts,” Mehretu’s base materials, she says, are contemporary and historical—images and texts melted into a collage that is then painted over with irregular, curving lines (like the Kraken). The two boxes on the left are parodies of centering, framing, and traditional scale. What they contain near one edge is no more significant than what is outside of them. Ellmann’s interviews don’t imply that all is equal in Ducks, but it does “argue” that pollution and other ills occur all the time all over the world—including within the box/house that her characters occupy for a modicum (and illusion) of safety.

The title of Mehretu’s painting is “HOWL, eon I.” Ducks includes considerable suffering, but Ellmann’s lists and her “all-over” technique damp down emotional melodrama. Also, within the box/house in Ducks—despite all of domesticity’s frustrations and irritations—are the comforts of family and love. Many of the old movies that the narrator describes are kind of sentimental about domestic life. I wouldn’t call Ellmann a sentimentalist, but she gives tender emotions weight in her monstrosity.

Ducks, Newburyport can seem all middle. Much of what I’ve written above is about the first half of the novel. From the middle on, the novel does slowly change. For hundreds of pages, it seemed the book would take place on one day, waking up the kids, getting them to school, making pies, having a flat tire when delivering in a snowstorm, being saved by Jesus (a Hispanic good Samaritan), getting home for the kids’ return from school. Past the middle, space contracts, time stretches out, becomes vague, and there’s less about the narrator’s activities outside the home, more of her repetitive thinking inside the home—about her childhood, her dreams, her fears of the future, the actors in old movies. And thinking about her thinking, how it oppresses her, requires evasive tricks and digressions, interferes with her relation to her family, makes her at times, she says, a “monster-mom.” The first-half themes are present, but Ellmann is adjusting the weights. The changes in character and text (fewer long lists, less racing from subject to subject) look to be tending toward conventional fictive resolution, possibly an emotional breakdown, perhaps something worse, not “picnic, lightning” but an ending like those in Madame Bovary and Chopin’s The Awakening (both referred to in the text). If readers were initially afraid of the text, its demands, Ellmann manages to make them afraid for the narrator as, she says, she “spirals.”

The alternative text about the mountain lion seems to parallel the changes in the primary text. The lion narrative initially concentrated on her actions. Past the middle, Ellmann imagines the lion’s troubled consciousness after her cubs are lost. And not long after, the cubs are referred to in a news report inside the primary text. In some succeeding sections, the narrator describes lion sightings, public panic, and a tracker’s pursuit of the lion. If the lion’s entry into the primary text is not a fake McGuffin, the lion story suggests that the narrator, with her love of animals and concern for children, may have written the lion story, perhaps after the events described in the whole primary text. If true, Ducks, Newburyport would be a recovery narrative, the narrator finding relief from the crippling monstrosity of her pandemonium consciousness to compose a narrative in complete sentences even her children (well, not the youngest one) could read. [Future scholars should pay more attention to this, too.].

Ducks is one of the most suspenseful novels I’ve ever read, hundreds of pages of suspense. When is something different going to happen? Will the lion be reunited with her cubs? Will there be some resolute action from the passive narrator, some resolution to the text? I can say without fear of spoiling that after worrying on almost every page about men shooting women and children, the narrator must face the fact and act. I can also say that the very long list that ends the novel includes some encouraging items about the future—and the lion. If not a recovery narrative, Ellman’s novel is a survival story despite the toxins outside all persons and inside some persons. As a whole, Ducks, Newburyport is like the ancient Greek “pharmakon,” both a poison (or collection of poisons) and a remedy for readers: recognition.

At the end of the day, at the end of many days reading Ducks, Newburyport, even I, like some 2019 reviewers, wonder if the novel needed to be as long as it is. At half the length, it would be an original and affecting monstrosity. But for anything like a final judgment of this monsterpiece, we need more understanding of its patterns, its possible complexity. When asked to judge sketches by two of her children, the narrator praises one for “intricacy,” the other for “color.” We can see all the color. We need scholars to investigate that possible intricacy. Maybe not devote their lives to Ducks as some have to Ulysses but take some months (or years, if they judge Ellmann unique and profound) to identify all the patterns that make the book an intricate chaos that needs its massive scope to do, like its narrator, its multitasking. One scholar could research the reliability of all the scientific “facts” that Ellmann has her narrator introduce. Another scholar should study all the movies the narrator views and responds to. A third scholar would use current psychoanalytic theory to illuminate the narrator’s neuroses and developing paranoia. Scholar four might do an analysis of the novel’s material culture. The narrator’s husband studies bridges; a scholar may look into bridges as an important metaphor. Then these scholars would organize a conference—like Dennett’s “congress”—to which they and other scholars would present their specialized papers for discussion and “weighting.” The most weighty would be published in an expensive university press volume that would have the title (like Dennett’s) Ducks, Newburyport Explained. I might not buy it, but I’d definitely check it out of the library (and check to see if this belated “review” is cited in the bibliography). In the meantime, take Ducks out of the library, read 200 pages, and see if Ellmann pleases you as much as she did me. If so, you can own the book and keep coming back to it as some readers of Moby-Dick and Ulysses do—with or without the scholarly apparatus I imagine.

I’ve read library copies of Ben Lerner’s three previous novels—Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and The Topeka School—with moderate interest in his personal psychological shavings and with only faint understanding of his current artistic prominence. But when I found out that his new novel, Transcription, was about interviewing a famous and difficult writer, I took the unusual measure of purchasing a copy. Primarily because I have done such interviews, but also because a critic I respect claimed that Transcription is a “brilliant attempt to resurrect the novel.” This turns out to be far from true, but Transcription is a funny and witty short fiction (130 pages) about three hypersensitive (and therefore unreliable) contemporary characters and one character from another time, the 90-year-old writer, who has almost no sensitivity to others.

https://openlettersreview.com/posts/transcription-by-ben-lerner

If you have read the review, you know that aged writer is Lerner’s monster, the kind of writer who creates monsterpieces, the kind of ambitious writer Lerner has never tried to become. As I say in the review, Transcription seems to express the anxiety of not being influenced by monstrous major work that might have made him more than a minor novelist with an inflated reputation, a writer similar to but less serious than the main man of social and psychological realism, Jonathan Franzen. With his hip peek-a-boo autofictions and formal playfulness, Lerner is Franzen lite, light-hearted, light-weighted.

In “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” Pound said, “The age demanded an image/Of its accelerated grimace,” and Lerner provided the image in the mirror of autofiction and in his attention to quick-timing media. Pound also said, “The `age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster,/Made with no loss of time.” Lerner didn’t lose much time writing 130 pages. Or maybe the age was too anxious about itself to demand, but Lerner could see the value of moving from poetry to novels and bouncing back to more numerous readers their postmodern anxieties.

Lerner knew to Ignore monsters, avoid creating anything that might be called a monstrosity, please the people who read some poetry, collect the prizes. If you’re interviewed, as Lerner’s monster is, don’t alienate your interviewer and possible readers with crazy talk about subjects way outside the usual boundaries of literature.

I understand the farewell to poetry economics: 25 bucks for 130 pages, about 20 cents a page with tax. What I still don’t understand, though I’ve been 50 years in the reviewing biz, is the praise being poured on Transcription, the least of Lerner’s fictions, what Henry James might have called a “frail vessel.” I’ve been reading the reviews in mainstream venues courtesy of Lit Hub’s “Book Marks.” The reviewers can’t all be Lerner’s anxious and unconfident coevals, afraid of losing their precarious perches as freelancers if they don’t keep the helium coming. In these raves, to whom is Lerner being implicitly compared? Sally Rooney, Gary Shteyngart? Certainly not Don DeLillo (he’s not the monster). Not Rachel Kushner or Dana Spiotta whose work thrived under the influence of DeLillo.

In the reviews, I found no references to Michael Cunningham’s triptych The Hours though it received the same kind of praise now being given the three-part Transcription: psychologically subtle, highly sensitive, knowingly literary. The Hours won the Pulitzer Prize. Transcription won’t, but still—why am I complaining? Lerner is not the emperor with no clothes. But I just don’t understand the raiments the reviewers are putting on him. Literary reputation is not a zero-sum game, but it can be an imitation game. Novelists in training can do better than soaking up Lerner’s influence. The better novelists’ models are, the fewer negative reviews I will feel the need to write in my defense of monster-making ambition and effect.

As for “resurrection,” for as long as I’ve been reviewing, the novel has been pronounced dead. Diminished in its audience, yes. In need of resurrection? Hardly. Oddly, Pound is again apposite, saying about Mauberley, “He strove to resuscitate the dead art/Of poetry.” Then Lerner moved to fiction. But the novel doesn’t need the Lazarus act—and Lerner didn’t need the Easter-time hyperbole. Even if the novel were in need, how in the world could a respected critic believe that Lerner is the savior with, of all things, a novel (or novella) of 130 pages?

Technology progresses, it seems, by ever more miniaturization. Is the technology of the novel subject to this same law? Less is more, smaller is better, least is best? One review site, perhaps influenced by Poe, lists works people can read in one sitting, maybe even without checking their phones. Each of the three stories in Transcription can be read in less than an hour. A transcription often leaves things out of the original event, reduces it, saves time. AI can save readers further time by summarizing a transcript in a paragraph or two. One reviewer thinks he’s complimenting Transcription by calling it “exquisite.” In an interview, Lerner said he wanted the book small and thin to remind readers of a cell phone, which is pictured on the cover. With a cell phone, one can access more information than one can ever process. With Transcription, one has only those 130 pages, their connections to each other, their occasional allusions to the world outside the book. This reductivism is supposed to save the novel?

Okay, I understand why the proprietor of Monsterpieces would be consternated by a wildly exaggerated promotion of the miniature, the minimal. But I still don’t understand all the consistently high praise for Transcription. If you read it, please explain the reputation of Ben Lerner to me and the readers of Monsterpieces.

https://openlettersreview.com/posts/son-of-nobody-by-yann-martel

In the Iliad, literal monsters, the hybrid creatures that Greek heroes kill, are in the background, in the past. But from a contemporary perspective, the poem’s characters, both gods and humans, are monstrous in their powers, sometimes their size, and their preternatural actions. Toward the poem’s end, in Book 21, violence exceeds its previous level: Achilles now fights to exhaustion the river god Scamander, and various other gods and goddesses join the fray on both sides. In the Robert Fagles translation, the Scamander is called “monstrous,” and Priam, viewing from the walls of Troy the raging Achilles, calls him “monstrous.”

Although the Iliad may lack literal monsters, for most contemporary readers it’s a formal monstrosity—particularly when compared with the narrative of the Odyssey, which does have the monster Polyphemus. The Iliad is an ancient imitative form: the length of the poem reflecting the fabled length of the Trojan War. The scene shifts—from Greeks to Trojans, from Troy to Olympus and back—interrupt the narrative. There are pauses for stories to be told, digressions about minor figures to be related, catalogues to be recited. The characters rarely change. The battles and speeches are, like the epic’s formulaic phrases, repetitive. The detail seems excessive—the names, the killing, the equipment, the shield of Achilles.

Of contemporary monsterpieces, the Iliad most resembles Tom’s Crossing, which refers to it, except that the stakes for Greek culture are much higher. Menelaus wants Helen back and goes to war. The Porch family wants two nags back and then revenge for the accidental death of their son/brother, a poor Patroclus. Danielewski’s two adolescents on a quest are like the Odyssey; the family pursuing vengeance are like the Iliad.

Martel quotes Donne’s tutor’s remark on the Frankenstein nature of Donne’s poem. The complaint at first sounds exaggerated, for the initial fragments seem chronologically or logically ordered. But after Donne learns of his daughter’s illness, some of the poem is disordered, recording unlikely events such as the diffident Psoas becoming a manic killer and then fighting Mestor to the death. Sections go on much longer than earlier sections. Some lines of dialogue are repeated, as if Thersites or Donne forgot they had been used. Hades speaks like a beleaguered contemporary businessman. So, on a small scale, the poem is a monstrosity. The book is hybrid, like ancient monsters, but the commentary half poses no great challenges, so I don’t consider Son of Nobody as a whole an aesthetic monstrosity.

The monster that most interests Martel is a metaphor—of emotional danger, of repressed rage and violence. As a child, Donne asks his grandfather about serving in Vietnam. He is loath to answer but finally says, “`We are hiding places for monsters.’” Donne goes on to say he studies the Iliad as “the blueprint, the original hiding place for monsters.” The Achilles-like monster within Psoas surfaces when Mestor insults his wife, after which Psoas goes on a killing spree and battles Mestor, both stripped naked of their armor, of civilization—a duel that recalls the climactic fight between Achilles and Hector. The monster within Donne comes out of hiding when he refuses to return to Canada immediately after the death of his daughter because he wants to finish the poem in Oxford. Psoas uses the rage monster to defend his family honor; the art monster Donne denies his family. When Psoas’ fellow Greeks are raping and massacring Trojans inside their walls, Psoas restrains the monster and looks for loot he can take back home. Donne uses his art monster to complete the poem and bring back an object, the manuscript, that fails its function, his degree. In the last scene where he and his wife are together viewing their daughter’s corpse, they get into a vicious, hateful argument, and Donne says “the real monsters [are] in the room,” rage in his wife, egotism in him.

More hidden than rage may be the monster eros. The name Psoas seems to allude to the ancient Greek word for loins, the muscles of the loins. He values the works of his loins. Before leaving for Oxford, Donne no longer has sex with his wife and finds physical intimacy only when cuddling with Helen. Psoas is willing to die to honor his family. Donne is willing to completely alienate his frigid wife after the death of Helen. [He’s fortunate she’s no Clytemnestra.] According to Donne’s poem, Psoas is “rewarded” as the only living person in Hades after he brings the Lord of the Underworld the body of a dead child. Upon his return to Canada, Donne lives in a “dismal basement apartment.” He says, “I was banished to Hades.” From failed Eros, it is not a long way to Thanatos.

Beyond the personal, Son of Nobody suggests a cultural allegory related to monsters out of hiding. From the first pages of the poem, when a knowledgeable merchant speaks, Greeks are represented as impoverished, violence-loving barbarians. Much more than Homer, Donne and his poem credit the Trojans for their cultivation of beauty and the creation of art. Even the walls of Troy are elegant mosaic tiles. Psoas is a goatherd but defends his family. The artistic Trojans are defending their families but also the beauty of their city. Martel implies that art is not just an epiphenomenon of monster-taming but is a useful sublimation. Until the monstrous barbarians show up. The destruction of Troy may symbolize the fall into monstrousness in any place at any time, but Martel balances his allegory with Donne’s guilty devotion to his art, to his ambition for his poem. Donne also has his bard Thersites forsake his criticism of Achilles and try to impress him in a chance encounter.

