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.

The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence.…But the supplement supplements [supplants]. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void.

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

My last post—a link to a review of Martel’s Son of Nobody and a supplement to the review—got me thinking about “supplement” and its relation to monsterpieces. The material on Martel was not, though, my first supplement. The published text of my 2022 novel Passing Again, described in an earlier post (LeClair), was accompanied by an online supplement composed of five items—a fiction, an interview, three personal essays. To that initial supplement on the publisher’s website, I have added the “Supplement to the Supplement” you are now reading—after I found the following statement by Derrida: “The supplement is dangerous in that it threatens us with death.” I think the opposite: the supplement or, more precisely, the “Supplement to the Supplement” could well be dangerous in unpredictable ways but offers us—actually me—the possibility of life after death. Or again more precisely, the possibility of supplementing after death.

Not long after that initial supplement to Passing Again, death “entered,” as DeLillo says in White Noise, when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and wrote my mortality memoir Passing Down: Late, Later, Last Writings. The final two entries in the initial supplement became with some revisions early chapters in that memoir, which also included three fictions about the relationship between the author and his character Michael Keever—making Passing Down a hybrid work and partial extension of that relationship central to the hybrid Passing Again.

Unable to find a publisher for Passing Down, I posted the 50,000-word text here on Substack. Afterwards the site mutated to become “Monsterpieces,” my essays on long and experimental contemporary novels that achieve cognitively dissonant monstrosity. The essay about my own work, mentioned above, could be considered a supplement to all the other essays about novels by other writers. Termed “LeClair,” the essay described my five-novel Passing sequence, a thousand pages long but not a memorable monstrosity although its final novel, Passing Again, does have some of the characteristic excesses and deformations of a monstrosity.

Thinking more about supplements, I realized that many of the posts in “Monsterpieces”—not just the one on Martel— are supplemental because the posts include my past reviews of the author being currently reviewed. More importantly, I realized that sequels are a form of supplement, four of them in the Passing sequence. How, I came to wonder, might my long sequelential work become fully the kind of monstrosity I’d been praising in “Monsterpieces”? Reading Derrida helped me hit upon a solution: declare this whole Substack—both the memoir and the critical essays, past and (this is crucial) future—as an explicit online supplement to the earlier online supplement to Passing Again. This second supplement, which would incorporate the initial supplement, would in the future be termed the “Supplement to the Supplement.” That phrase will replace “Monsterpieces” as the title of this Sub-stack account. The renamed account would be similar in its combination of fact and fiction to Passing Again, and at present the doubled supplement would be longer than the novel it continues and modifies. In a future I imagine below, the “Supplement to the Supplement” that this essay initiates and describes could become even longer than the whole Passing sequence just as Kinbote’s supplement to Shade’s poem in Pale Fire far exceeds the 999-line poem. In the future, the “Supplement to the Supplement” would become monstrous—hybrid in form like ancient monsters, grossly oversized, and possibly dangerous (as Derrida said) or, at least, highly dissonant. Acromegalous, it could grow without foreseeable end, perhaps eventually swallowing the texts it was initially intended to supplement! Infinite Jest has a hundred pages of notes at its end, but they are contained in the text and therefore cannot approach infinity. The “Supplement to the Supplement” on Substack will not be similarly constrained and might go on supplementing itself with “companion volumes” like the encyclopedia of Tlon in Borges’ story for as long as Substack exists. The incipient monster in the I-BeaM publisher’s website escapes and, like Frankenstein’s monster, goes out into the world, the larger Internet world, and becomes a monstrosity.

Linguistically, Substack is the appropriate place for a supplement. Its etymology is traced back to “fill from below.” The word “substack” has a similar vertical orientation. In mathematics, substack has a highly technical meaning that AI summarizes as follows: “A sub-stack Y of a stack X inherits a similar geometric structure, often restricted by properties like being open or closed.” As I have pointed out, the “Supplement to the Supplement” has a similar open structure to the systems it supplements. One might say the “Supplement to the Supplement” is, like some monsterpieces, an imitative form of its subjects. I once considered writing a novel called “Acknowledgements” that would begin with conventional credits that exponentially expanded and substituted for the promised and presumed narrative, but “Acknowledgements” would have been a supplement from above rather than below, a prefatory surplus that would require a different theorizing.

Now—about my motive for creating a shaggy mammoth of a supplement: “life after death.” Not a literal heaven or fantasy underworld or walled paradise but an ongoing presence, what Derrida calls “the fullest measure of presence.” In my remaining years or months or weeks, I will be writing supplemental pieces both fictional and factual that my literary executor will post to “Monsterpieces,” which will become “Supplement to the Supplement,” after my death.[1] I believe this process somewhat differs from the usual posthumous publication in several ways. Writers don’t ordinarily write material intentionally posthumous. Since there will be no public-access archive, for example, readers of the retitled “Monsterpieces” will never know when that series of pieces may end. But best yet: since the pieces will be posted by an executor who is both a character in Passing Again and a contribut0r to the initial supplement, readers will wonder if the pieces have been written by me or by her, she perhaps generously giving LeClair a “life after death,” a presence beyond my expiration date. Those readers familiar with the pervasive unreliability of characters and author in the Passing sequence, particularly in Passing Again, and even in Passing Down will have good reason to suspect the executor’s reliability and authenticity. The post-death “Supplement to the Supplement”—the future exfoliation of this essay—will therefore take on a fictional quality, and the “Supplement to the Supplement” may become more than a supplement: a sequel to the hybrid fiction and hybrid memoir that came before the supplement. Eventually, this hypertrophied sequel would overwhelm the whole Passing sequence and make it a monstrosity. Unfortunately, I will not be around to explicate it here on “Monsterpieces.”

“No game, no gain,” says Michael Keever, my double and now, I suppose, my supplement. This elaborate supplemental “design,” the word Thomas Sutpen uses in Absalom, Absalom! for his immortality project, may be a monstrous game, but I won’t gain from it. Despite taking a fistful of dietary supplements every day, I’ll be dead. I see readers gaining in several ways. I imagine the plot lines and character relationships presented in the fiction sequence and in Passing Down will be continued in the “Supplement to the Supplement,” as will the author’s or authors’ investigation of mortality, particularly the influence of fiction on an individual’s response to death—writing fiction and reading fiction as dangerous evasion or as useful inquiry. “Trust the body,” Keever also says. All the Passing novels, as well as Passing Down, are about the athlete’s body, so there will be a shadowy connection between the athletic “supple” and “supplement,” which is after all supple in its protean capabilities. The “Supplement to the Supplement” would probably also continue the permutations of the word “passing,” such as the author’s passing the torch after passing away.

These are traditional gains from literary fiction. What I consider the primary and possibly unique contribution of the “Supplement to the Supplement” will be its concrete and exhaustive working out of Derrida’s recognition that once begun a supplement—like any Godelian meta project or deconstructive interpretation or even natural language itself—goes on and on and on, the motto of Keever’s “Terminal Tours.” In “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Stevens said such a fiction must be abstract, must change, and must give pleasure. Its manifestation of an abstract idea and its inherent changeability recognized, the “Supplement to the Supplement” should give pleasure to subscribers to the current “Monsterpieces” since they—you—have a possibly obsessive fascination with long, excessive, seemingly endless monstrosities, which are sometimes about obsessed art monster characters and authors whose designs veer far from common reality and the traditional novel, someone like Helen DeWitt, both a character in and author of Your Name Here where DeWitt supplements her narrative about conflicting authors with earlier work by her [Coincidentally, my review here is a review and a supplement to it!].

If subscribers eventually find that the “Supplement to the Supplement” makes the Passing sequence an original monstrosity, I can envision recommendations and Substack linkages increasing the number of future readers of the novels—as well as increasing subscribers, living supplements of the original subscribers, some of whom may have passed away. I am not so sanguine—or deluded—about the “Supplement to the Supplement” to believe, however, that it will ever be published as a book. Besides, the supplement began on the Internet and probably belongs there where it can become a King Kong of digital textuality.

A supplemental impetus for the post-death “Supplement to the Supplement” is the recent “Monsterpieces” reprinting of my essay about women novelists rewriting men, which can be seen as a process of supplementing the initial dead authors. This author is not yet dead, but he likes the prospect that another person, particularly this woman, may impersonate him and his work—and create another collaborative monstrosity. “Another” because the executor and I composed such a work called “The Framing Project,” unpublishable as a book but available on the website of her publisher, Ephemere. In centuries past, women’s malign influence on their embryos was blamed for offspring considered monstrous. I trust the executor will be given credit rather than blame. That she happens to be forty years younger than me is promising for the future expansion—the “excession”—of the “Supplement to the Supplement.”

As I said at the end of that rewriting essay, the Internet and writing are monstrosities that we occupy and play language games within. For me, the continuation of the passing game—a subset of language constantly passing itself off and on, whimsically and seriously supplementing itself—is ultimately more important than who might be playing it. The death of the author need not end the game. The executor/inheritor might vet and bring in supplemental players sympathetic to the project. I suppose if the “Supplement to the Supplement” attains some status and popularity, fan fictions will follow. Even living writers appear to have no control over this supplemental sub-genre. I can only hope that any future “Supplements to the Supplement to the Supplement” will have informed contact with the origin, the first supplemented. It probably won’t be long before fans using AI will make the supplement primary, not secondary: they will claim that one’s life, one’s years of living, is a supplement or series of supplements to one’s birth, ongoing education, sequels of action, social media posts. A person’s gravestone will be the Afterword. Or Afterwords. Mine will quote that daredevil Sam Patch who said “Some things can be done as well as others” before he died trying to survive Niagara Falls in a barrel. Hard to imagine the event, but we have Sam’s words.

Although the “Supplement to the Supplement” is merely embryonic in this essay now, I can already forehear the kinds of questions that could pop up in the “comments” that Substack allows:

A) “Is the author, as Keever accuses LeClair in Passing Down, playing ever more elaborate (and desperate) games to keep on playing, to keep on living, to keep on evading acceptance that the body is on a Terminal Tour and does not go on and on and on?”

B) “Was the Substack account created from the beginning to be a stalking horse—even Trojan horse!—for this self-reflexive and self-promoting `Supplement to the Supplement’?”

C) “If `Monsterpieces’ was created to support ambitious novelists and monstrous fictions, why does `Supplement to the Supplement’ shift attention away from other writers’ fictions?”[2]

D) “What if `Supplement to the Supplement’ is itself a Nabokovian or Borgesian fiction, a parasite that under false pretenses “insinuates itself,” as Derrida says, into the non-fiction `Monsterpieces’ and, as Derrida also says, `fills a void’ with a monstrous `surplus,’ thus turning`Monsterpieces’ into a hybrid like many of the works it is about?”

Finally, for now, I can say I take pleasure knowing that all questions and any possible answers will be supplements within the “Supplement to the Supplement.”

Notes

[1] I have already begun the first piece, a lengthy review of Julian Barnes’ Departure(s) that will introduce a subset of the “Supplement”—the “Complement.” Into this category on Substack will go writings that are not crucial additions to the “Supplement to the Supplement” but pieces that are instructively analogous to works present in the larger set. In the review, I will discuss the numerous and remarkable similarities between Departure(s) and “Passing Down.” In brief, both are narrated by an unreliable novelist writing about the cancer that threatens his life and thinking about the nature of death. Much of both works is demonstrably autobiographical, but in both there is also a substantial fictional element—the stories of two invented “friends” in Departure(s), the stories of one invented “friend” in “Passing Down.” One of Barnes’s two imagined characters criticizes his writing of “hybrid” texts; LeClair’s imagined character criticizes the influence of fiction on his memoir. Both works have informed commentaries on others’ literary works (as well as [supplemental] references to the authors’ own earlier works), and both claim to be the authors’ last books. At the end of Departure(s) are the dates “2022-25.” “Passing Down: Late, Later, Last Writings” first appeared on Substack in late 2025, so I can’t claim that Barnes’s work is a supplement to mine—only a complement offering parallels that bring out features of my work. And, I guess, features of Barnes’ work for those studying him. Because of the projected length of the review, I will not add it now to this “Supplement to the Supplement,” but the full review will be posted shortly after my death (and Barnes’ death). Just as the essay you are reading is an embryonic origin, the review will be, I now believe, the embryo of “Complements of the Supplement to the Supplement.” I am familiar with Occam’s razor but believe this new category of the Complement is necessary to understand the Supplement—just as Departure(s) may in the future come to be necessary to understand Passing Down.

[2] This question is partially answered or mooted in footnote [1].

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.

[Looking through the archive, I found this essay published seven years ago in Full Stop, where it got more views than any other piece until that time. Not “lo and behold” but middle and behold there is a discussion of bullshitting in the context of monstrosity. At least three of the novels I discuss here I would call or have called monsterpieces. “Bullshitting” is one common method of pushing realistic narrative toward monstrosity—both in scale and expression—so I’m posting the essay here.]

I realize “bullshitting” has negative connotations. People call “bullshit” on a statement or a person. Donald Trump has been termed the Bullshitter in Chief. But when I was young—and when many of the American experimental fiction writers I’ll discuss here were young—bullshitting was often preceded by the word “just” when a group of people, mostly male people, were asked what they were doing while waiting for the fish to bite. “Just bullshitting” was passing time, talking to entertain oneself and others for long stretches of time that couldn’t be used to do anything else, such as riding cross-country in a car without a radio. Bullshitting is telling and retelling anecdotes and stories, maybe even fish stories, joking and bantering with little regard for truth or sincerity or politeness, observing the passing scene, meditating, speculating, asservating, revealing, both sharing and competing for time–preferably with more than one other bullshitter.

The best bullshitters are naturally garrulous, and can be digressive to hold the floor even when they may not have much information to communicate. A strong voice, capable of shifts in timbre and tone, is also an asset. As is a certain verbal facility or cleverness, an ability to perform accents and aural idiosyncracies. Bullshitters have to be improvisational, responsive to fellow bullshitters, supplementing the line of conversation or contesting an assertion or taking the discourse in a new direction. Bullshitting is, I’d insist, aware of itself as bullshitting, a genre if you will, an informal language game with parameters if not rules. A participant may say, if another’s tale becomes too tall, “don’t bullshit me,” thus paradoxically using the operative descriptor to restore the discourse to a realm between falsity and fact.

Decades ago there was a popular distinction in American Literature between Palefaces and Redskins. I want to modify that a bit to Artistes and Bullshitters. There is a scholarly book of sociology entitled Street Women and the Art of Bullshitting, but I believe you are reading here the first use of Bullshitting, now capitalized, as a literary term. For experimental novelists of the late twentieth century, the central question was how to get outside the well-oiled, rather simplistic textual machine of realism with its disciplined balances of plot, character, and setting, expressed in a slightly elevated literary language. I believe most people think of experimental or postmodern fiction as the formal or stylistic innovations of the Artistes, novelists influenced by Borges and Nabokov or writers cognizant of French structuralism and post-structuralism. Artistes include Barthelme, Barth, Gass, Hawkes, and DeLillo, all of whom exert considerable control over their fictions. Or someone like the short-fiction writer Lydia Davis whose work is so controlled there is sometimes nothing there. Bartheleme was a consummate parodist, Barth a learned narratologist, Gass a student of Wittgenstein, Hawkes a poet of the unconscious, and DeLillo a transformer of leaden popular genres into literary gold. An extreme example of an Artiste’s text is Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa, influenced by Raymond Roussel and written under absolute alphabetical controls.

The Bullshitter line runs from Melville to Twain to Faulkner to Miller, all heavily influenced by colloquial oral discourse. The line continues with Burroughs and Pynchon and the Gaddis of J R. For contemporary Bullshitters, garrulous orality was a way out of the realism machine and a way to distinguish themselves from the Artistes of rigorous control. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is probably the most extreme example as he throws the voices of the carny barker and drug hustler and 50s hipster within a very loosely organized collection of narratives and monologues. You can hear Burroughs’ hallucinogens and hipsters in many of the numerous digressions in Gravity’s Rainbow, particularly in the last hundred or so pages where Pynchon quotes from Naked Lunch and where, like the rocket, Gravity’s Rainbow appears to lurch out of control. J R is all talk all the time, though actually more fractured dialogue than continual Bullshitting.

But I want to focus on somewhat more recent and less obvious exemplars of the Bullshitting tradition—Coover, Vollmann, Wallace, and Gayl Jones. And I want to show how Bullshitting sounds in epic novels by these four because the books are like orally composed epics of the past and because I believe these big, wide-ranging books are postmodernism’s best, for the Bullshitters engage more directly and profoundly than the Artistes with significant cultural subjects. Coover’s The Public Burning is a lengthy 1977 novel about the execution of the so-called atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. I recommend it highly now because it’s the work of contemporary literature that best understands the Trump phenomenon, its continuity with American history and world pre-history. The Public Burning is also an explicitly Bullshitting work about Bullshitting. The novel is structured as a performance—a giant three-ring circus in which Coover assumes the voices of the high-wire Rosenbergs, the clown Nixon, and the ringmaster Uncle Sam. Coover told an interviewer that he wanted the novel “to seem to have been written by the whole nation through all of its history.” Coover’s superhero Uncle Sam gives this history multiple voices. Coover describes him as an “incorrigible huckster, a sweet-talking con artist.” Sam is a protean shape-shifter, the impure principle of performance and entertainment, an amoral exploiter of American myths and stereotypes. He is also like an archaic pre-literate priest or king, for he uses his bullying bluster to arrange a scapegoat sacrifice in Times Square–in a section of the novel that runs to about 80 pages voicing crazed Americana and religious fanaticism.

A character in this section shouts “BEWARE THE MAD ARTIST,” In The Public Burning, as well as in some of Coover’s longer stories about performances, he is the mad Bullshitter, both angry and a little crazed. He praised Stanley Elkin’s fiction for its “bizarrely elaborated routines, extended metaphor, prodigious sales pitches, and show-off shaggy-dogging,” and Coover employs all of these devices, taking wild risks to display both the pleasures and dangers of oral performance, the distinctive voice’s power to entertain and its power to manipulate crowds, its possibilities for sadism and masochism.

In the Times Square section of The Public Burning, Uncle Sam spots “Billy Faulkner” among the gathered celebrities. Uncle Sam asks Faulkner what to do about combating the Phantom, the prince of darkness threatening the American children of light. Faulkner says:

“Let us think fust of savin’ the integer we call home: not whur Ah live, but whur we live: a thousand then tens of thousands of little integers scattered and fixed firmer and more impregnable and more solid than rocks or citadels about the earth, so thet the ruthless and ambitious split-offs of the ancient Dark Spirit shall look and say…`Man–simple, unfrightened, invincible men and women–has beaten us.’”

Then Coover has Sam reply:

“Sweet Genevieve, Bill! That’s pretty highfaluting’ sesquipedalian advice! When I think on this majestic jazz, mine eyes dazzle! And that word integer’ was a jimdandy, too! Let’s give him a hand, folks, he’s a good ole boy! And pass him a bottle a redeye! That’s right, on the house, nothin’ too good for an old Massassip screamer—that boy can head-rassle with the worst of em! All them little integers swarmin’ around—WHOOPEE1 you gotta be born and reared up in the swamps to think `em up like that!”

Sam’s colloquial diction, pronunciation, fake enthusiasm, sound effects, and second-person appeal to his listeners deflate the high orotund orality of the Nobel Faulkner. Sam’s passage is an extravagant example of American Bullshitting, both satirizing and satirized. Sam’s style is not an example most other novelists dared to follow, and yet in this passage and elsewhere Uncle Sam represents the tendency of future American Bullshitters to use the lower registers of vernacular style as a way to escape the polished niceties of realism–and as a way to “head-rassle” readers.

William Vollmann is also a “head-wrassler.” In his book about sharing trains with hobos, Riding Toward Everywhere, he mentions his father’s favorite saying, which also appeals to the son: “Bullshit Baffles Brains.” For experimental novelists, baffling brains involved formal, as well as stylistic, dissonances. Posing as Bullshitters, Vollmann, and others were, like Pynchon—and Homer long before him–free to digress and expatiate, to open up the form of their books to odd catalogues of information and strange inventions that might be true, historical arcana and pop trivia, science and fantasy, all of which suggested plural realities, competing and complicating versions like the three simultaneous rings of a circus. In Europe Central, which won the National Book Award in 2005, Vollmann conceives of his book of linked stories as a telephone switchboard where the author purports to overhear the voices of numerous historical characters in the Second World War. This is orality as multiplicity and authenticity. But with an element of ironic self-consciousness, for presiding over the scores of “recorded” conversations is the novelist as amateur historian and, because amateur, a Bullshitter. Vollmann has for much of his career been obsessed with history, with creating alternative narratives to received history while at the same time suggesting that his researched inventions are ultimately exercises in elaborate Bullshitting. In one of his notes in Europe Central, Vollmann says that he “substantially retranslated” a German passage “to avoid paying permission fees.” In another note, he admits that a passage is “the flimsiest speculation, which is God’s gift to historical fictioneers”—and to Bullshitters.

If you have read even half of Wallace’s Infinite Jest, you know that much of this 1996 novel is taken up by textual representation of oral performances in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, by fulsome passages of dialogue, and by lengthy associative riffs in the voices of its many minor characters. The addicts’ raw narratives wind and rewind, digress and regress as they try to express—or avoid—the truth of their situations. Wallace’s hero, Don Gately, has a “keen bullshit antenna,” but he listens with empathy to the struggling, inarticulate speakers—and thus becomes a stand-in for his creator who appears as a wraith to Gately. The wraith defends his “aural chaos” as “real life’s real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds, of the animate world’s real agora, the babble of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment.” The wraith calls this “babble” of voices “radical realism.”

If Coover opened up his novels to popular culture and anthropology, and Vollmann opened up his books to history, Wallace uses the loose, slip-sliding oral mode of Bullshitting to allow in ugly physiological and raw psychological materials with the apparent motive of serving others, those whose sometimes bullshitting voices are not usually heard in books. Coover’s and Vollmann’s fictions are historical. Because Infinite Jest is futuristic, it also serves others—readers–as a warning about overly seductive entertainment, particularly visual entertainment.

In the passage from Infinite Jest that follows, one can hear how the dialogue that I’ve quoted from The Public Burning and the self-consciousness of Vollmann ooze into Wallace’s third-person narration:

“Lenz reguiles Bruce Green about certain real-estate cults in S. Cal. and the West Coast. Of Delawarreans that still believed Virtual-Reality pornography even though it’d been found to cause bleeding from the eye-corners and real-world permanent impotence was still the key to shrangi-la and believed some sort of perfect piece of digito-holographic porn was circulating somewhere in the form of a bootleg Write-Protect-notched software diskette and devoted their cultic lives to snuffling around trying to get hold of the virtual kamasupra diskette and getting together in dim Wilmington-area venues and talking very obliquely about rumors of where and just what the software was and how their snufflings of it were going, and watching Virtual fuckfilms and mopping the corner of their eyes, etc. Or of something called Stelliform Cultism that Brucc Green isn’t even near ready to hear about, Lenz opines. Or like e.g. of a suicidal Nuck cult of Nucks that worshipped a form of Russian Roulette that involved jumping in front of trains and seeing which Nuck could come the closest to the train’s front without getting demapped.”

Perhaps because Lenz is a drug dealer and drug user, his sentences run on with little seeming control as he reports what appear to be paranoid rumors and tall tales–that are actually somewhat garbled elements of the novel in which he speaks. After letting Lenz go on at shaggy length, committing fragments and solecisms along the way, Wallace comments on Lenz’s bullshitting voice:

“What sounds like Lenz chewing gum is really Lenz trying to talk and grind his teeth together at the same time. “

The comment undercuts Lenz, but his grinding teeth may represent the ambivalence of all novelistic Bullshitters who want to talk—to communicate—but abandon conventional literary language to sound like they are chewing gum, to sound more like the people they write about. You might think of the Bullshitters’ rhetoric as a modified call and response technique, “calling” to readers with oral vividness, hoping to elicit a more visceral “response” than the conventional literary expression of realism or the language games of the Artistes might produce.

These three novels are about monsters—a sexual predator Uncle Sam, the several monsters of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the physically and psychologically misshapen people in Infinite Jest. The works themselves are imitative forms, over-sized monstrosities like doctor Frankenstein’s deformed creation, patched and stitched together from the voices of high and low culture, past and future. Bullshitting fiction can seem excessive, but I’d argue that what appears to be extra is necessary to convey a sense of representational plenitude or what students of epics call “copiousness.” Another rationale for lengthy Bullshitting is Bertholt Brecht’s theory of “alienation effects.” By giving readers more than they thought they wanted, Bullshitters make it difficult for readers to identify too closely with characters or plots. Readers are thus encouraged to think about the social, economic, and political contexts from which the characters and stories emerge. Bullshitting authors might also say that their Bullshitting self-awareness or self-mockery is an act of humility, a confession that, for all the authors’ desire for an enlarged and robust “radical realism” of human voices, the books are fictions. In this, the Bullshitters would agree with the Artistes, who use more refined or high-toned literary devices to “baffle brains”–to deconstruct the fake transparency of realistic fiction.