Martel’s use of the monstrous as metaphor is persistent but ultimately not very original. I still think that Martel failed to get the most out of his material. The poem might well have been longer and more thorough in establishing its difference from the Iliad. Donne rushes to complete his poem and commentary before returning home. The writings, while provocative, fail as a dissertation. At the end of his abstract, Donne refers to himself as an Oxford Ph.D. Not a monstrous lie but still a lie about the quality and reception of his work, its failure as a substantial addition to knowledge. Something similar can be said of Martel’s work.

Discussing different versions of how Helen reached Troy, Donne says: “We have no idea how Helen got to Troy. The determinant must finally be the reader’s desire, how the reader wants to interpret the story. How do you want Helen to get to Troy?” This is close to a comment by Pi that I mentioned in the review: after telling his interrogators two stories about his ordeal, Pi says, since “`you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer?’” The archaic rhapsodes of epic poetry had to keep their listening audience in mind—who they were, what they expected to hear at their festivals, how attentive they were, what they could remember. Printed text altered the artist’s relationship to the audience. The text had an existence of its own, which created different criteria for artistic judgment. An artist worthy of a prestigious book prize does not respond to what readers may “want” or “prefer.” The artist prints their story and takes their chances in the present, in the future. “Dollars damn me,” Hawthorne famously wrote to Melville. So does indulging readers’ desires. Maybe this monster of indulgence was not in hiding from Martel when he consigned his Psoas and his Donne to Hades.

Since Monsterpieces has so far included only one woman—Helen DeWitt (though the essay on Bullshitting does discuss Gayl Jones)—I decided to go back and look at a 26-year-old essay about women rewriting men, an essay in Electronic Book Review that I mentioned in my first post:

https://electronicbookreview.com/publications/false-pretenses-parasites-and-monsters/

The men are Melville, Nabokov, and de Sade whose characters are monsters; the women are less widely known—Sena Naslund, Pia Pera, and Rikki Ducornet. Though not equally successful, their novels provide interesting perspectives on their target texts and, in a couple of cases, achieve their own version of monstrosity. Late in the essay, I also discuss other monstrosities: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, as well as Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and a collaborative work entitled The Unknown published only on the Internet.

If you’re a committed monster-tamer, you may want to know about these novels by women. I haven’t re-read them since the essay. What interests me now more than the particulars in the essay are several general ideas I should have pirated into my first post on Monsterpieces.

The first idea was influenced by Michel Serres’ concept of the “parasite,” the word the French use for “noise” in an information exchange. Noise disrupts the channel but also can lead to diagnosis and improvement. A monstrosity of a novel is most often received as noise, unwelcome and resisted but sometimes later recognized as useful in diagnosing and modifying accepted generic systems. The idea is an extension: the novel—any novel—is noise in the global system of communication that aims for perfect reception, noise because a novel is by nature ambiguous—a pretense—and requires interpretation. A monsterpiece with its usually variable sources of information and interpretive possibilities is the extreme illustration. More in the essay.

The second idea arose from reading House of Leaves and The Unknown, the first a huge hybrid of texts and visuals influenced by the informational variety of the Internet. The Unknown, existing only in virtual space, replicates the Internet because readers can follow a seeming infinity of links and stories. A quarter of a century ago, the Internet was probably not considered the monstrosity it is today.

The third idea extends the first two: that language itself, composed of logical and accidental features, inventions and traces, is a monstrosity, both ordered and disordered, fixed and mutating, functional and not. The influence here is Jacques Derrida’s notion of language as an infinitely deferred intertext with no univocal, stable meaning. A monsterpiece is the large-scale literary representation of linguistic undecidability. Fewer details in the essay.

My conclusion would be that monsterpieces of the kinds discussed in this Substack are not unnatural forms but logical—though unusual—growths of the novel as a linguistic form. It’s within monsterpieces that readers are asked—or forced—to think about the nature of fiction and the words (and sometimes pictures) fiction uses. Which is to say that while some monsterpieces are locally metafictional within themselves, the very fact of their existence is metafictional and metalinguistic. Monsterpieces may seem to be parasites and noise but represent the essence of fiction and language.

The anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that language grew out of physical grooming as a means of socializing in groups. Conventional novels are like grooming, authors pleasing readers by picking lice off their heads. Monsterpieces are the vocalizations that replaced grooming by putting ideas into readers’ heads.

This is not a review, like “This is not a pipe.” This is an alert. This Spring, Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive Press will be re-releasing William Gass’s 1995 novel The Tunnel along with a book of contemporary responses to it. Having no memory of the 650-page novel’s initial reception, I went back and read some reviews, all available online. The New Republic called it a “bloated monster of a book,” The Los Angeles Times said that the protagonist/narrator is a “monster [who] has taken human form,” and The New York Times Book Review called that character “a plausible monster.” He thinks of his past as a “string of monsters.” The Tunnel is outside the initial date range of Monsterpieces, but it fits the definition: a radically unreliable and persistently garrulous narrator reviewing in stream of consciousness sentences his life as an unloved child, disappointed husband, angry man, and Nazi apologist. The novel even has some visual elements breaking up what plot there is. Of the difficult books discussed here, The Tunnel is closest to A Short Introduction to Anneliese in narration, willy-nilly structure, and style, but Gass was an unrivalled master of sentences and this novel about Nazi Germany and “the fascism of the heart” has more cultural weight than Elkins’ book (in which Anneliese calls The Tunnel “bats”).

Because The Tunnel is a demanding monstrosity, I’m posting this alert early so you can sample excerpts online or scan a library copy before you rush out and buy a novel that many readers admit to never finishing. For encouragement, see the long and enthusiastic review by Michael Silverblatt in the Los Angeles Times.

If this is not a review, maybe it, like the novel, is a dare. Those quoted reviewers are right: from the beginning, the protagonist William Frederick Kohler is a moral monster and, like Gass, an art monster. Both admire Rilke and practice prose poetry, the kind of intensive writing that Roland Barthes said caused “bliss”—or in this case occasional disgust. Not just any old, fuzzy poetic prose, but fiction that sounds like it was voiced by that noted alliterationist Gerard Manley Hopkins. Kohler’s mentor, a German historian called “Mad Meg,” tells Kohler “`greatness—greatness—isn’t sensitivity or vision, Kohler—no—take it from me: GREATNESS IS PASSION!’” Gass worked on The Tunnel for more than twenty years to make sure that every sentence on every page manifested his great passion for sound and simile, music and metaphor no matter how vulgar or reprehensible were his narrator’s actions and opinions.

To escape his unhappy life as a 50-year-old professor of history, Kohler conceives in 1967 a project—digging a tunnel out of his cellar, as if it were a concentration camp. It is slow going, dark, cramped, bad air, tiring for an overweight man past his prime. Reading this memoir or confession that he keeps secret from his wife can also be exhausting, partly because of Kohler’s quick shifts among subjects and times, mostly because of the density of his sentences, even of his words with their double or multiple meanings. Going back to The Tunnel after many years away, I treated it not as a task or project, such as preparing a meal or writing a review, but as a dessert, twenty or so pages at a time every day after less demanding—but also less pleasurable—reading. I kept digging it (to use a phrase the 60s-hating Kohler would mock) despite realizing that the richness of Gass’s language, its millefeuille of sweets and fillers, concepts and cunts, made every other writer—self included—seem a sluggard.

A few facts, though for Kohler facts lack significance until they are put into words, played with, and put into more words where they get their true being. Born in 1917 (it seems), Kohler grew up in a small Iowa town, the lonely child of a harsh father and alcoholic, asylum-bound mother. He went to Germany to study history in 1938 and witnessed Kristallnacht. He later served in the Army and observed the Nuremberg trials. He got a job in a third-rate Indiana university, married, and within a year was unhappy with his bride. They had two children, one of whom Kohler names; the other goes nameless. He dislikes both sons and all his colleagues. He had one short-term lover, Lou, he never got over. He has written a manuscript called Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, but when he attempts to compose the preface he sidetracks into this tunneling text that he presumes no one will read. He’s free to dig into his past, released from his wife’s scrutiny and academic expectations. Hollowing his tunnel, he has to remove the dirt, now waste. Perhaps the tunnel manuscript is not the talking cure but the writing cure, Kohler shedding his past defeats while articulating his current despair.

In Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, a learned and bombastic figure like Kohler says, “Can there be misery— (he yawns) —loftier than mine?” Kohler might sympathize, but as his manuscript grows and, perhaps, matures, he increasingly attempts to connect his misery with the Germans’ savagery during the war: “what horrors had been done the Germans first that they should prove the monsters that they proved?” (550) Kohler believes and then argues that his familial suffering is widespread and historical, maybe even natural—genetic—for humans who rage as he does and Germans did. In his narcissism and, perhaps, his sophism, Kohler pushes way beyond Freudian family dysfunction and social alienation with his theory that the popular support for Nazi leaders came from personal resentments like Kohler’s (and Hitler’s). Elaborating and belaboring his thesis, Kohler tips from eccentricity into monstrousness, and the novel—given Kohler’s confessed “bathetic excess and ruinous derision”—becomes a monstrosity of unwanted illustrative details Kohler insists on including to “prove” his thesis. One late section is an extended rationale for bigotry. In its specificity, The Tunnel is like Danielewski’s oversaturated Tom’s Crossing, but Gass harbors no nostalgia, offers no conclusive gunplay, and includes no ghosts. Not literal haunts, anyway.

If The Tunnel is initially a dare, by the middle and end it becomes a test of the reader: how far will you follow what the reviewers rightly call a moral monster? How much credit will you give the author for creating such a character and giving him most of the stylistic gifts the author deploys in his other writings? I interviewed Gass several times. Speaking of difficult novels, he told me that we do not judge certain books, they judge us. Questions proliferate. Will you rise to the stylistic challenges posed by The Tunnel? Will you be able to tolerate beautiful ugliness? If fiction is said to teach its readers empathy for others, even the worst of others, will you find a way to empathize with Kohler?

Then there’s the test of time. I’m posting about a thirty-year-old monsterpiece because I think it—like Coover’s The Public Burning—is more timely now than it was when published, fifty years after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Gass’s enraged but hapless professor has turned into the powerful monster president, and the “fascism of the heart”—an obsession with personal grievance and mass vengeance—has become public policy enforced throughout the government, most dramatically with heavily armed and carefully masked troopers in American streets. One doesn’t need The Tunnel to recognize Fascism, but experiencing it now in the United States might lead literary readers to recognize the achievement of the novel. Gass died in 2017. He could have sensed then the immediate future and maybe even Trump’s revenge tour. Gass never cared much what reviewers said, but history has proved The Tunnel more prescient and valuable than many of its carping reviewers imagined.

Not a review, more than an alert, not really a dare or test, these paragraphs are a suggestion if you’d like to supplement the sample of recent Monsterpieces with a forerunner and, to me, a stillrunner. If you want to work up to The Tunnel, you might read a more accessible and entertaining novel by Gass— Middle C. A real review of it follows. Ideally, though, you’d read The Tunnel first and maybe then see Middle C as an alternative to the earlier novel’s pessimism.

Middle C

By William Gass

After seven books of philosophical and literary essays that have established William Gass as America’s most acute and stylish critic, he has published at age eighty-eight a “first” novel. Not literally his first novel. That is Omensetter’s Luck released in 1966. But the kind of novel with which young writers often begin: an exuberant shape-shifting bildungsroman and a near künstlerroman, as its protagonist becomes a music teacher rather than an artist. For those unacquainted with Gass’s challenging fictions, Middle C should be the first one to try. Given the high-modernist enthusiasms of his essays, it’s unexpectedly almost middlebrow in its attention to callow youth and ordinary folks, its leisurely third-person narration, and sentences readers can see through to the world, not just look at with envy.

Gass has said he doesn’t think much about readers, but his opening gambits in Omensetter’s Luck and The Tunnel were prickly dares. Middle C is welcoming from the slightly absurdist start, when an Austrian Christian identifies himself as Jewish to escape the coming Nazis. It has narrative blandishments and concealments, virtuoso performances, and verisimilitude to spare in Gass’s descriptions of mid-century Ohio towns and the places protagonist Joseph Skizzen works--a record store, a village library, and, for more than forty years, a small college. In an interview published in the Paris Review more than three decades ago, Gass stated his “work proceeds almost always from a sense of aggression.” There’s plenty of disgust with human stupidity in Middle C, but it doesn’t give voice to a monster as his other two novels do.

Well, maybe a middling, muddling comic monster, like one of Nabokov’s ill-fitting immigrant academics. In the late 1930s, Joseph’s father decides his family should take on Jewish names so they can emigrate to England, where they arrive just in time for Joseph to be born during the blitz. After the father deserts the family, mother, daughter, and Joseph move to the United States and end up in a semi-rural Ohio. The father’s motive for leaving Austria was to remain guiltless of collaborating with the Nazi takeover he sensed in the future. Young Joey mythologizes his father and vows to imitate his moral purity--a key word in the novel--even if his scrupulosity may require some “innocent” fabrications like his father’s change of religious identity.

In Ohio, Joey receives “C” grades in school, intentionally keeping a low profile, unlike his sister Debbie, who becomes a cheerleader and, later, a satisfied member of the middle class. As a teenager Joey enjoys his job in a record shop and becomes interested in serious and, he feels, pure music, but he is framed by a jealous employee and leaves the store. He has no friends, no interest in girls. He attends a community college and afterwards finds a job at a library in a nearby town. Needing a car, Joey forges a driver’s license because he lacks the necessary identification documents.

Joey meets two women working in the library: one improves his forgery and helps him fake up his resume; the other scandalizes pure Joey with a sexual advance. He scrambles home to his mother and applies for a position teaching music at the local religious college. Although Joey taught himself the piano, plays badly, and knows little about modern music, he bluffs and lies his way into the position, where Joey becomes serious Joseph and eventually Professor Skizzen, who affects a Viennese background while growing old teaching at Whittlebauer where he lives in a rented house with his mother.

With the Rabbit-raising Updike gone, only Gass, of American novelists working now, has the technical dexterity and, I suppose, aplomb to make so mundane a life absorbing--both entertaining and enlightening--for almost 400 pages. He employs the good old-fashioned suspense he has sometimes mocked in reviews of plot-driven fiction. Which of Joseph’s deceptions will be revealed and when? Will he be able to maintain his ascetic purity? Gass whets readers’ curiosity with flash-forwards, juxtapositions that make us wonder how a boy like Joey was ever able to become Professor Skizzen. And early on Gass plants a boldface sentence by Joseph--”The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure“--that he compulsively revises, expands, and explains. What has Joseph experienced that has elicited this nihilism and caused him to collect thousands of clippings about atrocities for the “Inhumanity Museum” he curates in his attic?