Wallace extends the Bullshitters’ self-awareness a step further in his equally oral-influenced Interviews with Hideous Men where he warns against the kind of aural exploitation that Coover presented, a “sham-honesty that’s designed to get you to like…another manipulative pseudopomo Bullshit Artist.” I think the Bullshitters are not “pseudopomo” but the most important postmodern experimentalists, for it’s they who, in their seemingly unsystematic ways, bring into their novels dense, often original information about historical, scientific, economic, and political systems—the reason I’ve elsewhere called some of them “systems novelists.” Like Gravity’s Rainbow, the books I’ve discussed have a global perspective on politics and the influences of technology. The Bullshitters are not writing what DeLillo scorned as “around the house and in the garden” fiction. Although playful, Bullshitters are fundamentally earnest. I think of them as old epic poets, writers who sum up their culture in voices. Re-read The Iliad and The Odyssey some day and note how much of the texts is recording of speech and story-telling. And I think of the Bullshitters as new sophisticated naturalists who use the more natural—oral–way of telling stories to address large cultural issues as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and John Steinbeck did many decades ago.

Gaining a critical reputation by Bullshitting at great length seems to be mostly a white man’s game and could be called mansplaining. I once asked Alice Walker why more women didn’t write like Pynchon. She replied, “Why would they want to?” Morrison, for example, is much influenced by oral modes, but I don’t think of her as a Bullshitter. One woman who has taken the Bullshitter aesthetic—or anti-aesthetic—further than any of the men is the African-American Gayl Jones in her 1999 novel Mosquito. It’s a 600-page book that I admit sometimes exceeds—in the banality of its diction and repetitiveness–even my enthusiasm for Bullshitting. Henry Louis Gates reviewed Mosquito and found it “sprawling and formless,” even “maddening.” He said Mosquito sounds as though Jones, who published a critical book entitled Liberating Voices, “wanted to deliver a dissertation about orality in literature by transcribing hours of tapes from a loquacious storyteller.” Here is a simple of what we hear from Jones’s confabulating, jonesing narrator: “I be wondering if it be possible to tell a true jazz story, where the peoples that listens can just enter the story and start telling it and adding things wherever they wants. The story would provide the jazz foundation, the subject, but they be improvising around that subject or them subjects and be composing they own jazz story.”

The foundational story in Mosquito is about the confused life of Nadine Johnson, a lightly educated truck driver, part-time resident of a Southwest border cantina, and possible participant in a plot to bring Latin American immigrants into the United States. In addition, Nadine is a would-be writer and a friend of a writer Jones invented in another novel. Nadine includes in her rambling narration a play written by Jones’s mother, the most obvious evidence that the novel’s Bullshitting is sometimes authorial indulgence rather than a method to defamiliarize disparate cultural materials. But Mosquito does bring, intentionally I think, the materials of the traditional British novel—marriage and money—to the largely male tradition (discounting Stein) of Bullshitting. In its triviality, humor, and exact attention to dialect voices, Mosquito may even be closer to non-literary bullshitting than the other novels. But it may well be a limit case of the Bullshitting method.

This essay is in praise of Bullshitting, but it’s also a lament because Bullshitting seems to have mostly disappeared from more recent American fiction or, maybe more precisely, from large culture-grasping novels like the four I’ve discussed. To show what has been lost, I want to contrast four 21st-century Big Books—Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel, Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers, and Richard Powers’ The Overstory—with my four epic Bullshitting novels. I have great respect for these recent novels—their range and social engagement and formal ingenuity—and yet I miss in them the vividness of voice that gives uncommon vitality to the work of Bullshitters. I won’t discuss the newer books in as much detail as I’ve given the Bullshitting novels, but I’ve reviewed all of the more recent novels and you can find my remarks by Googling the titles and my name.

Bullshitting books are written to a significant extent for the ear. What I’ll call Visualizing novels are written primarily for the eye. House of Leaves and I Hotel are extreme examples because of their experiments with footnotes, facsimiles, typography, different page designs, and photographs. Characters do speak, and Yamashita captures various dialects in multi-cultural San Francisco, but the texts are essentially giant repositories of information that seem influenced by the texts and visuals of the Internet. Cohen’s Book of Numbers takes as its subjects the invention of an Internet search engine and its effects. Like Danielewski and Yamashita, Cohen includes multiple narrations, but the most distinctive stylistic feature of Book of Numbers is technical jargon that no bullshitter would utter aloud outside Silicon Valley. Cohen’s novel is a book of some number and many words but few voices. In The Overstory Powers has nine points of view but uses limited omniscience in each. His characters, including a virtual reality inventor, have distinctive consciousnesses, but their voices are heard only in dialogue. And unlike Bullshitting novels, The Overstory is rigorously plotted, linked, and controlled, overseen by the author to make a unified argument against deforestation. Each of these four long novels will probably feel excessive to readers of the traditional 250-page realistic work, but the excess is of textual information—of documents–rather than oral performance. As I’ve stated and implied, the recent novels are like computers, information storage machines of great complexity and subtlety but without an earphone jack.

Obviously, all eight novels are written; none has, like Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, a tape of music and voices included with the text. I think all of the authors are aware of the parlous state of reading and go to great lengths to “save” the novel as an influential form. In a way, the salvational strategies of both Visualizers and Bullshitters are retrograde. The Visualizers are not retrograde like, for example, Jonathan Franzen and his comfort-food fiction, but they do essentially accept Stendhal’s ocular metaphor of the realistic novel as a mirror going down the roadway, even if that roadway is the long and wide information highway. The Visualizers enlarge the mirror, sometimes make it into one of those triple mirrors still found in some clothing stores. The Bullshitters are even more retrograde, recalling epic oral performance when the maker and the audience occupied the same intimate space. Bullshitting attempts to save the novel by adding sound to a book’s visuals. Maybe the Visualizing novels are like nineteenth-century landscape paintings, and the Bullshitting novels like plays or movies. I suppose I should say one style is not superior to the other, but what is lost as high-ambition Bullshitting disappears is not just representational exactitude of characters’ speech but the egalitarianism of what Wallace called “radical realism.” The Bullshitting novel seems to me a democratic form, honoring one Greek root of that word: demos, the people, those who spoke in the ancient agora. Perhaps even more importantly, the ascendance of Visualizing sacrifices a certain kind of pleasure–word to word, sentence to sentence pleasure in the sound of full-voiced prose, its music. In an age when it’s a cliché to say that few have the time or concentration for long novels, perhaps Bullshitters of the future could save the extended form with aural pleasures. The novels of Visualizers require attention to their length, their global scale, to demonstrate their value. The Bullshitters give value locally–page to page—and globally. They honor an ancient definition of art, Horace’s delight and instruct; Bullshitting novels entertain while instructively critiquing entertainment. They combine the sounds of low and high, exemplified by the limericks and quotations from Rilke in Gravity’s Rainbow. Literal bullshitters seem to be effortless. Literary Bullshitting takes a lot of work to get the sounds right, maybe another reason why this art wanes.

No novelist insisted more on writing for the ear than William Gass. An eminent Artiste in his high-modern models and formal elegance, Gass was far from being a Bullshitter. But his final novel—Middle C, published in 2013—is an excellent example of both aural and visual orientation, an example that makes the reader think about the differences between them. Narrated by a failed musician and mostly incompetent music professor, the novel has the full catalogue of sound devices consistently displayed in Gass’s earlier fictions and criticism. But in its later stages, Middle C becomes, like the fiction of the Visualizers, an archive of information as the professor puts together an “Inhumanity Museum,” a record of barbarous acts that are articulated in more transparent and functional diction than the rest of his story. The personal resentments that generate the stylistic vitality of the professor’s early narration give way to historical catastrophes that cannot be aestheticized by poetic means. The massive information of the Museum does not cancel the professor’s voice, for it is, after all, the voice that reports the Museum, but what we have—in a way—is an internal conflict between voiced text and written text, between the musical reference of “middle C” and other meanings of the phrase, including middle class, that gather around the musical reference. For those readers who find the Bullshitters too aural and improvisational, and for those who find the Visualizers too influenced by the hyperlinked data dump, Gass’s novel is a work that has both orientations–and is thoughtfully about both. For such a work, this coiner of terms has no name except Middle C.

Playground

Norton, 2024

[Open Letters Review]

I’ve read all of Richard Powers’ fourteen novels and have reviewed many of them since his second, Prisoner’s Dilemma in 1988. I mention these facts to support my contention that Powers is now—with Morrison gone, Pynchon gone soft, and DeLillo silent—the greatest practicing American novelist. If his new novel, Playground, is not one of his very best, it’s a pleasurable and prescient assemblage of his Greatest Hits—scientific themes, prodigy characters, global dangers, linguistic ingenuity, literary gamesmanship.

Playing literary games is not usually the first-mentioned characteristic of Powers’ fiction, but Prisoner’s Dilemma was rooted in 1950s game theory. One of the significant characters in Powers’ Pulitzer-winning The Overstory (which is one of his very best) is a computer game inventor. One of the four major characters in Playground, Todd Keane, is the billionaire creator of the Internet site that gives the novel its title. Only at the end of The Gold Bug Variations (another of Powers’ very best) do we discover who have been narrating the whole story. At the end of Playground, we find that all three seemingly separate strands of narration have been created by Keane’s DeepDive AI that uses his private anecdotes and public information to construct what he—or it--calls a “rich, robust, and convincing story” but one with a counter-factual happy ending. You may feel I’m inflicting a spoiler with this information, but I think of it as a helper because many of the early readers of Playground were confused, even at the end, by the novel’s narrative game.

Keane and his long-time, then estranged friend, Rafi Young played chess against each other as kids, then move up to the more complex Go as college students in the late 1980s at the University of Illinois where Keane studies programming and Young tries to be a poet. He says AI will never be able to write poems, but Powers suggests that AI may be able to write a novel. Or maybe Powers--in this novel where all living beings including fish play—is playing with or against his readers. Yes, Playground claims to have been composed by Artificial Intelligence, but we know—don’t we?--that it was written by the natural—but almost preternatural—intelligence of Richard Powers.

Powers’ knowledge of various sciences is usually the first-remarked quality of his fiction. The Gold Bug Variations had as its subject and its form recombinant DNA. The Overstory was about the complex collaborative systems of forests. The science in Playground is oceanography, and as in The Overstory Powers introduces a female character—a generation older than Keane, Young, and the Tahitian woman, Ina Aroita, whom both men love—to provide oceanographic information and dive experience. Powers puts into Evelyne Beaulieu’s mouth the wonders of the deep—and the threat of polluted oceans to life on dry land. Powers lives on a Tennessee mountain, but the detailed enthusiasms he gives to Beaulieu are a remarkable combination of research and invention. In this novel’s vision, land is like chess and the oceans are like a gigantic Go board of play beyond current human understanding, even that of AI.

Despite its high-flying games and deep-diving science, Playground is grounded in two somewhat traditional plots. At the university, the sculptor Ina falls in love with and lives with Rafi, which leads the two childhood friends to be estranged. Decades later, Ina and Rafi have adopted two children and are living on Makatea, a Polynesian island with 78 other inhabitants. Once ravished by phosphate mining, Makatea is now threatened by a certain tech billionaire’s desire to use the island as a jumping off point for the construction of floating cities. This late connection between the three former friends may have seemed “convincing” to Keane’s AI, but readers could find Powers’ resolution of the marriage plot and the environmental plot not as plausible as the AI might think. This would be unfortunate because the village life of the island is presented with authoritative anthropological expertise—and humor, not a hallmark of Powers’ fiction.

Powers knows Rafi’s literary language, employs Todd’s computing jargon, and describes the silent language of Ina’s sculptures. Then there are mixed dialects of the inhabitants of Makatea. In The Overstory, trees have a language, a way of communicating to each other. The same is true of many of the fish described in Playground. Influenced by Huizinga’s Homo Ludenz, a classic study of play in human culture, Powers suggests that everywhere life is playing what Wittgenstein called “language games.” Powers would have humans see and feel this connection with non-human communication systems, possibly a basis for humans’ new respect for and protection of the natural world. In The Overstory, Powers referred to James Lovelock’s Gaia that posited Earth as living. In Playground, the planet is speaking.

I have in another review of Powers called him a soteriological writer, one who would have his fiction save lives. Keane is dying, the heroic scientist of The Gold Bug Variations is dying, the protagonist of Gain, yet another of Powers greatest novels, is dying. Fiction can’t save them, but their deaths point to systemic causes. Forests and seas are dying. I think Powers believes that the right kind of stories—global in scale, personal in empathy--can retard the deaths of nature. Powers is no cheap catastrophist; the sciences he knows tell him how contingent humans have made all life. Perhaps he plays narrative and formal games to balance his earnest pessimism, or plays to draw readers into his diagnoses of contemporary ills. The conflict between Powers’ seriousness and his play is present throughout Playground in Rafi’s desire for moral justice and Todd’s passion for free invention. I won’t reveal how the conflict is resolved by the AI or the novelist.

Readers less familiar than I am with Powers’ novels may well be as ravished by the reach and astonishments of oceanic Playground as were many readers of the tree-loving The Overstory. But I found Playground more a combinatorial game—Greatest Hits--than a site of new, free, imaginative play. Is it fair to expect America’s greatest living novelist to, at the age of 67, create a fiction one would not recognize as a Powers production? Perhaps not. Playground is an impressive and warm-hearted book. Maybe only I want more or different play from Richard Powers.

The Overstory

Norton, 2018

[Full Stop]

The “overstory” of Richard Powers’s title is a term for the canopy of a forest, the foliage at the top of the trees. Powers has sometimes been criticized for being a “top-down” novelist, one who presents characters from the high or long perspective of history, science, or music. These critics carp that his often highly intelligent characters are not human, don’t live and breathe and feel for each other. In The Overstory, Powers twits those critics by presenting — with his usual scientific brio — trees that live, breathe, and signal to each other, exist in a “social” relation with other trees and the biosphere that depends on them. Trees were exhibiting qualities of animal life long before the human story began and will be here long after the human story is over, the latter hastened by our suicidal deforesting of the planet. Powers knows, and a psychologist in the book says, that humans need “good stories” to be persuaded by scientists’ alarms, so Powers creates a band of varied and lively characters with back stories and understories to make his novel a “bottom-up,” as well as a top-down, fiction, one that equals his best work.

Partial disclosure: you will find, perhaps on the back cover of The Overstory, a quote by me (from my review of his last novel, Orfeo) asserting that Powers is one of America’s greatest living novelists. Further disclosure: I have conversed with Powers several times when he visited the university where I used to teach, and I have occasionally corresponded with him about his books. More disclosure: I have read all eleven of his previous novels, but I review only those that I think are his most interesting and instructive. Penultimate disclosure: since reading in 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow, the deepest drilling environmental fiction of the last 50 years, I value most those novels that tell overstories, what I call “systems novels,” books such as Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations, Gain, and The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award in 2006. If you share my values, I think you will find The Overstory a profound and important book, one that does for the life that hovers over us what Pynchon did for the fossils beneath us. Even if you don’t now share my aesthetic priorities, you may after reading The Overstory.

As usual, Powers chooses limited omniscience, expanded at times into full omniscience about the futures of his characters. On several occasions in The Overstory, Powers — not one of his characters — directly remarks about art. In the following passage, he seems to address those critics I mentioned by defending the kind of fiction in which the passage is found:

Every one [of the novels his character is hearing read to him] imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive — character — is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court . . . life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

Mobilizing fiction on a “larger scale” requires one of Powers’s favorite words, in this novel as well as in the rest of his work: ingenuity. A former computer programmer and musician and student of genetics, Powers knows the importance of form in the communication of information. Probably his most formally ingenious novel is The Gold Bug Variations, with its double structure from four-part genetics and Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

In the first short section of The Overstory, a character looks up into a tree described as “fractal.” As James Gleick pointed out decades ago in Chaos, tree branches create a non-linear pattern of fractal self-similarity, both to the tree as a whole and to other branches. The Overstory has a fractal design. The names of the novel’s four parts — “Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds” — indicate the book’s basic structure and growth. Powers’ fractal ingenuity manifests itself in the similarities, bifurcations, branchings, connections, and further branchings among the nine major characters introduced in the independent, named sections of the 152-page “Roots.”

Though the settings from which the characters come are specific and identifiable, Powers supplies few temporal markers, perhaps appropriate for “understories,” a word he uses throughout. Most characters seem to have been born in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The exception is Patricia Westerford, a botanist, author of The Secret Forest, opponent of clear cutting, and Powers’s spokesperson, who is about twenty years older than the others. She has the initials of Peter Wohlleben, who published a popular book entitled The Hidden Life of Trees. If you would like to dig into other roots of The Overstory, there are Donald Peattie’s Natural History of North American Trees, to which Powers refers in the novel; James Lovelock’s Gaia, which furnishes an epigraph; and Thoreau, who supplies several quotes. For those interested in the history of American deforestation, see Annie Proulx’s 2016 novel Barkskins. And for a powerful visual of clear cutting, there is the paperback cover of Pynchon’s Vineland, a novel, like The Overstory, that refers to fractal patterns and is partially set in redwood country.

Some trees grow very slowly. Readers will need to be patient as Powers introduces his people who are similar in their experience of trauma and in their association with trees. Nicholas Hoel grew up on an Iowa farm with one of a few surviving chestnut trees; as an adult he finds his whole family asphyxiated by a faulty gas heater. Mimi Ma’s Chinese father planted a mulberry in the family’s yard in Illinois and years later killed himself underneath it. The novel’s psychologist, Adam Appich, identifies with a maple after his sister disappears on a Florida vacation. Vietnam vet Douglas Pavlicek is saved by a banyan after parachuting into the jungle. Neelay Mehta, son of Indian immigrants in Silicon Valley, falls out of an oak, cripples himself, and becomes a whiz inventor of computer games. Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly, a married couple, come to appreciate their backyard trees after Ray suffers a debilitating stroke. College student Olivia Vandergriff begins to care for trees only after she almost dies from an accidental electrocution.

Given the commonalities in “Roots,” readers may feel Powers is more an overlord manipulating his characters than a teller of understories. But in “Trunk” we soon see how the characters’ similar backgrounds bring them together. Olivia and Nicholas meet cute over “Free Tree Art,” move together to the West Coast in search of some post-traumatic purpose, join a nature “Defense Force” (that resembles Earth First!), and spend a year sitting on a platform in a giant redwood. Mimi and Douglas meet after a small park in their city is destroyed and join the same defense group in Oregon, where Adam Appich shows up to interview activists for his Ph.D. dissertation on group psychology. After the leader of the group is killed, Douglas is abused by the police in a demonstration, and Mimi is wounded in another demonstration, the two couples and Adam form a Monkey Wrench gang of arsonists. When the action they say will be their last — burning a resort in progress in Idaho — goes awry, one of the gang dies at the scene and the survivors disperse, ending “Trunk.”

Powers is insightful about the motives of his eco-terrorists, their appreciation of natural life after personal traumas, their hatred of industry and police, their idealistic desire to save other humans from their suicidal destruction of forests. Powers spends many pages describing the lives of Olivia and Nicholas 200 feet over the ground in their redwood. Powers’s presentation of this literal overstory — the weather that moves through it, the life forms that exist in it, the close seeing and clear thinking that can occur when one is unplugged in it — is the scientific and emotional center of his book and a mini Walden, for Powers’s language, like Thoreau’s, is equal to what Thoreau called the “extravagant” nature he witnessed by separating himself from humans. Olivia and Nicholas and readers learn to love the tree and its connections to the forest around; when the tree is cut down, the characters’ love turns to rage against the machine of development.

These five activists never meet Patricia Westerford, but several do read her Secret Forest from which Powers periodically inserts the science that underlies The Overstory. As a graduate student, Westerford discovered that trees in forests communicate in subtle ways with each other, warning of dangers, activating defenses, even attacking threats. But she was mocked by other botanists who defended clear cutting and organized replanting of trees — which destroyed the complex ecology of true forests, turning them into monoculture tree farms. When others’ research proves Westerford right, she becomes a well-known authority. Her lecture to environmentalists near the end of the novel is a remarkable tour de force. Like the intricate genetics in The Gold Bug Variations, Westerford’s descriptions of exceedingly complex feedback loops and strange, mysterious tree forms are necessary to substantiate Powers’s stories. The difference is that Westerford’s trees can be seen: just do a Google images search and view the trees for yourself. One of Powers’s familiar prodigies of learning, Westerford is also the conduit though which the author pipes in world-wide myths about forests and trees, such as Yggdrasil and other Trees of Life.

The other important character who does not meet the activists is Neelay Mehta, the game programmer. If Westerford is Powers’s earth-hugging authority on the past lives of trees, Neelay is the high-flying collector of future arboreal information whose last name suggests a “meta” dimension. He turns from producing successful competitive computer games to creating virtual experiences dense with nature, employing hundreds of programmers to make his simulations as robust and rich as possible. At the end of Powers’ novel Gain, a woman dies of cancer probably produced by environmental toxins, but Powers offers a shard of hope by making one of her children a cancer researcher. At the end of The Overstory, Powers moves beyond Neelay’s initial earth-from-above simulations to posit what Powers calls “the learners,” who are like angels of Big Data moving through the air over us, their algorithms assembling and organizing such comprehensive and persuasive information about trees and the rest of nature that humans of the future will no longer need stories to save themselves from suicide.

One present function of the “learners” (which Powers doesn’t mention) is identifying from satellites illegal logging operations and sales.

“Crown” and “Seeds” quick cut among the characters’ lives twenty years and more after the arson in 1979. The activists have gone underground, changed names and occupations. Betrayal, guilt, imprisonment, hopelessness, and a possible pedagogical suicide make for a pessimistic crown. Nicholas creates art out of fallen branches that only the “learners” will see. Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Czaly let their backyard revert to woods, but this non-cultivation of their garden, like Nicholas’s art, is an isolated seed. Presumably writing most of this novel before the election of Donald Trump — and the appointment of Zinke at Interior, Pruitt at the E.P.A., and Perry at Energy — Powers seems to have foreseen the current accelerated assault on nature: “Everything’s dying a gold-plated death.” Westerford has written The New Metamorphosis and created a seed bank of endangered species, but only the “learners” offer hope for a transformed future in the real world.

Powers has plucked from present streams of data sufficient information to demonstrate the complex lives of trees and the necessity of preserving those lives. He has worked his learning into and through many affecting stories in The Overstory, but he chose to invent environmental activists who failed, who killed one of their own almost forty years ago. If the “learners” don’t deliver their saving overstory soon, we are going to need “imaginers” more radical — a word with its origin in “roots” — than the characters in The Overstory.

Despite the disappointing election results for Jill Stein and the Green Party in 2016, eco-activism — or even eco-terrorism — may not be as futile as the recent history in Powers’s novel seems to imply. Westerford shows that forests migrate as a response to threatening conditions. Ray Brinkman gets interested in trees by playing one that moves in Macbeth. Imagine a hundred thousand humans dressed as trees and migrated to Washington. This would be an event the “learners” and maybe politicians would register. How about a “War on Christmas (Trees)”? Fleet-footed activists come out at night and spray the trees for sale on city streets with orange paint, recalling Agent Orange and disrupting wasteful tree farms. The Kochs’ estates have trees. Could they be girdled by laser-equipped drones? Eco-suicide is also mass murder. Ray Brinkman — a man on the brink — is a lawyer who argues that if the planet is our home, humans have the right to defend it. Florida has a “hold your ground” law. Imagine protesters breaching the fences at Mar-a-Lago and taking back our home. Twenty years ago, I published a novel (Passing Off) in which an eco-terrorist intends to bring down the Parthenon, which she considers a symbol of building mania in a city surrounded by deforested mountains. A scholar has recently claimed that a scene on the Parthenon frieze approvingly depicts human sacrifice. I have begun to wonder if only the sacrifice of human lives can slow down, if not prevent, environmental catastrophe in the future.

Final disclosure: like Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop, I have a family history of cutting forests. My grandfather ran a sawmill in the Green Mountain state. An uncle cut trees. As a teenager, I peeled pulp and stacked lumber. But I don’t think my guilt affects my judgment of the importance of The Overstory. Read the e-book version of this 500-page novel, save a tree, spread Powers’s words, become a seed of information, contribute to the “learners’” global truth, and think about performing some arboreal action for the sake of your grandchildren.

The story within this autofiction/autofaction goes like this: DeWitt met Gridneff more than 20 years ago, gave him her email, received from him an email in a style that reminded her of Hunter Thompson, didn’t reply for two years, then began corresponding with Gridneff, and suggested they collaborate on a book. What they initially had in mind isn’t said, but Your Name Here is now described as a novel, one that “documents” (suspicion, not scare, quotes) in its outer frame the difficulties DeWitt has dealing with Gridneff, constructing the book (this novel), and, implicitly, finding someone to publish a two-headed and many-handed monstrosity of apparent “authenticity,” a word speckling the text.