Consciousness, skewed by circumstance, stewed in obsession, has always been Gass’s chief concern, so he filters most of the novel through his protagonist’s mind, which is a fascinating blend of three overlapping identities: Joey, Joseph, and Professor Skizzen. There are conflicts between what they can’t know and what they would like to avoid; between self-imposed purity and natural needs; between perceptions of other people all the Skizzens resent and the external personas they compose to please those others. Unlike the word-crazed and learned narrators who take over Omensetter’s Luck and The Tunnel, the protagonist in Middle C is no genius, and his limitations make the novel affecting.

Gass believes that Henry James is the greatest American novelist because he was the master of consciousness. Middle C is like a male companion to The Portrait of a Lady, another novel in which not much happens. With little or no formal instruction, Joseph and Isabel Archer, living in countries not their own, educate themselves through error, protect their “innocence” with repression, and take refuge in their own perceptive but stunted consciousness. As the autodidact Joseph struggles to keep his knowledge a step ahead of his colleagues and students, readers get the benefit of his self-instruction about twentieth-century composers and their music.

Although Gass’s early aesthetic theorizing resisted any socially instructive value for fiction, Middle C should receive at least a B-plus from even the most militant Franzanies, for Bass uses the anxieties of Skizzen and the hypocrisies of minor characters to authoritatively represent the self-fashioning, other-directed culture of the 1950s described by David Riesman and Erving Goffman, an era that Gass can recall with the precision of an advanced recording device. And with only a nudge, the novel’s small-town social dynamic of self-presentation becomes a metaphor for the contemporary fraudulence of big-time social media--and even for the falsity of political correctness.

Joseph believes that “Changelings required impromptus, variations, bagatelles, divertimenti, to do justice to their nature,” and Middle C is the kind of inventive pastiche that first novelists throw together to show off their formal chops and to keep readers interested in pages not made for movies. Several chapters are double-barreled classroom lectures on music--the professor alternating between his delivery to witless students and his witty remarks to himself. Joseph is in turn instructed in great detail about the care of books by an old-maid librarian and about the care of flowers by his even older mother, whose ever-expanding garden becomes a symbol of the growth that Joseph refuses. Gass includes Joseph’s notes on students, supplies compact bios of victimized artists Anton von Webern and Bruno Schulz, inserts a poem about catacombs, quotes old popular songs, incorporates news items on index cards, varies typography, and writes a commentary on faculty meetings to the tune of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.”

Within all the formal variations, word-man Gass is a constant micromanager. Note to note, paragraph to paragraph, his sentences offer pleasures for readers who may enter the book desiring other excitements. In what could be his last novel, Gass has found the subject--music--perfectly appropriate to the sound devices and metaphors both manifested in and analyzed by works such as On Being Blue and the metafictional novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. Here is Gass throwing the voice of Professor Skizzen, sometimes called “Doctor Digress,” in his lecture on John Cage:

With our new instruments of bedevilment might we not record all sorts of sounds out there in the world that calls itself--that call themselves--real; where squeaks and squeals and screams are on the menu, where dins assail us by the dozens--the crinkle of cellophane, whishiss of small talk, the fanning of five hundred programs--where we fill our ears with one noise in order not to hear another…yes, record, preserve not only the roil of the sea but the oink of pigs and moos of cattle, the wind rattling the cornstalks like the hand of an enemy on the knob, and put them in…in the realm of majesty, of beauty, of purity, in…in music.

Because the context is rhetorical--the uncharacteristically passionate professor trying to wake up dullard students--this passage is more intense and richer (onomatopoeia, alliteration, elaborate parentheticals, simile, an iambic beat) than much of the novel, yet Gass maintains throughout Middle C the kind of stylistic energy and linguistic ebullience that we find busting out in debut novelists, qualities that make mundane material musical.

Music moves in time; fiction--according to Gass--occupies space as painting does. The name Skizzen recalls the word for “sketch” in the German that Joseph’s mother speaks. The paragraphs above trace a first reading of Middle C, its surfaces. Because sketches are sometimes found beneath the outer layer of a painting, a second reading may be necessary to uncover and appreciate this novel’s formal wholeness. Very near the end, the usual third-person narration bleeds into the first-person narration of the much-revised boldface sentence. On second reading, I noticed that near the beginning the opposite briefly occurs: the boldface first-person sentence leaks into the third-person prose. And what is my point, you may ask? That Professor Skizzen, experienced artificer of false documents, may have composed the whole book. And so what? If so, Skizzen, and not only his creator, has recognized the foolish figure that he has cut all those years. If true, Middle C is a happy-ending kunstlerroman, recording the slow processes by which Skizzen becomes an artist, not a musical artist but a literary one like Henry Adams, who wrote his memoir of education in the third person.

Is Gass merely playing a game, like Nabokov’s puzzle about who really wrote the two parts of Pale Fire, Shade the poet or Kinbote the professor? I think not, for the shifty point of view in Middle C extends and nicely complicates the central theme of fictive self-presentation. If Skizzen is the “author” between Gass and readers, they must consider how much of Skizzen’s autobiography is true; how much J. S.--like his earlier avatars Joey, Joseph, Professor--has faked to please; and, most disturbing, how much complicity readers may share in his duplicity.

And William Gass, professor emeritus known to his friends as Bill, where is he in the layers and liars of Middle C? Barely visible in a modest signature. When Professor Skizzen addresses in his own head a college committee he thinks will fire him, he says, “To you, a counterfeit is more acceptable than a real bill, the shade of a shade more important than the tree.” As here, the “real bill” occasionally instructs readers behind Joseph’s back. Gass moves Joseph’s mouth to defend the novel he’s in when discussing Arnold Schoenberg: he “was incapable of the Middle-C mind” and “probably never understood the bland, the ordinary, the neutral, because it is as difficult to strike as oil.” Gass is no seat-of-the-pants wildcatter. He went back to drill in the small town of his undergraduate years at Kenyon College and the village Omensetter passed through in his horse-drawn wagon. Do I give Gass too much credit if I point out that gas is refined oil and that oil is primarily carbon (the element whose chemical name is “C”) from the middle of the earth?

The “real bill” is more significantly present when Joseph discusses a musical memoir he has read: “You began one; you were suitably entranced; the style, the subject, the arrangement--the noble sentiments, the brilliant thoughts, the charming creatures therein portrayed” but then you found “an idea that was as grotesque as a two-headed calf, a sentiment that steamed like rotting flesh, like a childhood ramble in the ruins that suddenly betrayed you with a sight not meant for living eyes.” This passage describes the controlling bait and switch strategy of Middle C, the exceptionally risky maneuver that makes the novel emotionally gouging as well as amusing, for Gass lures readers into an unthreatening human comedy that he periodically punctuates with long catalogues of historical and contemporary inhumanity. Here is a short sample from a list that goes on for three pages:

On the walls of his attic area were everywhere pinned atrocity pictures, some of them classics: the weeping baby of Nanking or the wailing Vietnamese girl running naked amid other running wailing children on that fatal Route I near Trang Bang (even the name a mockery); numerous sepias of dead outlaws with their names on crude signs propped beneath their boots; clips from films that showed what struck the eyes of those who first entered the extermination camps--careless heaps of skins and bones, entirely tangled, exhibiting more knees and elbows than two-pair-to-a-death ought allow….

Voltaire employed a similar strategy of compact excess in his Candide, which overloaded a short adventure narrative to indict false innocence and every variety of cruelty. Former philosophy professor Gass tips his hat to the old philosophe with the last words of Middle C: Joseph’s mother, he thinks, “couldn’t cultivate her garden forever,” a reference to Candide‘s much-discussed concluding image.

Thirty years ago, John Gardner, puffed up with the successful provocation of his On Moral Fiction, berated Gass in a public debate for being an amoral aesthete, for cultivating his own garden of earthly delights. Gardner even said he hoped he would outlive Gass and change all his endings. Gardner died in 1982, and Gass has written his most moral of fictions even if, like Skizzen the fraud, he has been duplicitous in doing so. Ironically, some readers may find Middle C too moral, too didactic, perhaps gratuitously so. The objection will be that the modest disappointments of Skizzen’s life do not obviously lead to his fascination with his bold sentence and Boschian Museum.

But there is a plausible psychological connection, one that unifies the novel’s comic and horrific strands. As a barely legal alien occupying in small-town America the acceptable roles of earnest striver, dutiful son, and slightly eccentric professor, Skizzen has no one, not even his mother, to whom he dares express his large-world pessimism. So in the hothouse of his attic and mind his sentence and Museum bloom like the poisonous garden in Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” another work about false innocence.

Joseph may be the madman in the attic, but his private obsession is with undeniable facts, truths the 1950s, as well as later decades, wished to repress. Joseph’s father in prewar Austria forecast the Nazis; Joseph in post-war Ohio forecasts their successors. Readers can choose to skip these poison-pill passages. If they do, though, will they recognize the cost to their own humanity? Will they feel shame at preserving their ignorance, their “purity”? Maybe Middle C displays more aggression than I originally thought.

Lest Gass’s duplicity as a novelist seem to bleed out into this review, I want to disclose that I was the person who interviewed him for the Paris Review and who tried to moderate the discussion where Gardner attacked Gass. As far as I know, Gass has done me no favors. In fact I resent the man, for his exemplary work as a critic has made writing reviews more difficult for me, and his cadences infiltrate my own if I read too much of him. I admired Omensetter’s Luck and The Tunnel, the novellas in Cartesian Sonata, and the stories in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. I enjoyed Gass’s experiment with visuals in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. But Middle C I love for the pleasures it gives and the horrors it inflicts, its flying-fingers alternation of the high notes to the right of Middle C and the low notes to the left on the piano keyboard. I rank the novel first among Gass’s six books of fiction.

The essay, adapted from a chapter in my Art of Excess, was published in The Daily Beast soon after the inauguration. Given the chaos and cruelty of Trump’s second term, the details of the essay may seem quaint, but Coover’s anthropological perspective on performative American politics remains an original and powerful way of thinking about the ongoing Trump Show that has now devolved into a monstrous Show of Force.]

“The Public Burned”

Even before Donald Trump was inaugurated, I was impatient for some quick and angry fiction writer to publish a novel dealing with the Artist of the Deal. Writing before the election, the veteran political novelist Thomas Mallon outlined in The New Yorker what he would do in a novel about the campaign, but said he was too disgusted to write it. Surely rage will move others with stronger stomachs to engage the ugly campaign and the possibly uglier administration filled with spiteful know-nothings and canny profiteers.

While we await what I called the Trumpciad in an earlier essay about Pope’s Dunciad, we are fortunate to have Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, an encyclopedic novel published in 1977 that quotes Pope: “Aghast I stood [before] a monument of woe.” I’ve been writing about American fiction since the late 60’s, and I think that no novel gives us better understanding of Trump’s election than The Public Burning. Coover knows rage. In 2014, he published a thousand-page sequel, The Brunist Day of Wrath, to his first novel, Origin of the Brunists. A wrathful Public Burning II would be welcome, but the original took him many years to write, the Brunist sequel came 48 years after Origin, and he is 84. So today it’s back to 1953 and the public electrocution, in Coover’s imagination, of the “atomic spies” Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in Times Square, the “Entertainment Capital of America,” in a saturnalia directed by the flitting Superhero and Barnum and Bailey ringmaster Uncle Sam.

More complimentary than anything I can say to recommend The Public Burning are facts surrounding its publication. Coover’s initial publisher refused to release the novel for fear of libel. Another publisher attempted to emasculate it. Originally intended for the Bicentennial, publication was delayed for a year by the press that did bring it out. Many of the reviews were rabidly negative as critics, who had not yet experienced the offenses of Trump, were grievously offended by Coover’s presentation of the Rosenbergs as witch-hunt victims, Vice President Nixon as a sniveling careerist, Uncle Sam as an imperialistic sodomist, and by the novel’s formal and stylistic innovations. Structured as a three-ring circus, The Public Burning perfectly represented what the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the “carnivalesque,” a radically subversive style of excess and satire that Bakhtin traced back to the Feast of Fools. If paper-skinned Donald Trump thought the cast of Hamilton had insulted Vice-President-elect Pence, the Executive Tweeter would have been apoplectic at how Coover mocks Vice-President Nixon. And if the paranoid Trump who attacks tame sketches on Saturday Night Live had been one of the fools in The Public Burning, he would have launched teams of legal drones at Coover and his publisher — and would have used the novel as evidence to support his desire to strengthen libel laws and weaken free speech.

The Public Burning intentionally violates traditional fiction’s canons of good taste, but it is an exceptionally artful historical novel. The private and public lives of the Rosenbergs and Nixon have been scrupulously researched, and minor political characters have been swooped from the newspapers and public records of the time. Knowing that reviewers and other readers would take issue with his imaginative transformation of the Rosenbergs’ execution, Coover takes great pains to make the realism of his magic realism unimpeachable — documentary and super-realistic. Even his magic — the figure of Uncle Sam — is a compendium of American history and discourse. Coover has said he wanted the novel “to seem to have been written by the whole nation through all of its history,” and braggart Uncle Sam spouts lines from an amazing variety of popular culture sources. Because of its encyclopedic range and its shifting points of view, prose chapters and poetic interludes, The Public Burning may at first seem as chaotic as a crowd out of control, burning with murderous passion, but the novel is in fact carefully ordered, just as a three-ring circus is. Patterns of character doubling and skeins of metaphor emerge from the welter. Comedy and tragedy merge as the plot narrows to the absurd. All this is to say that The Public Burning will reward the literary reader in its own right, independent of how it seems to forecast and reveal the world of Donald Trump.

Coover studied anthropology in college, and it is the influence of that discipline that enables him to dig beneath psychology, sociology, economics and conventional political theory to see the deep structure of political life in America. In Negara, Clifford Geeertz’s study of nineteenth-century Balinese culture, he found — I’m simplifying here — that the authority and power of rulers came from performance, from display, the grander the better, rather than from Western notions of command and force. Geertz called Balinese politics the “theater state.” Coover brings this interpretation to the politics of the 1950s. Politics has always been at least partly about performance, the candidate’s appeals to the crowd, but Coover recognized that, as he has Nixon say, “This is a generation that wants to be entertained.” Personal ethics, policies, laws, codes of behavior, performance of duties — all are sacrificed to entertainment in Coover’s America decades before reality TV and Internet cat videos.