I have played a similar authorial authenticity game myself, as you know if you read the previous post. Passing Again purports to be the work of and to be about LeClair and a sometimes conflicting other writer. The novel appears to reveal embarrassing facts about LeClair’s personal life and includes, like Your Name Here, photographs and fictions within its framing fiction as an “archive.” Passing Again, though, has at least occasionally a linear plot. I was a mere playful “connoisseur of chaos,” to quote Stevens. A student of statistics, as well as self-confessed neurotic and suicide survivor, DeWitt is a full-bore (pun intended) and obsessed practitioner of chaos. Your Name Here is like the Lorenz “strange attractor” pictured below as the book shuttles back and forth between “DeWitt” and “Gridneff,” both now in those suspicion quotes, both supplying unpredictable throughlines and a plethora of random points:

Maybe because I used to offer friends name placement in my novels (minor characters only) for a modest fee, and probably because I played a version of DeWitt’s self-referring game, I did read all of Your Name Here but don’t know a single person who would finish this monstrosity of hybrid experimentalism gone, like Dr. Frankenstein’s, badly awry. But maybe some subscriber to Monsterpieces will consider taking up the challenge, so I’ll offer a few reasons to enter the ring (or the rings pictured above). For background on DeWitt’s life-long problems and esoteric interests, the challenger may want to prepare by reading a recent New York Times interview with her in which even she admits Your Name Here may be a “complete mess”:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/books/helen-dewitt-your-name-here.html

To begin, Your Name Here has an unusual and witty but also misleading cover:

Of the books mentioned, Your Name Here is somewhat similar only to the circus of excesses in Gravity’s Rainbow and to the meditation on authorial isolation in Mao II, which also has photographs. As a would-be monsterpiece, Your Name Here most resembles William Gaddis’s J R, its relentless satire of consumerism (especially the artistic variety) and its abdication of literary elegance to represent “real”--oral, careless, and fragmented--utterance. The difference from J R? Its chaotic ugliness is consistently about much more than itself. In DeWitt’s autofiction/metafiction there’s little room for the outside world.

Perhaps a third of DeWitt’s novel is in the form of emails. The first ones by G, whom I have now reduced to one letter, are hypermanic, stimulant assisted, and scabrous accounts of his tabloid scams and sketchy adventures in Muslim countries. They attract the more refined and somewhat reclusive DeWitt who wants more of them for the book, but this reader, who has heard obscenity-laced shtick something like G’s on the street, wanted less--even if DeWitt is showing off her ventriloquizing chops by writing in the voice of a toxic male who imbibes toxins every day.

DeWitt ’s email responses to G are often cajoling and frequently complaining about the problems she has speaking on the phone, dealing with her possible agent, searching for publishers, and making enough money to survive. This stuff I have not heard on the street but in any café that allows laptops. Much more interesting than DeWitt’s “facts” is her offloading some of her unfortunate experiences and complaints to the work of her alter ego, Rachel Zozanian’s novel Lotteryland, mentioned on the cover. G initially addresses DeWitt by her name, but as the book proceeds the boundaries between Helen and Rachel become porous. The name is there but is no assurance of identity.

The Lotteryland excerpts--with thankfully more continuity than the emails—in Your Name Here have an even wider, if futuristic, satiric purview than the lit biz exchanges. Characters have in their homes lottomonitors on which they can any minute of the day check their luck, the basis of the society described in Lotteryland. Rachel’s best luck comes from a much-traveled john overpaying her with many different currencies that he doesn’t understand. One can see Lotteryland as a projection of DeWitt’s belief that literary success is a matter of prostitution or good luck, which is in little supply in the 2005 when most of the email exchanges occur.

Think of Lotteryland and the emails between DeWitt and G, then Rachel and G, as the mobius-like lines in the chaos illustration above. What will, I predict, defeat most readers are all those dots of randomness within the lines. Some dots may remind readers of features in Danielewski’s House of Leaves: various fonts, blank pages, codes at the tops of some sections, unexplained mathematical sequences, possibly auto-interpretive texts drawn from a gaming manual. In addition, always in addition for DeWitt, she has photographs of uncertain relevance, movie references, pages of Arabic script with translations, novel references, long passages from Thomas Bernhard (one about the “monstrosity” of contemporary culture), lots of German, items from Wikipedia, the periodic reference to a book titled Your Name Here that a reader wants to trade for something by Anne Tyler. On page 10, G’s talk is briefly described: “London, drink, drugs, everything to excess.” Maybe Gridneff, not DeWitt, is the maximal muse of Your Name Here. Decades ago in The Art of Excess I met my match in Barth’s LETTERS, its excessive overdetermination. Your Name Here is excessively underdetermined.

DeWitt describes the voice of G’s early emails as writing where “even ordinary words went on a rampage,” like escapees from a pet shop, zoo, and circus:

“Then there are the beasts with their party tricks, the unicycling elephants, the parasol-twirling bears, the tigers that leap through rings of fire, there are the monsters, the machines, the succubi, the griffins and basilisks and chimeras and talking toasters, the ventriloquist’s puppets, the chess-playing waffle irons, the vacuum cleaners that tell fortunes and remember birthdays….”

Like this passage, Your Name Here is more a series than a sequence, one damned thing after another. But too few of the components have the imaginative variety and linguistic vigor displayed here. Persistent, often repetitive email banalities and too many of those chaotic dots distract even a veteran monsterpiece loyalist from the two main characters (even if minimally drawn) and from the literary satire (even if it’s maximally overdrawn). In a footnote unattached to the text is the statement: “But the footnote is then a monstrosity.” In Your Name Here, formal and stylistic and typographic monstrosity exceeds its possible function as social and artistic commentary, even as an affecting autofiction, even as an installation of early century discourse. The excess might be read as parody, but I don’t think DeWitt was writing 600 pages to make fun of autofiction. To return to the pet shop metaphor: too many escaped animals. Too little about about the owners and customers of the pet shop. And what happened to the animals who got free?

At least one of the early reviews of Your Name Here called it “original.” I think the novel is unfortunately belated. DeWitt is not standing on the shoulders of earlier autofictionists but stepping upon their heels as she tries to catch up. This book, it seems to claim, was too crazy to be published 20 years ago. That’s not the case. In its current form, Your Name Here would have had too many longueurs back then, and they are more visible now when DeWitt’s novel is compared with other monsterpieces. In her interview, DeWitt says she has several other works in manuscript. Although I doubt Your Name Here will find her many 600-page readers, I still hope the book’s militant monstrosity will bring DeWitt enough attention—a currency in lotteryland--so that she will get lucky and sneak some of her more current and maybe slightly less monstrous work into print.

That faint sound? It’s this wrestler’s tapping on the canvas.

But then I realized the match was best two out of three falls, so I re-read parts of Your Name Here, my underlined passages, the direct emails between DeWitt and G. I ignored all the static, the chaotic dots, the fun filler. I was searching for the root or essence of the book, maybe a submerged plot. It’s the bad date in digital-land becoming the bad marriage plot. To see it requires a bit of abstraction, so both characters are now only single letters. D is an intellectual writer uncomfortable with uncontrollable personal contact, but she would like to be more worldly after 9/11. She falls for G’s writing, its worldliness, its sexuality and its contact with Muslims and Arabic. She’s somewhat disappointed in him when they meet, but she still loves G’s writings. She suggests the long-term relationship, the book, the marriage of mind and body, order and disorder. Any feminist could have told D it was an old, bad idea. Almost immediately, G disappoints D, is slow to supply more emails, gives his attention to other projects, hooks up with other women, asks her for money, worries about his portrayal, suggests that he control the marriage/book.

Journalist G has most of the final words in Your Name Here, but novelist D has the final edit. She chooses the book’s chaotic imitative form to reflect G’s chaotic life, his prose style, and his effect on her life. She incorporates (this DeWitt admits) her unpublished manuscript “Lotteryland” (about a woman novelist used by men) into You Are Here. D adds her literary insider knowledge of other toxic males, a hypocritical editor named Simon, a greedy talentless screenwriter named Noszaly. D knows she is complicit in the marriage plot failure, but she’s willing to construct an eminently failable book to demonstrate…what? That men are shits. That shits control much of the media, but that women still have the power of language to mock them. Not just language. Also imagery. Almost all of the photographs of people in You Are Here are small unflattering shots of men, including the last one of Tom Cruise, Scientologist. Of course, such a book will take years to be published, the delay becoming part of its point.

DeWitt mentions Kathy Acker. There’s something of her abjection in You Are Here, but DeWitt is wittier and more attuned to how humans connect and disconnect in digital-land. Maybe a non-male reader would have recognized earlier DeWitt’s marriage plot, but this male reader still thinks the monstrosity of You Are Here exceeds its presumed feminist function and risks alienating even those readers likely to be sympathetic. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has done well at half the length of DeWitt’s contemporary media-gothic. She also mentions David Foster Wallace. Maybe DeWitt was going for the monstrous style and length of Infinite Jest. I guess I can imagine You Are Here achieving cult status--small cult status. Men could join as reparation for lionizing Wallace.

I’d be satisfied with a draw on this second grapple with You Are Here.

[I was planning to sneak in this piece on Passing Again, the fifth and final novel of my Passing series, sometime later when I had gained your confidence. But with no new long novelists on the immediate horizon after Elkins, Pynchon, and Danielewski, I’m posting this essay now. Passing Again is only a minor monstrosity, but this autoreview does try to make a case for the Passing series as a thousand-page novel with a monstrous ending.]

Tom LeClair

Passing Again

I-Beam Press, 2022

I’d never written a word of fiction, at least not intentionally, until 1990 when, at the age of 56, I took a year of unpaid leave from my university, moved to Athens, and began a novel about a deceptive American pro basketball player, Michael Keever, who falsely claims to have a Greek grandfather so Keever can play for an Athens team in the Greek league. After numerous rejections and revisions and rejections of the revisions, Passing Off was published in 1996 by a press run by a couple of basketball fans who had no idea of what tricks I was up to even after I told them that, to keep piling up meanings of the title, I wanted to publish the novel with the protagonist-narrator’s name on the title page. They refused the hoax but let me create a fake title page after the real title page.

I felt lucky to finally be a published novelist, but I did not imagine—could not have imagined—that I would write another novel about Keever and then another and a fourth and then would surpass Updike’s four Rabbits with a fifth Keever fiction, Passing Again, published in 2022. It was with that final book that I began to think seriously of Passing Off, Passing On, Passing Through, Passing Away, and Passing Again as one long novel, partly because in Passing Again Keever, now in middle age and in the company of the character Tom LeClair, returns to Athens to settle a grudge against the man who questioned Keever’s veracity when the man translated Passing Off into Greek.

In Athens, the translator tells the two Americans that an eco-terrorist group has been influenced by the ecological arguments in Passing Off and threatens an attack on the Parthenon like the one Keever said he foiled in that first “autobiography.” Except that his wife—not Keever—ghostwrote Passing Off and made up both its terrorist plot and her husband’s heroism. So the group in Passing Again plans an action based on a fiction within a fiction, a danger that occurs over and over in the Passing novels—another reason for thinking of the books as one long novel.

I began writing Passing Again in Warsaw in 2020. I was again feeling lucky: I had survived a radical Whipple surgery in the U.S, survived Covid in an Athens quarantine hotel, and was living with a new partner, a Polish photographer. But in 2020 and 2021 Warsaw was often in lockdown. After decades playing basketball, I had been for some years regularly playing ping pong. I couldn’t in Warsaw. I wanted and needed to play, so I turned to my player Keever, turned my attention back to Greece, where he had been invented, and started assembling Passing Again, which has the epigraph “Me to play,” from Beckett’s Endgame. My play begins right away with the title page and first few pages. Like Passing Off and the other Keever novels, Passing Again has a fake title page, this time with the subtitle “An Archive” and with the names of both Keever and LeClair. The pages are photobook sized, and the text begins with Keever trying to understand on his blog 15 full-page photographs. As just suggested and explained further down, Passing Again was designed—in the terms here—to be a monstrosity like the movie Frankenstein, put together from spare parts lying around the room, around the author’s mind.