Nixon is the realistic version of the performer, the clown in Coover’s circus, capable of both bathetic appeals to others and amusing pratfalls for others. In 2017, Coover’s portrait of a much studied Nixon will not be news, but the novel’s presentation of the self-made (for others) man is remarkable for how Coover connects psychological detail to sociological — and anthropological — dynamics. Nixon is one version of democratic man, “free” from the constraint of some inherited, intrinsic identity. Feeling nothing himself, Nixon desperately solicits the approval, respect, and applause of others, a performative or extrinsic identity. He is tricky, pompous, self-serving and self-pitying, always aware of the “audience” even when alone.

Nixon the politician for life is Donald Trump the attention-mad New York developer who leveraged himself up from tabloid entertainment and guest of Howard Stern to business failure and conspiracy theorist to successful showman and hate-mongering political candidate. In his early years, Trump was willing to play the clown to garner publicity as he plastered his name all over grandiose buildings. When I am protesting in front of Trump Tower, I tell obvious Trump supporters that it isn’t really The Tower. “Wail, what is it then?” “A façade,” I tell them, “like the man.” We know all this about Trump now, may have known it for a few decades when he was not taken seriously. What Coover recognized was that performance was deeply ingrained in American culture 70 years ago, long before what we now know as the Entertainment State and before an entertainer could reach his audience 24 hours a day with his Twitter account. Coover’s Nixon attempts to escape his role as clown, but makes a greater fool of himself by adopting a movie-inspired role for which he is unsuited: heroic rescuer of the damsel in distress, Ethel Rosenberg. Though humiliated in Times Square, as Trump was at a roast by Obama for the developer’s “birther” campaign, Nixon the needy no-man is ultimately accepted by Uncle Sam as a future president. It’s the Trump success story, one that relied on Nixonian strategies in the campaign.

The national and global politics presented in The Public Burning are religion-rooted, Manichean (the American Children of Light versus the Communist Forces of Darkness), and paranoid, Americans fearful of atomic attack by the Russians to whom the Rosenbergs were convicted of passing secrets. As if to fit into this part of the essay, Trump tweeted not long ago that a new nuclear arms race is in order because he feared America was falling behind the Russians. Uncle Sam, as personification of American imperial power, instructs Nixon in the political uses of fear and in the pragmatics of scapegoating. The Jewish and New York City dwelling Rosenbergs fit the role of sacrificial victims just as immigrants and Muslims and cosmopolitan “elites” fit the role of scapegoats for Trump as he campaigned in the “heartland,” the “real” America of undereducated white Christians. For Coover, the appeal of performance in America is so strong that the Rosenbergs seem to accept their role. Once convicted, they give up human particularities to become abstract symbols of injustice. Americans and others identified by Trump as enemies of the homeland could try to resist the role he foisted upon them, but he controlled the space of performance — the visual media, the theater state — where power is asserted, repeated, maintained. Like good liberals, the Rosenbergs respected legal codes and expected the courts to protect them, but the courts were no competition for the hysteria whipped up by Uncle Sam for the entertainment and instruction of the American people who, Coover implies, wanted a ritual sacrifice of the kind performed by “primitive” cultures to protect themselves from nature and the gods. Regression and atavism rule Coover’s world, just as they did Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rallies.

It’s in the “god” of The Public Burning, Uncle Sam, that Coover most strikingly foresees Trump and his public. Based partly on Sam Slick, the Yankee peddler, Uncle Sam pretends to be a populist strong man defending American Christianity and protecting the little people from domestic and foreign evil, but in fact Sam is an “incorrigible huckster, a sweet-talking con artist,” a protean shape-shifter, the impure principle of performance and entertainment, controlling characters and events to perpetuate his power to control characters and events. It is Sam who moves the execution from the prison at Sing Sing to Times Square where he assembles entertainers, officials, and celebrities to create a ceremony that will bind Americans together in a spasm of hate and vengeance, a festival that takes to extremes the violent and vile emotions elicited in Trump’s rallies. Like Trump, Sam is consistently vulgar in act and speech. He strings together others’ phrases, slogans, clichés, and dog whistles from centuries of American jingoism, racism, and misogyny. And also like Trump, Sam has no respect for facts: History, he tells Nixon,

is more or less bunk, as Henry Ford liked to say, as saintly and wise a pup as this nation’s seen since the Gold Rush — the fatal slantindicular futility of Fact! Appearances, my boy, appearances! Practical politics consists in ignorin’ facts! Opinion ultimately rules the world!

Uncle Sam has no use for history, but the Americana Coover puts in Sam’s mouth demonstrate that the enmities and violence he elicits are not new in 1953 but old features of American culture. In Coover’s conceit, U.S. presidents are “Incarnations” of Uncle Sam. Donald Trump is the most recent but not original.

Coover’s vernacular populist Sam is not the old man on military recruiting posters but a sexualized macho Superhero whose way of baptizing future Presidents is forcibly sodomizing them, as he does Nixon. When Ethel is burned, her body flapping in the air, the description is full of misogynistic sadism as the crowd’s erotic burnings stoked by Sam are satisfied. The Rosenbergs are mostly presented in prison, which becomes a metaphor for a country where power takes the form of a bully thug buggering America, an obscene image you may not be ready — yet — to associate with Trump even if he has proudly stated that he grabs pussy whenever he wants and that he is hugely equipped. Like hypocritical Sam, Trump claimed to be the saving embodiment of old patriarchal power — personal, national, and religious. The last, association with Christian righteousness, was perhaps Trump’s greatest deception, reeling in evangelical voters just as Sam’s burned sacrifice excites the religious in Times Square when the Rosenbergs, Jews like Jesus, are electrically crucified and symbolically raped for the nation’s sins.

The Public Burning began as a theater skit and over many years became a marvelous example of Bertholt Brecht’s “epic theater” that used “alienation effects” to keep the audience from emotionally identifying too closely with the characters on stage and to force the audience to think about the historical, social, and political systems in which the characters functioned. Coover’s alienation devices can be dizzying: feel, think, feel, think, so he includes a character who represents, I believe, the effects he wants to have on his readers. The unnamed character lurches out of House of Wax, a 3-D movie playing in New York City at the time of the executions. Still wearing his disorienting 3-D glasses and stumbling through Times Square, the character is able to understand some of the ritual going on but also wails “BEWARE THE MAD ARTIST.” Coover is an enraged artist who alienates readers with what seem to be crazed excesses in order to reveal the buried psychological and archetypal motives that produce the burning in the novel and in America, both then and now — the resentful nationalistic crowd’s burning need for revenge on the “other,” politicians’ heated desire to manipulate the crowd’s thoughtless passion, and the incineration of nuclear war that may be the end of performance-whipped emotions. Another character, possibly the evil Phantom himself, speaks for rationalists, realists and many reviewers: “`Life’s always new and changing, so why fuck it up with all this shit about scapegoats, sacrifices, initiations, saturnalias.’” But these are precisely the elements essential to Coover’s achievement, identifying the archaic ghosts in America’s machine of civil religion that Trump summoned out of sweaty flesh. His rallies were mocked by the computer-modeling Democrats, but Trump knew, from his own narcissism, what Uncle Sam knew: that people jammed together feel free to abandon their better selves for passionate idiocy [sic].

No matter how “MAD” Coover is about mass manipulation and mass hysteria, he remains the “ARTIST,” both performing and deconstructing performing. He realized that “Envoutements have been known to destroy the priests who practiced them,” as performing characters are destroyed in several of his short stories, and yet he was willing to risk the excoriating reviews he received to give America what I think is its most profound political novel, one that exhaustively anatomizes the 1950s and casts ahead to 2016 and beyond with its anthropological insight and ethnographic detail. Coover includes a scene in which Arthur Miller, sitting in a theater where The Crucible is showing, muses that “Art is not as lethal as it might be.” The aggravated assault and battery of The Public Burning come very close to “lethal” art as Coover does his damnedest to kill off the American myths of moral exceptionalism and providential favor by demonstrating the profane backside of the sacred so often invoked by demagogue politicians.

I have merely sketched here the deep and wide achievement of The Public Burning. If you would like to learn more, I was one of the few reviewers who praised it (in The New Republic, if you still have issues from 1977 around), and I wrote about it in detail in The Art of Excess. With limited space here, I have also merely skimmed off the most obvious ways Coover’s fiction anticipates our world of fact. If you have followed the rise of Trump — the scandals, the frauds, the cruelties, the buffoonery — reading The Public Burning you will find scores of amusing and instructive details that demonstrate Coover’s prescience and give you an historical lens through which to see Uncle Sam’s new boy in office who looked, on the day he visited President Obama, as if Uncle Sam had had his way with the Donald’s butt.

I’ve written this essay for fiction readers, but also for fiction writers, particularly those too young to have encountered The Public Burning. I hope that American novelists will be inspired by Coover’s rage and courage, his attention to the deepest structures of public life, and the inventive methods he uses to break through the scrim of conventional political novels. Trump has consistently attacked journalists, the people who uncovered many of the facts employed in The Public Burning. He has also attacked dramatic artists who, like Coover, mock fakery and ignorance. We need novelists who will defend fact-gatherers and performers, novelists who will attack with heroic fictions the manifold fictions of Trumpism. Since Trump is easily offended and enraged, an epic of mockery like The Public Burning might seduce him into some tweeted stupidity that not even he could lie his way out of. But even if a mock-epic novel cannot bring down a president, can’t be “lethal,” it can rally the demagogue’s opponents and become a text of resistance, as Catch-22 was during the Vietnam War.

Some left-leaning novelists who have written recent books with epic scale include John Sayles (A Moment in the Sun), Garth Risk Hallberg (City on Fire), and William Vollmann. Perhaps they will enlist in the war of literature against Trump.[see note below] Unfortunately, the best current example of Coover’s rage and range is by a British writer, who has his own right-wing problems at home: Jerusalem by Alan Moore. Its 1200-plus pages rival The Public Burning for functional excess as Moore drills deep into the history and myths of his native Northampton. It would take little effort for readers to contrast the informed empathy of Moore for the left-behind of industrial England with the fake sympathy of the billionaire Trump for unemployed Americans. All of these novels were many years in the making. Maybe the quick-writing Vollmann, if he recovers from his carpal tunnel syndrome, will produce something before Trump runs for a second term. Vollmann’s books about historical figures and contemporary prostitutes should serve him well if he produces an epic of America tainted by Trump.

In The Public Burning there are all manners of burning. What I didn’t find was the meaning of “burned,” as in misled and cheated. Perhaps that word is so obvious it need not be remarked in a culture ruled by performance, and yet it is still my final word. With the election of Trump, we require The Public Burned.

Vollmann and Powers are among the seven young novelists David Foster Wallace has said he admires. These three and Jonathan Franzen also compose what Wallace has called, in a short Harper’s Bazaar profile, the school of “white male novelists over six feet,” which suggests big authors write big books. Infinite Jest, though not quite as prodigious as its title proclaims, is only 150 pages shorter than The Gold Bug Variations and You Bright and Risen Angels combined! I do not want to suggest that Wallace, who wrote his book between 1992 and 1995, was substantially influenced by the earlier novels, but Infinite Jest can be most economically described as synthesizing and extending characteristics of its predecessors.

The setting of Infinite Jest extrapolates from much of the history, politics, and technology in the imagined worlds of Powers and Vollmann. In Wallace’s post-millennial future (about 2015), time is identified by its sponsors: “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” “Year of Glad.” “Annular physics”; something like cold fusion supplies energy; and “teleputers” (tele-computers) provide nearly infinite in-home entertainment. Giant fans and catapults send U.S. waste into northern New England, which has been ceded to Quebec by President Johnny Gentle, former Vegas crooner now president of the United States and leader of the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN). Into this onanistically ominous age, Wallace inserts a monster more deadly than Pynchon’s rocket or the gigantic corporations of Powers and Vollmann: a movie (or “cartridge,” with its explosive connotations) so powerfully seductive that it fixates its viewers and destroys their brains. The movie, possibly entitled “Infinite Jest,” extends the cyberthreat of Gold Bug and Angels to mass entertainment and gives Infinite Jest an international political dimension not present in those novels. As Quebecois terrorists and ONAN agents attempt to locate the master tape and identify the Master who made it, Wallace plays off the small, more traditional culture of Quebec with the gigantic, post-postmodern world of ONAN.

Within this imaginary setting and Pynchonian quest plot, Wallace creates two more contemporaneous worlds populated by Powers-like prodigies and Vollmann’s victims of childhood. Living at the Enfield Tennis Academy, founded by physicist and then filmmaker James O. Incandenza and his Canadian wife, Avril, are two of the Incandenzas’ sons: nineteen-year-old Mario, a physically stunted but precocious cameraman, “the family’s real prodigy”; and seventeen-year-old Hal, a “lexical prodigy” who quotes from the OED. Hal’s best friend, Michael Pemulis, is a math-science genius as well as a drug dealer. Other mostly white and rich residents at the Academy--ages ten to eighteen--have specialized intellectual abilities, and all are tennis prodigies sent away from home to prepare for “The Show,” the worldwide pro tour.

Just down the hill from the Academy in its Boston suburb is the Ennett House Drug and Alcohol Recovery facility populated by mostly impoverished white and black street people like those who enter the last pages of Angels. The focal character at Ennett House is Don Gately, a twenty-seven-year-old former narcotics addict of enormous size who is “a prodigy of vitriolic spine.” As a live-in staffer, Gately attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and listens to the stories of his residents. Among them is Joelle van Dyne, a former coke addict, a member of UHID (Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed), and a former actress in James Incandenza’s underground films.

In a novel where waste is propelled into a border area, Ennett House first seems a disposal site for the underclass. But as Wallace reveals the tennis prodigies’ individual lives and probes the histories of Ennett’s adults, the two social worlds begin to overlap and the radically disjunctional novel starts to cohere as a profound cross-class study of parental abandonment and familial dysfunction. Sent away to the Academy to become top-flight entertainers (or pre-teen failures), the tennis kids play self-destructive games and take recreational drugs to relieve the pressure. The founding family is itself sick. After finding his father dead, having committed suicide by sticking his head in a microwave oven, Hal, a boy of “prodigious talent,” loses interest in tennis, becomes dependent on marijuana, and moves toward muteness. At the novel’s end he visits Ennett and attempts to recover from his dependence.

“Conditioning” is a central concept Wallace uses to connect Enfield and Ennett. The kids are physically conditioned and scientifically coached, like circus animals, for performative success. In their childhood, many of the Ennett residents have been trained by their parents or conditioned by the media to be providers of sexual pleasure or consumers of reductive entertainment. Gately’s mother, for example, spent much of his youth in an alcoholic haze while his stepfather became an obsessive watcher of M*A *S*H. The underclass’s adult escapes from parental and cultural abuse are alcohol and drugs. The killer movie, perhaps made by James Incandenza, is the logical extension of other addictions and suggests that the higher world of Enfield has corrupted with mass-produced pleasure the lower world of Ennett.