I was sending chapters to a literary friend who, without my knowledge, was sending them on to the publisher of I-BeaM, a small press. I had spent years trying to find a publisher for Passing Off. I-BeaM accepted Passing Again before it was finished! Unlike the publishers of Passing Off, the publisher at I-BeaM knew some of what I was up to because he read the previous novels and recognized their game-like qualities, Keever the putative author and unreliable narrator creating fictions within his supposed autobiographies. The publisher was willing to let me—even encouraged me—to play on beyond the unreliable narrator to the unreliable author, now a character, in a work that was, or pretended to be, a metafictional autofiction. Because I was using pieces of the earlier Passing novels in Passing Again, I had to re-read all four and saw thematic connections among them that Passing Again could make visible and thus make the five a long novel.

But my publishing luck ran out. Passing Again was not reviewed in Kirkus or Publishers Weekly, necessary to attract mainstream reviews. Nobody else was impressed with my sequence even if it was similar to Updike’s Rabbit novels and Ford’s Bascomb books. Eventually, the novel received one positive but error-strewn review by a sports lit expert who was dying of dementia, a sad case of unreliability on unreliability. That one review is another reason for posting this autoreview.

Since I’m disclosing here, I will also admit that laziness rather than grand ambition led me to write the second Keever novel, Passing On, and thus begin the series. After Passing Off and a novel about Kurdish refugees, I wanted to write about Terminal Tours, a company I imagined that takes terminally ill patients on their bucket-list trips. I needed a protagonist. I don’t remember how I landed on Keever, but he did have a lot of experience traveling with his various basketball teams in Europe and the USA and he was aged out as a player. I say “laziness” because by using Keever I wouldn’t have the work of creating a whole new character. And given Keever’s propensity for lying, I could count on him giving a fake happy ending to the final Terminal Tour. He did, but Keever’s proximity to the dying also gave me a way to put some existential weight on a player whose wife called him a “dumb board.”

After my next novel, The Liquidators, I came back to Keever. I was teaching a course in college novels and decided I wanted to write one, a humorous fiction like most of the books on my syllabus. Who better than that fake autobiographer Keever to teach creative-nonfiction and sportswriting at a diploma mill? Comedy and satire ensue, Keever gets into his usual financial trouble, and bails himself out by making a deal to travel to Algeria and smuggle out an endangered feminist. It’s a great ending, the professor becoming a real-world hero, but it’s probably invented by Keever, a fiction leaning very heavily on his wife’s fiction about his escape from Greece in Passing Off: Despite Keever’s predictable problems in academia, his character is developing—first existentially, now culturally and politically from his experiences in Algeria.

Keever might be growing, but I wasn’t because I was working in sub-genres: sports novel, road-trip novel, college novel. My next novel was Lincoln’s Billy, another sub-genre work, an historical novel about Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon. I was also interested at that time in two other historical figures—Calvin Coolidge, whose Vermont hometown was where Keever and I grew up, and Frederic Tudor, the 19^th century Ice King of Boston—but I didn’t see a way to write novels about them, so I wrote long stories, a new form for me. The first story in Passing Away is Keever’s narrative of revisiting the past of his Vermont childhood, which interests him in Coolidge and through Coolidge Tudor, about whom Keever writes “my” stories. Previous novels began with Keever’s different occupations: hoopster, guide, teacher. In Passing Away, he becomes a fiction writer. I thought Passing Away was surely the final Keever novel, for now he had grown historically and had become a writer of fictions. Character and author were merging. I borrowed the last word of Updike’s tetralogy to end mine: “Enough.”

“No game, no gain” were words I put into Keever’s mouth long ago. In the four books he narrated, I was playing games within sub-genres that I could exploit and then subvert with his unreliability. After all that constrained playing, in Warsaw I wanted my fictional play in Passing Again to be as irresponsible, as unconstrained, as Keever’s deceptions, his sometimes inventive plays against opponents on court, against other characters, and his readers. In a way, then, the unreliable Keever created me—liberated me--after what I thought had been the end of my creating him in Passing Away. My character freed me to write a novel similar to the genre-breaking long novels I loved, similar in form to monsterpieces but a junior 241-page version, a compact assemblage or bricolage of postmodern methods, a little cousin of monsterpiece novels such as Gravity’s Rainbow, J R, Infinite Jest, and House of Leaves.

Passing Again is radically hybrid in media and production, forms and styles. It contains designs and fifty photographs, and the printed text is continued in an online “supplement” that may include, like the end material in House of Leaves, keys to understanding what comes before. Like J R, my novel is dominated by dialogues, some of them bullshitting (like digressions in Infinite Jest). True to its title, Passing Again contains excerpts from earlier Passing novels and old essays by LeClair. What seems to be literary autofiction is often literarily true, what seems confessional is sometimes made up. The plot is unlikely and unresolved, like Wallace’s. The ecological focus is serious and bows to Pynchon. The printed novel ends with first chapters of future books by LeClair and Keever, books never written. In sum, Passing Again is a monstrosity constructed of pieces that don’t seem to fit together.

Decades ago in a book called The Art of Excess I praised long novels influenced by systems theory and information theory. What I wanted in Passing Again were different kinds and diverse sources of information for readers to sort, not exactly like the Internet but influenced by its heterogeneity, its monstrosity. Because monsterpieces had the room to create informational diversity and unpredictability, they often seemed excessive, over-loaded and difficult. I think Passing Again attains excess in compressed form. The novel is not so much a game, a closed system that observes rules, as the play of an open system, a non-linear system in which just about anything can happen and does, sometimes twice in this novel about character doubles and doubled experiences from the past.

If Passing Again has longueurs, they are, I believe, brief because of the quick shifts among the novel’s materials. The four monsterpieces I mentioned have chaotic surfaces but are orderly at deeper levels. Passing Again may look somewhat random, but basically it’s a buddy-book travel story with a beginning, middle, and possible ends. Though Passing Again doesn’t appear to be a serious environmental novel, it comes to be one, as its final actions and last photos illustrate. Because relying on fiction may have tragic consequences in Passing Again, the novel connects with but raises the ante on that theme in the earlier Passing books where Keever tells some lie or creates some deception and has to wiggle out of trouble caused by his fictionalizing. In the world of Passing Again, the Parthenon could really be destroyed because of reliance on a fiction, a made-up story for the Keevers to sell books.

Passing Again now seems to be a coda offering instruction on how to see the separate Passing works as a long novel. This instruction was for my former students and friends who for decades asked me why I didn’t write a long novel like the ones I praised. My standard answer was “I’m no genius,” not like the authors I’ve mentioned. While I didn’t intend Passing Again to be that coda, once I understood dangerous fictionalizing—as a theme in all five of the Passing novels and as a fact of this final novel’s reception—I thought I’d done what others (and I) wanted. The Passing novels may not be a monsterpiece, but at least they comprise a long novel.

The constant theme of dangerous fictionalizing doesn’t just make the books, in my opinion, one long novel. In Passing Again, the theme migrates out to the author and raises questions about the possible effects of fictionalizing on the fictionalizer. What were the dangers for the author of writing fiction so long about one deceptive character? How might the creations have imperiled the creator? In James Elkins’ A Short Introduction to Anneliese, the title character says that long novels make their authors insane because they lose touch with the world outside their project. The Passing novels were not a “project” but a series of books about different, sometimes quite worldly matters—and the books did not drive me crazy (maybe because I always alternated them with non-Keever novels). But the first four novels did make me, I realized when writing Passing Again, repressed and self-limiting as a novelist. I was stuck putting Keever through the paces of four sub-genres. I’d gotten a late start writing fiction and often had difficulties finding publishers for my novels. I didn’t want to take any chances beyond Keever’s consistent narrative unreliability. I was playing it safe.

The novels written during and about Covid that I’ve read since publishing Passing Again are usually about finding safety, withdrawing, buttoning down. Writing Passing Again during lockdowns, I was busting out of the genre-inhibited series I’d written. But in doing so, I was cementing the relationship that connects them into one long novel about something more than the same character--the dangers of fiction-making.

When Passing Again received only that one review, I came to understand the danger of breaking loose from praiseworthy game-playing. [As I write this, the highly ambitious A Short Introduction to Anneliese has, three months after publication, received one review—mine.] Though not itself long, Passing Again may have seemed to review editors guilty of the charge of self-indulgence often brought against long novels using monsterpiece methods. Can one plead “partly” guilty? Yes, the author was playing as freely as he could imagine, juggling the novel’s hybrid elements, but near the end of Passing Again LeClair’s creation criticizes the author’s obsession with fiction. Can a novel be both self-indulgent and a critique of self-indulgence? Now some years removed from the writing of Passing Again, I want to think it has that ambiguity, that doubleness, to go along with all the other doublings in the novel. When in Greece, Keever’s wife calls him “the lying cretin,” playing with the Lying Cretan paradox that both asserts and denies at the same time. Passing Again is a Lying Cretan kind of book.

But one last admission: I may be reading Passing Again backward from Keever’s new and recent appearances in my Substack memoir Passing Down. In the last of three appearances, “Passing Tests,” Keever, now a senior-citizen Uber driver, gives LeClair, who has been treated for cancer, a ride to an airport in California. They discuss the essays in the memoir that LeClair has sent Keever. He criticizes them as too literary, too much influenced by fictions, and thus evasive of the cancer diagnosis that inspired them. LeClair defends himself and, of course, has the last words in the completed memoir, but Passing Down remains haunted, even perhaps undermined as a memoir, by the fictional character’s critique of the real author’s fictionalizing. Even in Arcadia, the old saying goes, is death. Even in a highly factual memoir about death and dying, is the fictional voice. A figure representing freedom from rules in the past has grown, it would seem, to become the author’s superego, a strange transformation caused, perhaps, by a long life. No matter how or how much I might play with words in the future, I may never be free of Keever, his late-life distrust of fiction. We have a long strange relationship, Key and I, but perhaps rather than insane, as Elkins’ Annieliese would presume, the relation is healthy, the imagined monitoring imagination, the fictive questioning fictionalizing.

Tom’s Crossing

Pantheon, 2025

(Los Angeles Review of Books)

[LARB does not allow posting of its reviews on Substack, but they allow posting a few teaser paragraphs and a link to the full, long review:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/enuf-is-enuf/

As with my review of Shadow Ticket, I’m posting reviews of earlier long Danielewski novels for context should anyone be interested.]

In the beginning of Big Fiction, there were encyclopedic novels and mega novels and then maximal novels. With Mark Z. Danielewski’s 1232-page Tom’s Crossing, we have the supermax, a term most commonly describing huge prisons with no escape, no variety of existence, and few relations with the outside world. Prison critics call supermax facilities, with their frequent solitary confinement, excessively inhumane. Like the long novels of the 1970s and 1980s that I wrote about in my 1989 book The Art of Excess, Danielewski’s supermax is excessive but very different from those earlier works. The excesses of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), J R (1975), The Public Burning (1977), and the four others I discussed were generally caused by a hypertrophy of some innovative literary technique, such as Brechtian alienation effects in the epic theater of Gravity’s Rainbow. Rather than innovative, the excess of Tom’s Crossing is retrograde, a hypertrophy of specificity in traditional narrative and realist style.

Since I wrote The Art of Excess, I’ve been on the lookout for other Big Fictions. In 2010, I published an essay called “Prodigious Fiction” about novels by the next generation of maximalists: William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991), and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). All three novels were about prodigies, and all were prodigious in intellectual scale. One could see the cybernetic influence of Pynchon in each, but they weren’t excessive, not the way Tom’s Crossing is. Neither were Danielewski’s previous long works, House of Leaves (2000) and the five volumes of The Familiar (2015), which reveled in multiplicity—in plots, characters, forms, styles, visual layouts. Tom’s Crossing is much longer than any of the earlier novels I’ve mentioned but at the same time reductive in its over-elaborations of the conventional.

Unlike the world-building and information-gathering characteristic of two generations of maximalist novels, Tom’s Crossing is locale-remembering and story-telling. With its narrow setting, compressed chronological plot, and overload of minute detail, the novel is like a supermax prison where one must serve a long sentence with little variety and very limited contact with the world outside the walls of the story. In this era of reduced attention spans, when readers of literary fiction are tempted to stray to other forms of entertainment, Danielewski wagers on his ability to bring readers into and hold them within a work that will demand weeks, probably, of attention. In his 2017 book The Cruft of Fiction: Mega Novels and the Science of Paying Attention, David Letzler claims that mega novels’ meandering excess of detail—what he calls cruft, a programming term—is valuable because it trains the readers’ attention to separate the significant from the insignificant. This is not the case with Tom’s Crossing, for it appears to ask readers for the same word-to-word, page-to-page attention that they would give a late novel by Henry James. Otherwise, readers would risk missing, for example, the one sentence midway through that indirectly identifies the mysterious putative author and narrator of the book. The supermax imposes the law—of diminishing returns.