What distinguishes Infinite Jest is Wallace’s passion for the particularities and histories of characters, both intellectual prodigies such as Powers’s characters and figures even more psychologically deformed than Vollmann’s. In case readers of Infinite Jest do not understand why it provides more detail than Powers’s novel and proceeds more slowly than Vollmann’s, Wallace enters his narrative as a tall, lexically gifted, and etymology conscious “wraith.” To a semi-conscious Gately, the wraith explains his desire to give voices to “figurants,” the mute, background characters of most literary fiction. The wraith calls his project “radical realism,” which accurately names Wallace’s method, for no matter how story lines wander both major and minor characters dig down and articulate the childhood roots (”radicalis”) of their personalities. “Radical realism” also corresponds to the kind of fiction Wallace calls for in his interview with Larry McCaffery: “Let’s try to countenance and render real aspects of real experiences that have previously been excluded from art.” The number of Wallace’s characters, the intelligence or sensitivity of some of them, Wallace’s dedication to imagining the etiologies of muffled geniuses or fast-talking idiots, and the instructive value of placing these characters in contrasting cultures are some of the factors that necessarily press Infinite Jest to its prodigious size.

In the McCaffery interview and an accompanying essay on television, Wallace describes the contemporary fiction to which “radical realism” is an alternative. He criticizes younger writers for becoming purveyors of “image-fiction,” surface realism that resembles TV, and “crank-turners” of postmodern irony, both of whom respond in limited ways to an earlier generation of great experimenters such as Nabokov and Pynchon: “The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.”

Although the serious business of Infinite Jest is diagnosing how “figurants” are produced in families, social systems, and national cultures, the novel can also be read as a metafictional allegory of this aesthetic orphanhood. James O. Incandenza brought a “scientific-prodigy’s mind” to several fields--first optics, then physics--before turning to experimental films that often resemble in their themes and parodic methods outtakes from Gravity’s Rainbow and Pynchon’s other work. In his last movie before committing suicide, “Infinite Jest,” Incandenza creates a parental apology--a long series of variations on “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”--that he hopes will bring his prodigy son Hal out of his inward-turning “hiddenness,” but Hal never sees the film. After the Pynchon figure dies, the Academy is run by Avril, an obsessive-compulsive primarily concerned with organized housekeeping and sexual relations, possibly a representation of domestic realism. The Incandenzas’ oldest son, Orin, a punter for the Arizona Cardinals, enjoys the love of the crowd but fumbles at his attempts to give love. Perhaps he represents the Brat Pack, to which Wallace condescends in his interview. Mario, the physically and intellectually challenged boy who walks around with a Bolex camera on his head, is “image-fiction.” Lexical game player Hal, who becomes increasingly withdrawn and ironic after his father’s suicide. is postmodern talent without passion or position. Although Wallace’s personal background most resembles Hal’s, and although the “wraith” sounds like a combination of Hal and his father, the Wallace who wrote Infinite Jest is a prodigious collaboration of the three sons’ qualities and of Don Gately’s sympathy for the victims whose stories he hears. Even in the realm of aesthetic allegory, Wallace is true to the history-mining of his “radical realism,” for he imagines the alcoholic James 0. Incandenza’s childhood with an overbearing father from whom a dominated mother could not rescue the unhappy boy.

In neither the aesthetic allegory nor in the realistic family relations Wallace depicts is he satisfied with the Abuse Excuse. When the wraith attempts to explain his past to Gately, this veteran of Boston A. A. critiques the wraith’s self-pity and victimhood, which recalls A. A.’s policy on “causal attribution”: “if you start trying to blame your addiction on some cause or other . . . everybody with any kind of sober time will pale and writhe in their chair.” A. A.’s suspicion of causality and “Analysis Paralysis” is in turn critiqued by a college instructor at Ennett who argues with Gately’s defense of the “Program”:

“You can analyze it till you’re breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause to walk away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and do the best you can.”

“AA’s response to a question about its axioms, then, is to invoke an axiom about the inadvisability of all such questions.”

Instead of choosing between mechanistic causality and A. A.’s “Miracle” pragmatism, Wallace allows them to alternate with and supplement each other. “Infinite Jest” the movie is repetitive and single-voiced, seductive and possibly destroying because it depicts a parent blaming herself for causing the viewer’s unhappiness. Infinite Jest the novel, though, is more like an A. A. meeting: multifarious and multivocal, engaging in its verisimilitude, and possibly rescuing because it depicts mysterious, even miraculous recoveries from addiction and anhedonia.

Like Powers and Vollmann, Wallace refers to the sciences of both chaos and cognition as contexts for the sometimes unpredictable actions of his characters and, I think, for the militantly “anti-confluential” character of his narrative. Describing the imagined heir of nonlinear science, “Extra-Linear Dynamics,” Wallace says it deals with “systems and phenomena whose chaos is beyond even Mandelbrosian math’s Strange Equations and Random Attractants.” An M. I. T. building within which Joelle van Dyne does her “Madame Psychosis” radio show is described in great detail as a huge brain.

The inherent disorder of dynamical systems and the neurological noise of mental illness may well be conceptual bases for Wallace’s critique of mechanistic causality, yet his central scientific interest is as old as Western medicine: orthopedics. The three Incandenza boys are all deformed: Mario’s whole body at birth, Orin’s left leg by repetitive punting, Hal’s left arm by tennis strokes. The bodies of other kids at the Academy break down under the constant stress of training and competition. The bodies of people at Ennett House, including its stroke-afflicted director, are deformed by their addictions or behavior. Don Gately, who “grew to monstrous childhood size” watching TV, has covered his huge body with ugly tattoos. Joelle van Dyne’s face was, in the novel’s argot, “demapped” by an accident with acid. During one of her radio shows, she recites hundreds of deforming diseases. Minor Ennett characters are in various stages of physical decay. Out in the larger world, Quebecois terrorists have had their legs cut off or crippled by trains in an initiation rite. In the waste disposal zone, it is rumored, feral animals grow huge and an occasional gigantic child wanders out of the zone to terrorize normal people. While some of these deformities are the results of accidents or political policy, many of the monstrosities are self-inflicted, the results of addiction that has its culminating symbol in the film “Infinite Jest,” described as a lethal “angelic monster.”

Infinite Jest is a “hopeful monster,” more extreme in both those terms than Gold Bug and Angels because Wallace extends Powers`s sense of possibility to people without huge intellectual gifts or first-rate educations and because Wallace makes Vollmann’s warning more plausible with “radical realism.” To defamilarize the ordinary and to familiarize the exotic require even more prodigal means than Powers’s “crackpot realism” and Vollmann’s “cartoon,” so Wallace combines and modifies the methods that the other prodigies use to deform the “classical Realist form” that Wallace calls “soothing, familiar and anesthetic.” The rigorously controlled dual collaboration of Gold Bug is opened up by Wallace’s multiple points of view, both first- and third-person; stylistic tours de force in several dialects; a swirling associative structure; and alternations in synecdochic scale. These methods produce, not just length, but a prodigious density because parts do not disappear into conventional and easily processed wholes. Wallace seems to allude to this effect with his references to mosaics and to an “infoliating. . . Cantorian continuum of infinities.” This infolding density frequently manifests itself in Wallace’s references to the historical, often physical roots of the words he uses. The wraith lists some of Wallace’s key words in caps when he talks to Gately. Although Vollmann’s relatively small number of cartoon characters are replaced in Infinite Jest by a host of physical or emotional grotesques, Wallace, like Vollmann, does employ numerous facsimile documents--such as formulae, transcripts, letters, and other documents--to deface the novel’s textual surface and constantly remind readers that they are experiencing “mediated consciousness,” a quality Wallace insists upon in his interview.

The novels of Powers and Vollmann imitate coded abstractions: the genetic chain and the cartoon. Wallace’s special achievement is to make his book recall and resemble a prodigious human body. In a note that begins with a discussion of “Volkmann’s contracture,” a “severe serpentine deformation of the arms following a fracture,” Wallace discusses “bradyauxesis”: “some part(s) of the body not growing as fast as the other parts of the body.” He then explains the “medical root `brady,’ from the Greek ‘bradys’ meaning slow” and applies the word to reading. Two notes later, Wallace mentions “hyperauxetic” in connection with Mario Incandenza’s head, which is “two to three times the size of your more average elf-to-jockey-sized head and facies.” Infinite Jest is self-consciously and intentionally both “brady-” and “hyperauxetic.” In addition, relations between the novel’s “big-headed” title, the body of the text, and Wallace’s “Notes and Errata,” which make up about one-tenth of the whole book, are both misleading and disproportionate. Although often humorous and satiric, Infinite Jest is more like the root of “jest”--”gest”: story or exploit--than an extended joke. The notes (which might have appeared at the foot of the page) often function less as supplemental or clarifying material than as crucial information of the kind that would appear in an epigraph or headnote. The eight-page “Filmography” note is a prime example, for the brief descriptions of Incandenza’s movies are seeds for larger narratives in the main text. In this book about addicts’ bodies and athletes’ extremities, the head and its abstractions are not as crucial as in books by writers of a more militantly intellectual cast. Wallace has not, like Incandenza, put his own head in a microwave, but much of the learning in Infinite Jest is physical, sensory, rather than bookish or filmic. The text and the notes have, like torso and extremities, a collaborative and reciprocal relation. The only “errata” in the final section are those of readers who do not switch back and forth between the two sections and who, therefore, do not appreciate how Wallace has deformed his novel to be a gigantic analogue of the monsters--hateful and hopeful--within it.

In its microscopic materials and macroscopic art, Infinite Jest makes 1996 the “Year of the Whopper,” for Wallace’s novel is a larger lie than The Gold Bug Variations or You Bright and Risen Angels. Infinite Jest is also a grand omen—a frightening warning against the feral future it depicts, invigorating evidence that a Pynchon protege can both collaborate with his fellow prodigies and create prodigious original work.

Critique, 1996

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/02/infinite-jest-david-foster-wallace-anniversary-book-review

I thought it might be useful—and safe now—to post this 30-year-old essay entitled “Prodigious Fiction” on Vollmann, Powers, and Infinite Jest. The NYer essay or re-review shows courage but is somewhat superficial. The material here on IJ was written not long after publication for a critical journal. Comparing Wallace’s monster novel about monsters with big books by Vollmann and Powers may help readers understand Wallace’s creative chaos, but the essay is not a review and therefore probably contains some spoilers. For Powers fans, discussion of The Gold Bug Variations. For Vollmann followers, You Bright and Risen Angels.]

Prodigious Fiction: Richard Powers, William Vollmann, David Foster Wallace

Since the publication of V. in 1963, when Thomas Pynchon was twenty-six, he has been the reigning, if now aging, prodigy of contemporary American fiction, the gifted author of two prodigious novels, the 492-page V. and the encyclopedic Gravity’s Rainbow. Reviewing the more modest Vineland in 1990, Richard Powers addressed Pynchon as a composer of bed-time stories: “So tell us another one, Pop, before it gets too dark.” Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace all admit within their novels their filial debt to “Pop” Pynchon. A major character in Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations has Pynchon as his “favorite living novelist,” several references to Gravity’s Rainbow appear in Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, and a major character in Wallace’s Infinite Jest is constructed from the obsessions of Pynchon’s biggest book. Of the three younger writers, Wallace is the most ambivalent toward Pynchon: Wallace praises Gravity’s Rainbow as generous in its gift-giving but also calls Pynchon, along with Nabokov, “a patriarch for my patricide.” Though still alive, Pynchon seems to have retired from novelistic mastery to become the grandfatherly proprietor of an amusement park called Vineland. In the new millennium, Powers, born in 1957; Vollmann, born in 1959; and Wallace, born in 1962, are our new prodigies.

By age thirty-three, Powers had published three novels--the V.-like Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the 639-page The Gold Bug Variations, which reviewers frequently compared to Gravity’s Rainbow. At the same age, Vollmann had published a travel book, a collection called The Rainbow Stories, and four novels, two of which exceed 600 Pynchon-dense pages. At the age of thirty-four, Wallace had coauthored a book on rap music and had published a collection of stories, a long first novel, and the 1,089-page Infinite Jest.

Powers, Vollmann, and Wallace deserve essays of their own. I have chosen to treat them and their most remarkable novels--The Gold Bug Variations (1991), You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), and Infinite Jest (1996)--together because fundamental similarities among the authors and these three works illustrate their relation to and differences from Pynchon, as well as other large-minded novelists of Pynchon’s generation. Although the Pynchon of V. displayed a precocious familiarity with history, geography, and multiple literary forms, what set him apart was his scientific knowledge, which became more central in The Crying of Lot 49. Despite his scientific training at Cornell, Pynchon has said in Slow Learner that his early knowledge of a concept as crucial as entropy was “second-hand.” Still, his use of technical terms and references to scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell made Pynchon a prodigy for most literary readers still living in an era of “Two Cultures.” Gravity’s Rainbow with its detailed development of cybernetics, physics, and other sciences confirmed Pynchon’s reputation.

Not long after Gravity’s Rainbow was published other prodigious novels influenced by information theory and scientific systems began to appear: DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, Heller’s Something Happened, Gaddis’s J R, Coover’s The Public Burning, McElroy’s Women and Men, Barth’s LETTERS, and Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. I do not mean to suggest that Gravity’s Rainbow led these writers to what I have called “the systems novel,” but that from early on in his career Pynchon exemplified a new kind of learning in fiction. Unlike Pynchon, these writers did not receive academic training in science, and their early works, though sometimes concerned with technology, do not exhibit the influence of theoretical science present in V. and Lot 49. DeLillo and the others came later in their careers to cybernetics and to the sciences--such as economics, ecology, meteorology, and mathematics--that saturate their prodigious texts.

Unlike the literary elders I have mentioned, Powers, Vollmann, and Wallace were educated in the Age of Information; and they acquired an expertise nowhere evident in the work of the previous generation, Pynchon’s fiction included. Although not much is known about the specific educational backgrounds of Powers, Vollmann, and Wallace, biographical sources do indicate that in their twenties, the age at which Pynchon was reading Norbert Weiner, Powers and Vollmann both worked as computer programmers. Their professional experience with information systems is manifested directly in their first novels, which are at least partially set in the computer industry. In Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance, the protagonist-narrator is educated in computer science, works for a magazine aimed at the “microcomputer design readership,” discusses the differences between digital and analogue technology, and brings a cybernetic awareness to his commentaries on mathematics, physics, and other sciences. The two narrators of You Bright and Risen Angels are computer programmers working in Silicon Valley; the characters they write about are both persons from their past and electronic alphanumerics these programmers call up from the graveyard of memory files. Like Powers’s narrator, Vollmann’s keyboarders are protagonists and antagonists whose lives mingle with figures from the historical past. In Vollmann’s succeeding novels about early North America, information storage and retrieval are no longer explicit subjects but everywhere implicit in the detailed research necessary to write those books. In The Gold Bug Variations, after writing a novel based on game theory, Powers returns to the information industry: two of his three main characters are programmers and caretakers of a large bank of Manhattan computers. Wallace, although not a programmer, studied in college the mathematics and logic that underlie the programming Powers and Vollmann have done. One of Wallace’s stories is dedicated to Kurt Goedel, and references to mathematics and theoretical physics abound in Infinite Jest.

I am not suggesting only that Powers, Vollmann, and Wallace write more explicitly about information than the earlier systems novelists or that their fluency with technical or mathematical languages distinguishes their work. Rather I believe these younger writers more thoroughly conceive their fictions as information systems, as long-running programs of data with a collaborative genesis. In the information industry, prodigies age quickly and generations change rapidly. In the novel industry, the cyberpunk strain of science fiction in some of its formal experiments has already exceeded the programming or systems influence found in Powers, Vollmann, and Wallace. However, among writers who set their fiction on this planet, those three novelists are, I think, most advanced in their knowledge of and most sophisticated in their use of information.

Compared with most of the older novelists mentioned above, Powers, Vollmann, and Wallace know more about the life sciences and ecology. Pynchon, Gaddis, McElroy, and Le Guin are all concerned with biology in their encyclopedic books, but only Barth in LETTERS registers as a central influence the most revolutionary experimental science of the Information Age: genetics, the discipline that was probably most aided by and that has the most conceptual overlaps with cybernetics. The Watson-Crick paper that propelled contemporary genetics was published in 1953, four years before Powers’s birth in 1957. That is, symbolically I assume, the year in which Powers sets the genetics research group called Cyfer that introduces the dense scientific discourse of The Gold Bug Variations. Post Watson-Crick biology is also the intellectual substratum of You Bright and Risen Angels; “insect genetics” supports Vollmann’s encyclopedic analogues between the human and insect kingdoms. In those two works about literary, literal, and figurative bugs, a detailed knowledge of contemporary biology underwrites, like the genetic code itself, a depiction of nature as vast and intricate collaborations of information and energy, a model for fiction even more prodigious than the mainframe computer. For Barth, genetics was a trope supporting a sequel, a backward look at and synthesis of his previous six books. Powers and Vollmann find in genetics and entomology information and symbols for urgent meditation on the future of all life. For Wallace, theoretical biology and zoology are not as central as they are for Powers and Vollmann, and yet, like them, Wallace is particularly interested in the effects of physical mutations, how waste turns two-legged and four-legged animals into monsters.

These young, obviously gifted authors’ combined experience with information and knowledge of life science generates new meanings of prodigy and prodigious. Both words have as their root the Latin “prodigium,” which meant “omen, portent, monster.” In archaic English, a prodigy was “something out of the usual course of nature (as an eclipse or meteor) that is a portent.” More recently, the word has come to mean “an extraordinary accomplishment” or “a highly gifted or academically talented child.” Beginning as a natural event, the meaning of prodigy changed to a human accomplishment. Now the word is most generally applied to an individual person with a precocious skill or high intelligence. Although Powers, Vollmann, and Wallace may be such persons (Powers graduated with an “A” average from Illinois; Vollmann and Wallace graduated summa cum laude from, respectively, Cornell and Amherst) and young, precocious characters populate The Gold Bug Variations, You Bright and Risen Angels, and Infinite Jest, the novels as wholes suggest that prodigies need not be only those hard-wired and solitary geniuses of tradition. In the world of Powers and Vollmann, collaboration with computers and other technology-assisted persons can create a contemporary prodigy, one less dependent on genetically inherited synapses, more free to direct the development of his or her own consciousness, more defined by the information he or she possesses. For Wallace, the notion of prodigy spreads even wider, incorporating physical talents and emotional capabilities, both trained in communities of the naturally gifted and culturally afflicted.

These new fiction-writing prodigies both find and create a world of information that is prodigious: “extraordinary in bulk, extent, quantity, or degree (enormous, immense, vast).” These synonyms for “extraordinary” have connotations of cosmic width and breadth, physicists’ extraplanetary exploration or sub-molecular investigation. The “Infinite” of Wallace’s title, which alludes to Cantor’s mathematics as well as to Shakespeare’s jesting Yorick, best represents the scale of prodigious fiction. The discoveries of contemporary genetics brought near infinity to biology, exploding beyond what Powers calls “the complexity barrier” information about all life all over the globe for all of history. The Human Genome project alluded to in The Gold Bug Variations has been called the most ambitious scientific project ever undertaken. Trying to keep up with genetics research in 1985, a Powers character says information in the field doubles every two years. For Vollmann, insects are the symbol of prolific life and proliferant information about life, millions of species breeding, multiplying, and changing, forever exceeding scientists’ ability to catalogue them. The irony of both proliferations is that the four-letter genetic code generating life and information is itself not so much a prodigy as a hyperactive idiot savant. “Prodigious diversity of macroscopic structures of living beings,” Powers quotes Jacques Monod, “rests in fact on a profound and no less remarkable unity of microscopic makeup.” It is knowledge of this new law of the very many and the one, the large and the small, that in Powers’s work modifies the behavior of old-fashioned prodigies and offers a model for the work of new collaborative prodigies. Vollmann’s novel implies a similar conclusion, but only through a reversal of its characters’ attempt to reduce and then destroy the many, “equality’s brood,” that threaten entrenched power in America, power personified by the novel’s pioneering prodigy, robber baron, and multinational CEO, Mr. White.

The effect of both the prodigy and the prodigious--exciting amazement and wonder--is also, I believe, the purpose Powers, Vollmann, and Wallace pursue with their gifted massiveness: amazement at the natural world they depict circulating through us and buzzing around us, wonder at the intricate and dense fictions they offer as imitative forms of that world. Like Pynchon and the other systems novelists of the 1970s and 1980s who were influenced by cybernetics, Powers, Vollmann, and Wallace insist on transforming the synecdochic scale of traditional realism, “overloading” their stories to reflect the accessibility and relevance of technical information in the lives of contemporary characters. The new prodigies also supplement the digital mode of print with iconic or analogue representation such as diagrams and drawings, the mapping of quantitative information in visual displays that has characterized recent developments in computer design.

The artistic pressures exerted by the magnitude of their subjects and by their desires to elicit powerful responses to revolutionary information about life push Powers, Vollmann, and Wallace toward literary means that sometimes seem “prodigal”: “profuse and wasteful expenditure of capital,” “given to reckless extravagance,” and “giving or yielding abundantly.” Like the older novelists who practice what I’ve called an “art of excess,” Powers and, even more, Vollmann and Wallace exceed expectations, deform genre, and write extravagantly, but they are not, as some reviewers complain, self-indulgent. If their works exceed the social politeness of most realism and the political correctness of their decade, they do so from, if anything, a too-earnest concern for readers and other living things. It is that concern for the future that propels the second halves of The Gold Bug Variations and You Bright and Risen Angels--and all of Infinite Jest--toward the original root of prodigy (omen, portent, monster) and the archaic English meaning (out of the usual course of nature) as the authors warn against mankind’s leaving the course of nature and becoming a monster in the world web of life, destroying itself in the process. In these three massive novels, creators, created, and audience are all braided together under the sign of the Latin “prodig-.”

The Gold Bug Variations

Although The Gold Bug Variations was published five years after You Bright and Risen Angels and although Powers mentions Vollmann as one of two contemporary American authors he admires, I treat Powers’s novel first because it is more explicitly about prodigies and new scientific paradigms. The central character of The Gold Bug Variations, Stuart Ressler, genetics researcher become caretaker of computers, “was the prodigy once.” In the first grade, he took over his teacher’s “abortive lesson on the language of bee dancing.” Given an adult encyclopedia at the age of seven, Stuart proved that his “precocity exceeded even his parents’ guess” by breaking its spines with rereading in two years. A little later he “lavished this precocious love [of learning] on the home nature museum--a walk-in catalog of the planetary pageant” that he spread around his house. “A boy completely, passionately in love with links,” Stuart as a sixth-grader derived “a perfect copy of Gauss’s great work” on mathematical summation, a significant discovery in this novel about responding to large numbers. “By junior high, he had proved to disbelieving high schoolers that almost all possible numbers have an eight in them, or a seven, or nine, but an infinity of numbers contain none of these. In late teens, he announced to an uncomprehending English teacher that the word `couch,’ repeated a thousand times at high speed, deteriorated into semantic nothingness.” Pursuing “not what a thing is, but how it connects to others,” young Stuart Ressler moved from observation of nature to mathematical formalism, metamathematics, and to an experimental knowledge of noise, breakdown of the meanings he had recognized or constructed.

Ressler’s rapid youthful progress is replicated at a slower rate during the rest of his life, which Powers dramatizes in two primary time periods: 1957-58, when Ressler is a postdoctoral researcher, and 1983-84, when his life has new vitality under the sentence of an early death from cancer. After studying physiology as an undergraduate, Ressler reads the Watson-Crick paper in 1953 and changes his graduate area to genetics in order to “rush the frontier,” believing “all significant breakthroughs were made by novices free from preconceptions or vested interests. In six months of ferocious precocity, he’d made believers of everyone.” Accepting at twenty-five a postdoctoral fellowship at Illinois, Ressler feels “under the gun. Miescher was twenty-five when he discovered DNA ninety years before. Watson was twenty-four. If the symptoms of breakthrough don’t show by thirty, forget it .... Research-America in ‘57-is no country for old men.” In chapters alternating with chapters about the early 1980s, Powers describes Ressler’s joining the Cyfer group of six scientists from different disciplines, their stumbling advance on explaining how genetic processes work, Ressler’s falling in love with his married colleague Jeannette Koss, their stumbling advance on consummating their relation, Ressler`s conceptual breakthrough, and a double renunciation: Jeannette of Ressler, he of his research.

Trying to uncover Ressler’s achievements and then understand his renunciation and years of obscurity are Franklin Todd, Ressler’s twenty-five-year-old coworker, an all-but-dissertation in art history at Columbia, and Jan O’Deigh, a thirty-year-old reference librarian who becomes Todd’s lover as she helps him delve into Ressler’s past and interest him in the present. In this novel with numerous character doublings, collaborative triplings, and coded quadruplings, Jan, the primary narrator of the book, is closest to Ressler in childhood interests and background. “From birth,” she says, “I was addicted to questions. When the delivering nurse slapped my rump, instead of howling, I blinked inquisitively.” Her early “why” questions were for a time answered by her mother’s gift of “a multivolume children’s encyclopedia,” but this strategy backfired because Jan could “ask about things that hadn’t even existed before.” The first time Jan touched her cello it made a wonderful sound she never duplicated; she soon turned to the piano and became a rather mechanical player. Like Ressler, Jan lost her father when she was twelve. Although she had scientific curiosity and artistic training that Ressler did not receive until he was twenty-five, Jan was no prodigy. As an adult, her skillful information searches are primarily directed by library patrons, though she does initiate “The Quote Board” and “This Day in History,” small ways of extracting and communicating some significant bits of “the disjointed stockpile.” Researching questions from a patron with a Down’s syndrome child, Jan makes what John Paulos calls an “Innumerate” interpretation of the data she finds on the causes of retardation. Her miscalculation of her own risk is partly responsible for her renunciation: a tubal ligation. Her four-year relationship with the adrenal ad-writer Keith Tuckwell also illustrates her defensive passivity, for she uses his nonstop commentary on competitive life in the city as a substitute for a more active life and as a source of entertainment. Like Oedipa Maas at the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49, Jan is susceptible to a search that will take her out of her library of trivia and trivialized personal relationship.

Todd challenges her to find out why Ressler was once famous. A student of physics in college, Todd switched to art history and is working the night shift with Ressler instead of finishing his dissertation on the life and work of a minor sixteenth-century Dutch painter. While Jan’s searches in the information hoard are primarily seeded by others, Todd actively lavishes his attention on other people and their eccentricities. He treats New York as his “home nature museum,” with the emphasis on museum. His apartment is an archive of art objects and musical recordings. Todd’s formalist training gives him a Resslerian awareness of links, but Jan repeatedly thinks of Todd as childish, his curiosity unfocused, his “unfortunately high intelligence” spent in passionate dilettantism. During spare hours at work, Todd cuts up the New York Times, pastes its information into his notebook, and surrounds the facts with elaborate sketches, turning information into a private aesthetic object. He treats the information in his computers like a video game.

The Ressler that Todd knows in 1983 appears to have both technical and personal control of the information glut. He teaches Todd programming skills, and Ressler’s almost monastic manner and obsession with Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” appeal to the widely scattered younger man. As Todd and Jan get closer to Ressler, he moves out of his self-imposed isolation. becomes a father figure to them, and tries to direct their attention away from his personal life to the biosphere he has spent his life studying, if not researching, since leaving Cyfer for cybernetic caretaking. After Ressler’s death, Jan quits her job, uses her life savings to support herself while investigating the state of genetics in 1957, and keeps a journal of her research and her life during the research. After spending time with Ressler just before his death, Todd writes an account of Ressler’s early life rather than his dissertation.

What the reader does not know until the last page is that the book just finished has been the product of combining Jan’s journal and Todd’s biography, a recognition that requires rereading with this new knowledge. This readerly recursion of a book about recursions--and dense with them--finds that the text has not been, as Todd suggests at the end, a product of “splicing” but has been, to use a programming term from the novel, a product of “backstopping,” recursive revision. Information, language, and sensibilities developed separately cross over the textual borders and get translated differently in their new context. Clues to this interpenetration or cross-fertilizing occur in chapter 17, when Todd’s programming language appears in Jan’s narration, and in chapter 22, when information about Ressler in Illinois breaks into a section presumably told by Jan. Locally cooperative, the text is globally collaborative. Its chapters and subsections simultaneously obey two formal codes--genetic and musical--that neither “author” could have managed to follow or impose alone. Although neither Jan nor Todd is, like Ressler, a prodigy capable of an imaginative “breakthrough” to the reductive secret of all life, they do combine his top-down power of abstraction and his bottom-up power of observation to understand the secrets of his life and learning, using this knowledge to form an artistically patterned text. Like Ressler’s breakthrough, Jan and Todd’s collaboration would have been impossible without love: their love of Ressler and his altruistic example, their learned love of each other. The Gold Bug Variations is, therefore, their “baby,” a creation with some of the chromosomal complexity present in every child, the being Ressler called nature’s “model of miraculous miniaturization.”