The Familiar

Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May

Pantheon, 2015

(New York Times Book Review)

Volume 2: Into the Forest

Pantheon, 2015

(American Book Review)

Turning thought into writing is an “alchemical wonder” says Mark Z. Danielewski, America’s foremost literary magus. He doesn’t just transform leaden narratives such as the haunted house tale in House of Leaves and the teen romance in Always Revolutions. He transmutates the pages of base books into rare new forms and formats. Alchemists of the past became cult figures by both keeping and revealing secrets. Danielewski actively uses social media to supplement his novels’ cryptic designs, and his website encourages followers to post recondite explications of his works. But MZD or Z, as he signs his books, is no mere masked Internet phenomenon. After one of his college readings, I witnessed cultists clutching ragged texts form a signing line worthy of the TSA.

I don’t know any secret handshakes, but I consider House of Leaves the most ingenious, profound, and important novel published by an American this century. Think of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” with a bottomless basement that must be explored again and again. Imagine a scholarly analysis of a movie about such a story, a polymathic text that haunts the hipster who finds it in a trunk. Consider that he is Nabokov unreliable and that his deranged mother may have inspired him to write the “found” text. Fill out with lists, footnotes, photo collages, poems, and typographical experiments not imagined by Sterne in Tristram Shandy. These funhouse games and Escher tricks all contribute to the novel’s fracking exploration of the etymology of profound--the deep, the uncanny abyss beneath the prisonhouse of language, film, and, possibly, life. House of Leaves is important because it demonstrates that the methods of concrete poetry and the techniques of Internet hypertext can alchemize line-bound, hidebound fiction and thereby attract a large cohort of passionate young readers who might otherwise be playing video games.

“Nothing Succeeds Like Excess” has been my motto since 1973 when I read Gravity’s Rainbow, a work alluded to in The Familiar. House of Leaves is 700 pages. The Familiar is about 880 (some pages are unnumbered), but it is only “Volume 1” of an announced 27-volume work! Volume 2 is scheduled for publication in November. Danielewski has said the project is a “remediation” of television series such as Twin Peaks and Breaking Bad, to which he refers in the novel. But with its prefatory trailers, rolling final credits, and multiple stories in widely separated locations--Singapore, Mexico, Texas, and Los Angeles—this volume of The Familiar more resembles Altman-inflected movies such as Crash and Babel. Or the time- and place-skipping novels of David Mitchell, except that all of Danielewski’s narratives occur on May 10, 2014, “One Rainy Day in May” as his subtitle has it. A reference to “the sublime music of time” may also suggest Danielewski aims to surpass the combined seventeen volumes of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

To support that kind of ambition, Danielewski will probably need more than his loyalists of the outré and experimental, so almost half of The Familiar solicits readers who like their fiction family-oriented, mostly realistic, and slightly sentimental. His lead is Xanther, a clumsy twelve-year-old epileptic who voices odd perceptions and asks precocious questions of her father, a computer-game designer, and mother, a would-be psychotherapist. On a day it’s raining cats and dogs in L.A., Xanther goes to pick up her new dog but on the way uses something like extrasensory perception to rescue a kitten. Although some sentences about Xanther have Jamesian qualifications and Faulknerian parentheticals, the long and detailed story of her day could be a novel for young adults who, not far removed from children’s books, would appreciate visual sketches of rain and words sprinkled on pages.

Danielewski’s attention to Xanther and her parents reminds us that “family” is associated with the adjective “familiar.” But as a noun, “familiar” once meant a demon, often in the form of an animal, attending a witch. That meaning seems relevant to the novel’s most unfamiliar set of chapters where a thief named Jingjing accompanies a cat-owning crone, a mysterious “healer” who is also an epileptic, to the home of a Singapore billionaire with a drug-damaged son. To reinforce the exoticism of his materials, Danielewski invents a nearly opaque pidgin English, interspersed with Russian and Chinese printed characters. Two other sets of chapters also have magus figures: a Mexican animal smuggler named Isandorno who is called a “brujo,” (320) and an elderly couple living off the grid in Marfa, Texas, to evade discovery of their “Orb,” which seems to be a computer program that can predict the future. Billy is an alchemist working with asters; Cas is identified as “Wizard” in the author’s notes.

Between the normal and paranormal are three remaining sets of chapters that introduce L.A. subcultures: a narrative in urban dialect and Spanish about a gang leader’s contracted murder of a young nerd, a story in primer English about an Armenian taxi driver who assists a scholar of Armenian genocide, and the meditations of a detective of Turkish descent investigating a murder. Listening to the radio, Xanther roves through very different stations each with its own call letters, an analog for the irregular order and simultaneity of Danielewski’s 30 chapters with their identifying fonts and color codes.

The possibly grandiose audacity and heterogeneity of The Familiar tantalize. But it’s no stand-alone initial offering of a modest trilogy or tetralogy. If The Familiar is really the first of 27 volumes, we’re in the very early stage of exposition and probably shouldn’t expect much plot or many linkages to emerge just yet. The couple with the Orb mention Snowden and appear to be members of an international hacking group, and the couple, along with Xanther and Ozgur the detective, know about a dismemberment in Chinatown, so the series may develop into a murder mystery with national security implications. But for now we have to be content—or not--with pregnant repetitions, thematic connections, and verbal associations. Each of the major characters hears a faint “cry for help” none can identify. Xanther responds and saves the life of a cat. The Orbists may be trying to save the world from some data cataclysm. The Armenians are attempting to preserve the oral history of a catastrophe, and the crone in Singapore is begged to save the billionaire’s catatonic son.

Danielewski wants to save the tired “old form” of fiction from stodgy obsolescence by combining his new TV accessibility and his usual hypertext visuals. He continues to play with typography, but it is less radical and more indexical than in House of Leaves. Although The Familiar contains many more enigmatic photo collages for cultists to puzzle over, less compulsive decoders may feel free to skip these chapter and section markers to get on with the next story. Except for the collages and an anomalous, meta-chapter on fiction as software programming, The Familiar generally substitutes linearity for the density of House of Leaves. That first novel stacked up every possible interpretation of itself. The Familiar hustles onward like Zanther switching stations.

Danielewski got out of the House with the road romance of Always Revolutions, which has a narrow band of historical references on the inner edge of each page. The Familiar continues this outward direction; its materials are mostly public, definitely contemporary, and studiously multi-ethnic. Although some chapters employ idiosyncratic vernacular styles, they don’t always manage to defamiliarize, as the Russian Formalists said art must, the novel’s Los Angeles, which often seems derived from the L.A. depicted in movies and television. Detective Ozgur compares himself to noir gumshoes, and gang leader Luther is very aware of his role and image. These imitations of simulacra of stereotypes may be postmodern to the third power, but in future volumes I’d like to see characters from other settings penetrate and disrupt Danielewski’s familiar L.A. He has said serial publication will give him the opportunity to adjust his project according to reader feedback. This reader’s advice: do less with Xanther and more with the Orbists whose interests are explicitly intellectual and technological, the strengths of House of Leaves.

Despite my disappointment that The Familiar is not the first story of The Tower of Leaves, I realize that unless Danielewski has discovered the alchemists’ secret elixir of life he can’t spend the decade that went into building House of Leaves on any one volume of a hypertrophied serial. His crowded and inventive pilot show has me curious about his characters’ futures and how he will connect them. It’s difficult to evaluate a work barely in progress, but I’m definitely in for Volume 2. If Danielewski can complete even part of his grand project, its scale and range and variety could well compete with high-end television series and compensate for the qualities of House of Leaves that needed to be sacrificed. Alchemists like the fabled Trismegistus and the self-named Paracelsus produced shelves of volumes. I hope Danielewski can bring off the long-running magus act of The Familiar.

****

Danielewski’s second volume, Into the Forest, runs as long—at 880 pages—as One Rainy Day in May. But the number of pages is somewhat misleading because design features leave a considerable amount of blank space on most pages. House of Leaves, Danielewski’s first extra large novel, sometimes had only a word or two on a page, but many pages were also exceptionally dense, font and spacing and margins reduced to cram in his learned references. Looking back on the big American novels of the 1970s and 1980s that I wrote about in The Art of Excess—works such as J R, Women and Men, The Public Burning—and excessive novels that have succeeded them (Underworld, The Gold Bug Variations, Infinite Jest), I think an important element they have in common, besides hypertrophy, is extravagant linguistic density. By that I don’t mean just many words per page but stylistic, formal, and referential methods that created vast intra- and inter-textual systems using sometimes multiple meanings of words connecting across hundreds of pages. Probably the title of Barth’s LETTERS, as well as its creating a sequel to his six previous novels, best exemplifies the palimpsest or crossword or network kind of verbal density I mean.

These novels presented the difficulty of processing huge databases before e-books allowed readers to do word searches. Though not as linguistically dense, Danielewski’s two volumes may be more difficult because they set readers a less familiar task: to also process the spaces between and around words—the different page designs for each of his nine alternating stories, variations on certain crucial icons, the photographic collages that separate chapters, and various other visual materials including some black on black pages. A metaphor for this difficulty and, perhaps, for The Familiar as a whole occurs about half way through Into the Forest when Danielewski presents a full-page line drawing of 12 pet cages, 3 high and 4 wide. They create a relatively dense grid like the systems novels I’ve mentioned. In the following pages, the cages are partly open and then fully open, leaving white spaces for readers to notice, connect with other open spaces, and interpret. For Danielewski, blank space is not just background. In the communications loop, no message is itself a message. Combining the digital and analog, The Familiar resembles two encyclopedic novels by women--Le Guin’s Always Coming Home and Yamashita’s I Hotel. A book about these three works might be titled The Excess of Art.

In both volumes of The Familiar, it’s not just the empty spaces on pages that challenge readers. It’s also the many gaps—geographical and cultural and narrative—between the characters and stories. Like One Rainy Day in May, Into the Forest does give readers a familiar core with the family story of Xanther, her mother Astair, and her father Anwar, whose narrations lock into one another and take up about half the book. The cat that Xanther rescued is now recognized as old and ill, the extrasensory perception that allowed Xanther to find the cat develops into her psychokinetic ability to open doors, and cat’s eyes become the crucial symbolic design in the book. I understand that Danielewski needs an essentially realistic (and possibly paranormal) core to solicit the wide readership his publisher will require to keep this ambitious project going, and I realize the relationship between animals and humans is a developing theme here, but I still think spending so many pages on a cat and its effects will test the patience of many who don’t watch cat videos on the Internet.

Into the Forest also connects Xanther’s family to what I found the most interesting and promising sections in volume 1, the story of Cas, Bobby, and the electronic Orb that Cas uses to glimpse the past (where she spies the “rainbow child” Xanther) and scry the future. It’s still not clear what this aged couple and their mysteriously murdered associates are up to, but their enemies’ pursuit of Cas and Bobby creates a dramatic plot with apocalyptic overtones. If Danielewski is learning from TV, as he says, an influence here might be the long-running 24.

Two other seemingly unrelated sections in volume 1—those about Luther the L.A. gang leader and Isandorno the Latin American animal smuggler—also come together in a familiar televisual way when we find both characters are working for a drug smuggler named “The Mayor” who has, like Chapo Guzman, a private zoo. Danielewski includes a scene where The Mayor drops a baby into a deep fat fryer, something you can’t do on TV.

Gaps still predominate though. Detective Ozgur seems to be waiting in the wings, perhaps to connect the hacker plot of Cas and Bobby with the drug plot. As in volume 1, the Armenian cab-driver Shnorhk has only a minor and unexplained role here. The most distant and opaque sections of One Rainy Day in May, those about the Singaporean addict-thief Jingjing, are even more culturally removed and stylistically blurred in Into the Forest even though he is now, like Xanther, searching for a lost cat. If the characters in volume 1 were like separate trees, not much of the forest is visible in volume 2. But as I said about One Rainy Day in May, if Danielewski really has 25 more volumes in mind The Familiar is still in a very early stage of exposition.

Because I love big books, I accept the present disconnectedness of The Familiar, but I am beginning to wonder if long-form, high-end television is that useful a model for lengthy literary fiction. The textual archive seemed Danielewski’s model in House of Leaves and Always Revolutions. They were informationally and intellectually, as well as linguistically, dense. The Familiar is thin. Astair, a psychotherapist in training, reads books about cats; Anwar refers to computer games; Cas and Bobby know hacking and drugs; Ozgur is a reader of crime fiction. These characters provide little intellectual depth to the proceedings, and other characters contribute nothing.