At 692 pages, The Gold Bug Variations is a miniature simulation of the natural world described in it. The collaboration that produces the text is learned at the center of it, a chapter called “The Natural Kingdom II.” In a book very concerned with formal symmetry, as well as the asymmetry that creates mutations, “The Natural Kingdom II” is the fifteenth of thirty chapters. Unlike most chapters, it is wholly composed by Jan, a four-part summary of the principles ruling the world populated by the four-letter genetic code, principles she had begun to understand in one of four parts of chapter 12, the subsection entitled “The Natural Kingdom.” In chapter 12 she quotes Melville’s Ishmael on natural classification (”the draft of a draft”) and meditates upon difference and similarity. She learns how huge the genetic “gap between individuals is” and how the human genome “represents only the slightest of divergence from . . . chimp and gorilla.” With her developing knowledge of genetics, Jan corrects her misconceptions about evolution: it is “not about competition or squeezing out, not a master plan of increasing efficiency.” Evolution is “a deluge, a cascade of mistaken, tentative, branching, brocaded experiment….” She ends this subsection by quoting Monod on “prodigious diversity,” the theme with which chapter 15 begins by returning to Ishmael’s comparison of nature to texts: “Books may be a substantial world, but the world of substance, the blue, species-mad world at year’s end outstrips every card catalog I can make for it.”

In “A. Classification” Jan learns that “Living things perpetuate only through glut” that resists and embarrasses all human classification schemes: “Nothing exceeds like success. Excess of issue. Surplus of offspring.” In “B. Ecology” Jan replaces “competition” with a new set of more appropriate, historically denigrated terms--”parasitism, helotism, commensalism, mutualism, dulosis, symbiosis”--and extends her book metaphor: the planet as “lending library-huge, conglomerate, multinational, underfunded, overinvested . . . No competition, no success, no survival of the fittest. The world I am looking for, the language of life, is circulation.” The next subsection, “C. Evolution,” is “an explosive deflation” of her library metaphor, for it is only through error, genetic chance that evolution proceeds: “Mutations cause cancer, stillbirth, blindness, deafness, heart disease, mongolism-everything that can go wrong. Yet faulty copying is the only agency for change.” For metaphor to represent the Darwinian revolution’s effect--”tailspin anxiety . . . soul’s distress”--she turns to “The Goldberg Variations,” its midpoint fifteenth, “terminal descent” from which the succeeding variations rise. “D. Heredity” is “the last, delicious twist . . . Evolution is the exception, stability the rule,” a recognition that returns her to the chapter’s beginning: “proliferation results from one universal and apostolic genetic code” produced by “the prodigal gene.”

This twenty-page chapter enunciates a new naturalism, one that revises and reverses early twentieth-century naturalism’s determinism and struggle for power, preserving the metaphor of hierarchy in the word “Kingdom” but undermining this vertical notion and the concept of Creation Jan first learned in her catechism. Born out of chance, affected by ecological constraints beyond its control, spreading and perpetuating itself by improbable variation, life is not designed. Once the notion of design disappears, Jan remembers Ressler theorizing, so will the destructive notion of improving life. Although spiritual distress has been the widespread response to the world as a “`Monte Carlo game,”’ the prodigious odds against life ever appearing on the planet and the prodigal diversity of its forms stimulate in Ressler “wonder and reverence,” reactions he believes are the appropriate purposes of science. “`The proper response”’ to the observed world, Jan quotes Ressler, “`ought not to be distress at all. We should feel dumb amazement. Incredulous, gasping gratitude that we’ve landed the chance at all, the outside chance to be able to comprehend, to save any fraction of it.’” The natural science that Jan, Todd, and the reader learn from Ressler teaches a series of analogous lessons: that life is a prodigy, a highly unlikely phenomenon on a planet dead for millions of years; that humankind is a recent prodigy on the timeline of life; that every normal child with its brain of a “hundred trillion synaptic bits” is a prodigy within the realm of biology; and that humans had better employ their natural curiosity, the information stockpile, and pattern-recognition to become new kinds of prodigies--emerging, collaborating, maturing rather than declining with age, creating an “ecology of knowledge.” For Ressler, humankind is the “caretaker” of the earth who must learn the most fundamental lesson of genetics: “small initial changes ripple into large differences.”

The wisdom of “The Natural Kingdom II” can be fed backward in time to evaluate the Cyfer group in 1957-58 and fed forward in the text to judge the actions of Jan, Todd, and Ressler in 1983. The seven scientists in Cyfer are brought together in a Cold War intellectual environment with reminders of the Manhattan Project, the possibility of nuclear apocalypse, and the launch of Sputnik. Despite these examples of theoretical physics turned into practical threat, the Cyfer scientists look to a local achievement--the invention of the transistor by two Illinois professors--to reinforce their collective belief that they are producing knowledge that will improve life. Supposedly pure scientists, their research is pressured by review boards and funding mechanisms. Initially collaborating, the group breaks up into two camps with Ressler as liaison and eventually the camps break down because of the difficulty of the project or the interference of the scientists’ personal lives. Tooney Blake, locked for a night in the library, experiences information overload and leaves the group for a life of hopeless generalism. Joe Lovering, who has an imaginary girlfriend and an impossible computer task, kills all the lab’s animals and, on a sudden impulse, himself. Woytowich, unwilling to admit in his personal life the long odds he investigates in the lab, breaks up his marriage and gives his intellectual energies to rating TV programs. Jeannette Koss sacrifices her role in the breakthrough and her love for Ressler to a 1950s version of womanly nobility. Ulrich, the administrator, and Botkin, the European scientist comfortable in two cultures and a reminder of Nabokov, who used the name as a pseudonym, are the only members of the group by the year’s end. The novel’s sections about Cyfer suggest that scientific discovery is almost as lucky--as dependent upon variables scientists of the 1950s tried to ignore--as life itself.

Ressler’s passionate love of Jeannette affects his own refusal of the breakthrough, but equally important is his vision of the future, the next generation of prodigies and science. While working backward to the genesis of life, Ressler observes two children of his colleagues in Cyfer. Margaret Blake, at age seven, has been trained to recite long passages of romantic poetry that she does not understand. The Woytowichs’ infant child Ivy is also being conditioned to be a prodigy, picking out alphabet blocks when her father names them. Both children are directed to second-order experience--language they do not understand, letters they cannot know, ciphers--rather than being placed in proximity to first-order nature that language names. They see arbitrary links before experiencing things. They may well grow up to be facile cross-referencers and glib conversationalists like Jan and Todd, but these “prodigies” will lack the curiosity about and wonder at nature that Ressler and, I believe, Powers maintain are the source of science and its grand understandings. Poised at the edge of such a breakthrough, Ressler sees what biotech will and has become. Koss’s husband-engineer turned food technologist, master of cheese in a can-is the parody version of useful knowledge. More dangerous is engineering life, creating genetic combinations that, like cheese in a can, cannot be put back in once sprayed out. For Ressler, the benefits of medical science are not worth the risks to the million-year-old genetic library, which can be snipped and cut a million times faster by human intervention than by evolutionary mutation. When he loses Jeanette and the possibility of the two of them standing as symbols of scientific renunciation, Ressler gives up the gold associated with the Nobel Prize and patented life forms. He spends the next twenty-five years recovering from what Powers suggests is the “gold bug,” the financial flu, of mid-century science.

Poe’s “The Gold Bug” is first referred to in the Illinois sections and serves best as a commentary on the period and the searches of the book’s first half. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” are also introduced in the Cyfer group, but they are more important in the second half of the book and in the 1980s sections. The fact that “Variations” is capitalized on the title page implies that this word is more important than either of its predecessors. The characters who comment on Poe’s story, Ressler included, are interested in the intellectual power and knowledge that the self-aggrandizing Legrand uses to break the code and dig up the treasure. For Powers, I think, other features of the story are equally important. Legrand is a naturalist whose curiosity about life on the seashore is responsible for first turning up the unusual golden bug. After that a series of accidents involving his servant, the weather, his friend the narrator, his dog, and a small error with huge consequences help lead him to the prodigious riches in Captain Kidd’s chest, natural stones worked into human treasure immorally amassed and then covered by skeletons of men Kidd presumably killed. This wealth Legrand shares with his servant and the narrator who spends little time meditating on the sources of the wealth.

Whether it is the possible wealth that produces feats of analysis or whether code-breaking is a natural proclivity of the brain that accidentally produces financial rewards, intellectual prowess is a metaphoric piracy. The “breakthrough” that Ressler achieves is a kind of break-in: “Putting One’s Hands Through the Pane” that separates life from our understanding of it. The plot of the last third of the novel provides a contemporary analogue of piracy and the dangers of interfering in the prodigious web of interconnected information inside or outside the gene. In December 1983, Ressler, Todd, and Jan take a weekend holiday in New England. When they are snowed in, their supervisor, a boy-man named Jimmy without computer skills, futilely attempts to keep the information processing working. Feeling guilty and sorry for the overworked Jimmy, Todd uses the programming skills he has picked up from Ressler to break into the company records and give Jimmy a raise. This altruistic hacking inadvertently cancels Jimmy’s insurance. When the raise is investigated, the innocent Jimmy has a stroke and requires long-term care and therapy no longer covered. To right this wrong, Ressler, Todd, and Jan create an elaborate computer violation that breaks no laws but embarrasses the company into reinstating Jimmy’s insurance before firing Ressler and Todd. Their clever manipulation of programming knowledge and literary quotation can close the gap in coverage, but nothing can repair the broken blood vessel in Jimmy’s head. Like the genetic code and the life it produces, the brain is prodigiously dense and complex. But as Jimmy’s accident implies, the brain that makes us prodigies is also exceedingly delicate, small changes producing huge unanticipated effects, a single event turning the rest of Jimmy’s life and speech into noise.

Personal collaboration, man-machine cooperation, financial conglomeration, and overpopulation create massive scales of information, organization, and environment in The Gold Bug Variations. Magnitude and number pose a question that Powers asks in his other novels: how can the single person believe she or he matters? In collaborating to help Jimmy, Ressler, Todd. and Jan renounce the selfish desires percolating up into behavior from the selfish gene and act, according to Jan, by the morality dictated by “a new complex mathematics, one dependent on the tiniest initial tweaks.” Her “notion that the entire community was accountable to the infinitesimal principle of a single life” has as its basis the nonlinear science of chaos and fractals, a paradigm that has emerged since the explosion of genetics and a paradigm that finds in both life and inanimate matter the kind of delicate patterning and noisy order of genetics. Particularly relevant to Powers’s novel are the sources of this new paradigm: fractal theory arose from Benoit Mandelbrot’s mathematical formalism and chaos theory came out of early large-scale sorting of phenomena made possible by the computer. Both theories rely on computer graphics, reducing their prodigious digital information into analogue forms, to communicate their beauty and validity. Key to both theories is the recognition that initial changes in a dynamic system create huge and unanticipatable results. This unpredictability--from the processes of genetics to an individual’s brain to ecosystemic processes--is the fundamental basis of Powers’s critique of scientific mastery and human intervention in the biosphere.

If old-fashioned and new prodigies turn their energies away from engineering nature and tinkering with biological information, they can learn how to imitate the new paradigm of nature in their lives and works. Jan and Todd create the collaborative biography of Ressler, who spends his last years investigating music’s relationship to the brain and composing his own music. In this work about science and art, Gold Bug and Goldberg, Bach’s music dominates the second half, culminating in chapter 27 where Powers uses both digital and analogue means to explain the multiple levels, overlapping orders, and recursive structures of the “Goldberg Variations.” I will leave a detailed analysis of the Bach influence to someone more knowledgeable about music than I, but it is clear from Powers’s use of the Goldbergs and his comments on them that the central feature uniting this music and the new science, whether genetic or nonlinear, is correspondence. For Powers, self-similarity and variation replace Newtonian cause and effect as the fundamental principles of nature. And correspondence is a pervasive principle in the novel from its molecular structure--puns, puzzles, riddles, translations--to its metaform doublings, splittings, triplings, recursions, and expansions.

The correspondence between Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” and Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations also represents the novel’s deceptive prodigality. Opening with an “Aria” that insists upon its simplicity, Powers takes the reader into a fairly conventional realistic novel about failed love and gradually overloads the reader with functional information about genetics that shows prodigality is life’s rule. Then through parallels with the “Goldbergs” and through commentary on them Powers reveals the prodigality--the superabundant connections--of his novel. The result is what one of Powers’s characters in Prisoner’s Dilemma calls “Crackpot Realism,” a fusion of traditional representational methods with contemporary paradigms that will seem like crackpot ideas to readers clinging to the common-sense empiricism of traditional realism. This fusion creates a mutation, the “`hopeful monster”’ known in biology as “the Goldschmidt variation.” With his collaborative artistic method, Powers elicits the emotional effect of realistic representation--the reader’s sympathetic engagement with characters--while building toward the final response of wonder, the reader’s amazement at the world created in and through this book made by an author “giving or yielding abundantly.”

You Bright and Risen Angels

William Vollmann employs as artistic methods the more negative meanings of prodigal--”profuse and wasteful expenditure,” “reckless extravagance”--from the very beginning of You Bright and Risen Angels: a vicious epigraph from Hitler; a subtitle that announces the book as a “Cartoon”; another epigraph defending exaggeration; a dedication to “bigots everywhere”; the author’s autograph accompanied by hermetic signs not explained until an “Author’s Note” on page 636; a four-page “Social Gazette of the Personalities Interviewed for this Book” too dense with information to be of use; a four-page “Transcendental Contents” that includes chapters of a second volume that does not exist; and a prologue entitled “Shape-shifting” in which the narrator says “I may disguise myself as any other animate or inanimate object in what follows.” The profuse frames and extravagant ironies of the first few pages are followed by Shandy-like chapters, often eccentrically titled and decorated with multiple, esoteric epigraphs; a plethora of human and insect characters in several wandering plots; an amorphous time and space, historical and imagined; a style as digressive and metaphorically diffuse as Tom Robbins’s; and a humor as parodically broad as that of Robert Coover and William Burroughs, both of whom are alluded to in the novel.

Unlike Powers, who suggests the prodigal quality of his novel arises from its protagonist-narrators, Vollmann calls attention to himself as the prodigy source of his book’s more than crackpot hyperreality. But the author who signs his name in the text at the beginning and signs again in hermetic symbols at the end is only one manifestation of the actual author whose printed name in capital letters (in the paperback edition) precedes the text. How the lower-case author becomes the capitalized Author is a central story of the novel: the development from personal hermeticism to a role as public Hermes, the prodigal god of science and art, orators and thieves celebrated as a parasite by Michel Serres. The prodigy who wrote You Bright and Risen Angels between 1981-85, when he was in his early twenties, became that prodigy: the author learned to become the Author by collecting and using prodigious information as a computer programmer, what he calls a “glorious profession” in the only partly ironic “Social Gazette.”

Reconstructing this development requires assembling into chronological order details about the self-referring “author” that occur piecemeal throughout the novel. This author lived in San Francisco with a girl named Clara Bee, who called him “Beetle” and kept snakes in a glass case warmed by electric lights. Tiring of him and his parasitical dependence, Clara ended their relationship, the author attempted suicide, and began what he terms his “bug blazoomises” to forget his personal unhappiness. The hero of these cartoons (and of You Bright and Risen Angels) is the nameless “Bug,” a bookish and vulnerable outsider like the author. Although Bug remembers everything he reads, neither he nor the author seems inherently gifted with creative abilities. Bug’s “great sensitivity” to insects is largely the product of some wax earplugs that a bug-eyed boy gives Bug at summer camp. From childhood Bug’s nemesis is a snake-like character named Parker Fellows, who continues to plague Bug like some Poe double even after college and after Bug joins with “The Great Beetle” to wage war against humankind and electricity. In addition to the parallels between the author and Bug, bits of information about them and what the author’s note reveals about Vollmann--that he went to Cornell, visited Afghanistan, and that he lives in San Francisco--also overlap. What Vollmann suggests with these seeming or partial self-references is that the cartoon, a form for children, arose from the author’s child-like vulnerability and took its imagery and names from his rather juvenile romantic relation. “As children,” Vollmann has his author say, “when we pulled the covers over our heads to protect us from monsters at night, we knew that if the monsters ever came they could rip the blankets silently with their claws and then eat us . . . but with an exoskeleton we’d be as invulnerable as Superman.”

Much of the mid-section of the book--about Bug’s years at summer camp, on a high school swim team, at college, in a protest group, and finally as leader of a violent revolutionary cell that includes Milly, Clara Bee’s best friend--parodies with its exhaustive, frequently excessive detail the sentimental, Holden Caulfield bildungsroman and the political revenge fantasy, mocking the obsessive personalizing that characterizes both forms. Although as a boy Bug, like Stuart Ressler, was a student of trees and interested in insects, his later eco-terrorism develops more from his emotional alienation than from an informed ideology. He decides to be a revolutionary when he sees the powerful effect the wind has on women’s skirts. The most ideological member of his little band is the “meta-feminist” Milly, whose alliance with Bug is a symbolic defeat of Clara Bee. The group retreats in Alaska to the “Caves of Ice” that Bug read about in a Tom Swift book. Bug’s attraction to guns and violence is equally juvenile and again bookish, reality developing out of the gun catalogues that he once collected. In the revolutionary cartoon, the alienated author reverses Superman’s alliance with the law and order of dominant culture. Bug is a Spiderman gone native, back to his insect roots.

What metamorphoses You Bright and Risen Angels from a parodic cartoon about adolescent monsters to a serious attack on a larger enemy is the author’s job as a computer programmer working for a “math nerd” supervisor named Big George. Incorporated as a character in the cartoon, Big George meddles with the author’s favored creations. Then Big George rises above his status as character, interferes with the author’s use of his word processor, and takes over long stretches of narration as alternative author. The reader experiences this conflict between authors early in the text, but understands their competition and the fact that Big George has been the speaker of “Shape-shifting” only later in the novel and in the epilogue, also called “Shape-shifting.” Initially Big George appears to be a cruel manipulator of the author, substituting a long “History of Electricity” where the author would like to tell the personal lives of his characters, but the reader eventually welcomes Big George as a source of public information. Although Big George’s history is ideologically distorted by his alliance with the Blue Globes, the personifications of electricity whose initials he shares, his tall-tale celebration of American pioneering imperialism and rampant industrialism are a welcome relief from the exaggerated sentimentality of the author. He attempts to depict Big George as a traitor to electricity, but he is “the eternal winner.” By the end of the book the parasitical, shape-shifting, and monstrous Big George appears to be in almost complete command: as night shift supervisor, he keeps the author locked in the “Training Room” of the computer center, where he sleeps next to snaking extension cords and finds it difficult to “believe in the outdoors.” Big George also controls the “tape drives” where the characters’ lives exist, the “disk drives where the action of this novel takes place,” and the “end of-file mark” that shortens the book from its “Transcendental” length to its real one-volume existence.

During Big George’s final “justification subroutine,” he becomes more than a commercial editor cutting the young author’s text, more than a personification of technological power unsympathetic to sensitive art. At the end, the reader understands a much-earlier comment by the author--that Big George is “pure electrical consciousness itself, insinuating itself everywhere, drifting in and out of all stories and machines.” Ultimately the relation between Big George and the author is a cartoon projection of several recent ideas coming out of neurobiology and the cognitive revolution. In The Gold Bug Variations the brain is described as an evolutionary “kludge,” a “walkie-talkie wrapped around a shrewscreech encasing a lizard’s intuition.” In these terms (what Carl Sagan called “the triune brain”), Big George is the big brain, the evolutionary top of the head, a “walkie-talkie” become a calculating machine consciousness. Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained posits a “Multiple Drafts model of consciousness” in which “information entering the nervous system is under continuous `editorial revision’ ... accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration.” For Dennett, consciousness is competitive and collaborative, selecting, editing, and revising the information we call personal (as well as “objective”) truth.

The conflicting voices of the author and Big George are two methods of cognitive interpretation and elaboration. What Vollmann calls “pure electrical consciousness” does not, according to J. Allan Hobson, turn off during sleep. In The Dreaming Brain, Hobson offers a physiological explanation of dreaming as an “endogenous process with its own genetically determined dynamics,” the work of a brain processing information without “external space-time data” and “the internal chemical controls necessary for logical thought.” By the end of You Bright and Risen Angels, the author is sleeping at the computer center and Big George is speaking, his electrical voice “insinuating itself everywhere.” Like Stuart Ressler’s attempt to map the effects of music in the brain, the theories of Hobson and Dennett have a reductive effect. Hobson does away with the autonomy of the Freudian or Jungian unconscious, often cited as the source of artistic imagination. Dennett attempts to destroy the vestiges of Cartesian identity, replacing the central processor with the connectionist model of consciousness. They make humans more electrical, more like machines, even more like fireflies. But in destroying several bases for mankind’s lordly separation from and authority over nature, his inherent, reified powers, Hobson and Dennett also increase human responsibility. If we are electrical information processors, if we are the summation of our information as well as our evolution, we must attend more carefully to the data about the world and ourselves that we take in.

Former programmer, Author Vollmann knows “garbage in, garbage out.” This external Author programs his novel’s programmers, controls the internal authorial conflict, and creates from its forcible collaboration--not a spliced or matched text like The Gold Bug Variations--but a prodigious garbage heap. Its prodigality represents the uncompromising extremities of its internal authors and satirizes the wasteful failures and reckless, also wasteful successes of their political positions. This satire has its dramatic climax near the end of the book when the author’s hero Bug attacks the computer complex where the author and Big George work. The Luddite Bug and his companions smash terminals, murder programmers, capture two Blue Globes, and torture them. The author is helpless. Big George escapes and the conflict between reactionaries and revolutionaries, machines and bugs escalates into further violence and repression. In Gold Bug Powers reports the origin of the expression “bug in the machine”: a “moth that crashed a complex program on one of the first sequential logic machines.” Powers’s cyberpunks get inside the computer and use its capabilities against the powerful people who buy control over and through it. Vollmann’s author’s revolutionaries are like the moth: they destroy a few machines and programmers and are then destroyed. Vollmann as Author is a parasite: he learns the computer’s language and procedures, shows how it helps perpetuate an economic and political system, illustrates how it can be a model of consciousness, and then imitates its prodigious storage and instantaneous revision to create You Bright and Risen Angels, a giant bug in the system of literature. Eating away from inside the decayed or useless forms it parodies, enlarging itself like “The Great Beetle” and Big George, the book does not molt, does not become a winged creature, whether angel or butterfly. It remains, like the winged Hermes, an instructive monstrosity, something “out of the course of nature,” a “portent” of American life and politics.

In his biographical sketch for Contemporary Authors, Vollmann calls himself an “Environmentalist egalitarian.” Where Powers described the genetic code uniting all living things, Vollmann spreads his environmental net even further, linking all things animate and inanimate with their shared electricity. Even a rock and a computer have this in common. The primary symbols of his egalitarianism, however, are insects and, more particularly, beetles, which include fireflies and cockroaches. Vollmann enlarges human sympathies for insects by showing how humans treat other humans like bugs (how must bugs feel when the scale of victimization is even larger?) and by incorporating objective entomological information into the book. The latter method, present primarily in “The Great Beetle” chapter, parallels Powers’s introduction of the “Natural Kingdom.” After emphasizing, like Powers, the similarities between mankind and the “lower orders”--their common need for space, the desires to eat and mate, the survival tricks they learn--Vollmann focuses on ecological interdependencies, particularly the beetles’ parasitical relation with ants, wasps, and bees. After man enters the scene in a crop-dusting plane that kills prodigious numbers of harmless insects, the encyclopedic account metamorphoses into cartoon imagination and Vollmann describes “The Great Beetle,” an individual bug “capable of many feats of mentation.” The Great Beetle organizes the insects’ defense against man, a mission almost completely devoted to gathering information, “bugging” man’s conversations for his future plans.

A prodigy among the bugs, “The Great Beetle” preaches collaboration among orders as an alternative to mankind’s aggression. Bugs and mankind coexisted for millions of years. In ancient Egypt, Vollmann reminds us in his tale of “The Great Beetle,” beetles were worshipped as symbols of cyclic process and immortality. In Vollmann’s history of the world, the nineteenth-century taming of electricity, what an early experimenter called “blue globes,” was the achievement that made man a dangerous prodigy in the ecosystem, a threat to all nature’s continuance. Using quotes from Thomas Edison’s writings, Vollmann metamorphoses the father of electricity into Jack White, pioneer of Big Power. With the help of his student Newton Payne, a prodigy of “superior mentation” who is credited with 950 inventions, and marketing genius William S. Dodger, White turns America into an electric monopoly in the first decades of this century. In the cartoon time of the novel, Mr. White is still living in the late twentieth century and now controls the computer industry. The “Blue Globes” of industrial electricity have become electronics, miniaturized into microchips that are, in a turn of the book’s metaphor, alarmingly “like bugs”: “tiny ubiquitous pellets inside the NMOSFET chips and other silicon wafer wonders . . . turning away from human concerns, the young ones, and playing diffusion gate games which we will never understand and they frolic as the snakes used to do in the great jungles of the Americas.” The prodigy of this silicon age is the snake-man Parker Fellows, who has a Midas-like gift of developing pictures with a touch of his finger. This master of the image is also working on an invention called “The Great Enlarger,” a technology obviously inimical to little bugs or other beings attempting to avoid the scrutiny of Mr. White’s information empire. The author attempts to diminish Parker’s power by making him suffer the puppy love of the author’s own life. Originally interested in electricity because of the male body’s ability to “conduct electrolysis of a concentrated sodium chloride solution” in a woman’s body, the author contrives as a fantasy solution to electrical and electronic monopoly a Martian takeover of White’s empire.

Vollmann the Author’s solution is to offer a frightening metaphor of the future, a planet-wide final solution that emerges through Big George’s “Shape-shifting” epilogue and gathers together the book’s numerous references to Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. For the “Environmentalist egalitarian,” the political terms of the novel--reactionaries and revolutionaries--shift shapes twice. Meant to sympathize with the insect revolutionaries’ battle against reactionary, White power, readers ultimately have to recognize that humans are the true revolutionaries on the planet, manipulating time and space that other life forms could only react to over long periods of adaptation. In his final words, Big George indicates his future work, “electrifying” all that is left of the Amazon, an “almost dried-up canal” that “stretches all across the east-west axis of our Great Republic, the two ends forming it into a fine palindrome.” When this waste sink and breeding ground for insects is brought inside the empire of electric civilization, America and the planet it stands for will become an ecologically closed system, what Vollmann calls, in a section just preceding “Shape-Shifting,” the “World in a Jar.” Newt Payne, White’s prodigy, studies life in a glass case. The author brings home an insect, puts it in ajar, and finally finds it has destroyed itself after it has molted. In “World in a Jar,” Vollmann recalls these two experimenters and creates a compact, economic metaphor for the future of man. Bugs placed in a closed jar eat the food there, multiply, cover the glass with waste, and cover the food with their own bodies. The bugs have been trapped in glass. Supposedly more intelligent, information-processing humans trap themselves in the glass of the Greenhouse Effect: “the cars snorted and farted in the blue-grey air, the yellow taxicabs especially idling and idling and double-parking, pouring out gases, while the flies buzzed and swarmed inside the darkening vial . . . but they went on buzzing and swarming until the vial dried up completely and then they were still. The vial went into the trash.” This gassing of life is a final solution, however, that destroys both the controllers and victims of industrial civilization. We turn ourselves into trash, garbage, prodigal waste.

Bugs rise to blue globes above the swimming pools in suburban backyards. Inside the homes children are glued to the blue globe of the television screen. At the office, parents are affixed to the blue globes of their monitors increasing human efficiency everywhere. To break the magnetic power, Vollmann creates a book that, like electricity itself, attracts and repels, a black and white cartoon for readers reared on television, and a prodigious store of information that has what Michel Serres calls abuse, rather than use, value. Though Vollmann and Powers share numerous ideas and concerns, Vollmann’s alienation effects, pop culture parodies, and surrealistic imagination are more like Pynchon’s methods. Where Powers provides charts and tables to represent the intricacy of genetics, Vollmann includes childish line drawings and grotesque wood-block prints analogous to the Tarot-card future Pynchon lays out at the end of Gravitv’s Rainbow. Perhaps that is why Vollmann’s two allusions to Pynchon are to children: “the Counterforce Kid” and “The Kamikaze Kidz.” To be a counterforce in post-Pynchon fiction and in postindustrial culture, Vollmann implies, an Author may have to be like a kamikaze, attacking like a swarm of gadflies, crashing like the moth that crashed the computer, risking that artistic prodigality in a time of blue globes will be recognized as functional. Treated as an organized profusion, You Bright and Risen Angels is neither wasteful nor reckless but generous, a prodigious text that uses its “monster masks and giant glow-in-the-dark Spiderman cut-outs to frighten” readers away from a glassed-in future.