The novels of excess I’ve mentioned were all deeply informed and sourced, generally in science, particularly in systems theory, also in history. Characters in more recent long novels by Powers, Wallace, Vollmann, and Joshua Cohen, for example, are often prodigies of learning. All these authors responded to the age of informational overload by incorporating it as subject and as method. Perhaps The Familiar is responding to a new age of visual media overload with very concretely represented (but not big-thinking) characters (such as Luther and Jingjing) who will accumulate more weight as they gain exposure in later shows in seasons to come. Where the artists of excess produced complex works with explicit informational components, such as rocketry in Gravity’s Rainbow, Danielewski seems to be relying on complicated plotting with implicit (or latent) materials--the imagistic in page design and in character presentation. Whether or not this strategy will hold readers who are accustomed to investing time and effort in big books because they are linguistically dense and conceptually sophisticated remains to be seen. Maybe a rapporteur will emerge to help readers see big ideas presumably underlying The Familiar.

Reading One Rainy Day in May, I was tantalized by the novelty and ambition of Danielewski’s project. Once his chapter designs became more familiar, and once the colloquial styles of several sections became less unfamiliar, I began to worry about all that empty space around the words. Does it suggest a profound relation between background and foreground, or does it represent a relative paucity of substance? In Into the Forest, Danielewski refers to The Wire as an example of long-form TV. In its first season, as I remember, the audience was immersed in the often puzzling secret world of drug sales. In later seasons, the director David Simon explored the causes of the drug culture, the impoverished educational system and the corrupt politics of Baltimore. I hope Danielewski has similar plans to eventually fill in the blank conceptual spaces of The Familiar. If not, it could turn out to be more Hypertrophied Entertainment than Big Book.

[If you read Lit Hub, you know about the continuing, possibly endless discussion of who is the “literary asshole.” I recently ran into one: Ross Barcan, editor of Metropolitan Review, who assigned me Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket some time ago. Two weeks before the novel’s publication date (and three days after I received a copy of the book) Barkan told me “Things change.” I was off the case, someone else would do the review. No explanation or apology, just “Things change.” I’ve been publishing book reviews longer than Barcan has been alive, but I’ve never run into this particular kind of “literary asshole.” So no reprint of my promised Metropolitan Review piece will appear here. The good news is that Open Letters Review has published my review but has requested a 30-day delay before I post it. For the sake of immediacy, here is a link to the review:

https://openlettersreview.com/posts/shadow-ticket-by-thomas-pynchon

What follows are three reviews, one 50 years belated, of long novels by Pynchon, background, should you be interested, for the review of Shadow Ticket.]

Thomas Pynchon

Bleeding Edge

Penguin, 2013

(American Book Review, for an issue about the sixties)

Unless you’re boycotting the Internet, you’ve had the chance to read thirty or more reviews of Bleeding Edge and probably know it’s set in New York City just after the dot.com bust and 9/11, so I’ll keep my description minimal. For details on the novel’s fraying plots, scads of characters, and loco color, and for an almost persuasive reading very different from the judgment here, I recommend Michael Chabon’s long review in the New York Review of Books. If you’re a Pynch-onanist, you’ll read the book—or have already read it—no matter what I say, but Bleeding Edge is far from one of Pynchon’s best novels, and I think the 1960’s may be one reason why.

I mean the mellow yellow version of the California 60’s presented in and through the style of Inherent Vice—daily dope, surfer sounds, and fuzzy suspicion of authority told in a hippy-dippy, loosey-goosey narrative—not the 60’s of high-concept postmodern fiction such as The Crying of Lot 49. Yes, some of the qualities above were present in Lot 49, but it had menace and history that compensated for its California high jinks. And it’s history, I realize now, that gives other Pynchon novels—V., Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason and Dixon, some of Against the Day—their substance and authority, even if earlier times are threaded with 60’s anachronisms. About Pynchon’s history, I think, readers can suspend disbelief, an act more difficult when he writes about a setting readers know first-hand—such as New York in 2001.

Like Pynchon, two website designers in Bleeding Edge are transplants from California to New York. Their DeepArcher site is an inventive virtual world, chaotic but still a “history-free” refuge from the real. Justin wanted the site “to go back in time, to a California that had never existed, safe, sunny all the time”; Lucas wanted something “a little darker,” silences “holding inside them forces of destruction.” Like DeepArcher, Bleeding Edge is a synthesis, but it’s sunny Justin who seems responsible for the book’s mellow sensibility and pastoral sympathies, who makes it an East Coast Inherent Vice, updated to include a passel of computer geeks in Silicon Alley.

From Lucas’s “forces of destruction” unleashed on 9/11, Pynchon is strangely distant, treating the event in a few very general pages and suggesting that it was part of a conspiracy he has imagined. One of his main characters would have been in the towers had he not overslept. Despite the requisite gestures to New Yorkers’ mourning and fear, Pynchon seems to have slept or slipped through 9/11. He complains about the words—Ground Zero--used to describe the ruins, implies that Americans had it coming, and does not allow the event to significantly darken his comic detective plot like the one in Inherent Vice. It’s difficult to understand Pynchon’s evasiveness because he seemed to forecast in the last lines of Gravity’s Rainbow the fall of towers. It and his other historical novels have the power to disturb or, at least, to discomfit, but despite including an “atrocity” Bleeding Edge is bloodless and gravitas-defying, as if Pynchon’s 60’s conspiracy theorizing could not take in the real thing.

Pynchon’s focal character, Maxine Tarnow, is an Upper West Side fraud investigator who sees through his usual cast of villainous men, crooks, cranks, and eccentrics with odd names. The daughter of old lefties, Maxine is first described as a post 60’s “wised-up” cynic, but she eventually gains sympathy for the views of her older friend, March, who writes a political blog and praises the idealism of “open source” young nerds: “`I haven’t seen anything like it since the sixties. These kids are out to change the world. “Information has to be free.”`” By novel’s end Maxine shares the disappointed idealist March’s take on the government’s using 9/11 to initiate an everlasting global “War on Terror.” But Pynchon’s political critique is “power to the people” simplistic and paranoid predictable with nothing like the weight of his attacks on multinationalism in Gravity’s Rainbow or imperialism in Mason and Dixon.

For Lucas, the darker of the web designers, DeepArcher is a “`valentine to the Big Apple.’” For Pynchon, this means fondly describing off-beat neighborhoods, weird food and odd merchants, the variety of New Yorkers and their obsessions. He worries that all of Manhattan will become corporate midtown, just as the old anarchy of Times Square was “Disneyfied.” But he rarely has Maxine venture from Manhattan to the truly diverse outer boroughs, and the editorial voice that occasionally displaces Maxine sounds like Justin the 60’s pastoralist, for Pynchon reserves his strongest language to bemoan the very existence of a city, “its seething foul incoherence.” The “bleeding edge” for Pynchon is not the near future but the far past, say the Montauk that Maxine visits--before the tourists, before the fishermen, before the Indians. Or the Hudson’s “ancient estuary exempt from what happened, what has gone on happening” in “bad history.”

Children have a larger role in this novel than in other Pynchon books, and he seems to want his novel to have an “innocence” associated with them and their computer games. He extends his plot with convoluted digressions and cute-meet coincidences, not to suggest some possible connectionism beyond most humans’ ken, but to give himself a merry prankster freedom to include zany inventions, old-movie allusions, and bad puns.

From a Pynchon novel praised by early reviewers for its treatment of 9/11 and Internet surveillance, I expected more, much more. But maybe Pynchon has warned me—and others--not to expect more anymore. At the beginning of Bleeding Edge a documentary filmmaker named Reg Despard abruptly zooms in and out on scenes, causing viewers cognitive dissonance. Pynchon makes fun of an academic who submits Despard’s work to Brechtian analysis and who praises his film for its “leading edge” post-postmodernism. I praised a similar scene of disorienting zooming in Gravity’s Rainbow as a metaphor for the Brechtian alienation effects of that novel’s “epic theater” in my book The Art of Excess. Foolish me. Later in Bleeding Edge, Despard says he just shoots what is in front of him and intends “`no deeper meaning.’” Though Pynchon writes about a “Deep Web” which only a few can enter, Bleeding Edge is mostly Surface Net for all, complication rather than complexity, digression rather than dissonance, a nearly contemporary counter-culture alternative to Tom Wolfe’s right-wing reportage or something like Jonathan Lethem’s surface-coasting Chronic City, a New York novel that includes a character resembling Pynchon. What an unfortunate loop: Pynchon influencing Lethem, who influences Pynchon, who is positively reviewed by New Yorker Lethem in the New York Times.

In an Electronic Book Review essay several years ago, I wondered why no great New York novels have appeared in the last decade, and suggested Pynchon might write one. I thought he had the imagination to challenge the DeLillo of Underworld, the Gaddis of J R, and the McElroy of Women and Men even if those novelists grew up in New York, but Bleeding Edge has only their bulk, not their cultural understanding or aesthetic ambition. Although Pynchon graduated from high school on Long Island and has lived in Manhattan for several decades, Bleeding Edge feels like the product of a pacific California tourist, someone much more persuasive impersonating the dope-smoking P.I. Doc Sportello of Inherent Vice than occupying the mind of a West Side Jewish fraud investigator. What Bleeding Edge chiefly lacks is a hard edge. “Nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist,” Pynchon says in Gravity’s Rainbow. Bleeding Edge isn’t loathsome or bleeding heart, just a lot of wasted energy, entropic. Perhaps Pynchon came to New York to retire, and the novel as a form is for him now just a septuagenarian’s hobby--not work, not art work.

Thomas Pynchon

Against the Day

Penguin, 2006

(Book Forum)

To reward the meta-generation faithful and, I suspect, to test reviewers’ persistence, Thomas Pynchon has inserted on page 853 of his new novel a lightly coded, only slightly tongue-in-cheek abstract of Against the Day, a passage that pleads to be quoted:

The Book of the Masked . . . [was] filled with encrypted field-notes and occult scientific passages of a dangerousness one could at least appreciate, though more perhaps for what it promised than for what it presented in such impenetrable code, its sketch of a mindscape whose layers emerged one on another as from a mist, a distant country of painful complexity, an all but unmappable flow of letters and numbers that passed into and out of the guise of the other, not to mention images, from faint and spidery sketches to a full spectrum of inks and pastels . . . visions of the unsuspected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters with details of God’s unseen world.

More concretely, Against the Day is a family saga, set between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the early 1920s, that traces the adventures of American miner Webb Traverse’s four children, Frank, Lake, Reef, and Kit, in the still-wild West, in revolutionary Mexico, in London, Göttingen, and the Balkans, in “Inner Asia” and outer Siberia. Early on, union activist Webb is murdered in Colorado by the hired guns of plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. Mine engineer Frank goes after the two killers, one of whom marries Frank’s sister, Lake. Cardsharp Reef pursues Vibe, who attempts to co-opt brother Kit by financing his mathematical education at Yale and in Germany. With its initial Western setting, hard-bitten, colloquial characters, labor sympathies, and violence, Against the Day could have been an old-fashioned naturalistic novel by Norris or Dreiser, or maybe a more newfangled proletarian fiction by Dos Passos or Steinbeck, a Book of the Masked that discloses the human faces behind the roles that American capitalism foists on wage slaves.

Except Against the Day is a Pynchon Production, which means the Traverse clan meets all manner of scientists, anarchists, erotic explorers, and spiritual crackpots--and then, coincidentally, keeps running into them on three continents. At Yale, Kit studies with the physicist Willard Gibbs, whose work is preparing the way for twentieth-century thermodynamics. In Göttingen, Kit meets the beautiful Yashmeen Halfcourt, a disciple of the mathematician Georg Riemann, another precursor of Einstein.

The more mundane Reef has a son with a con woman named Estrella, then abandons them for Europe, where he blunders into Balkan politics, the “distant country of painful complexity.” Reef falls in with Yashmeen and Cyprian Lightwood, a young British spy. They wander around in or are chased out of Venice, various parts of Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, and what used to be Yugoslavia, never staying in one place long enough to understand much about it. In the language of geometry, which is pervasive in the novel, Pynchon is plotting the prewar “unmappable”--radical new science and tangled old politics--on two overlapping planes, “layers [that] emerged one on another.”

Or three planes, if one considers the quirky permutations of sexual relations among the Traverses and the characters they meet. The bisexual Yashmeen, the homosexual Cyprian, and Reef form a decadent triangle similar to that depicted in Pynchon’s first novel, V. Lake engages in a threesome with the two men who killed her father. When Reef brings Yashmeen to the US after the war, they find that Frank and Reef’s Estrella are now a couple. Soon after meeting, Yashmeen and Estrella have sex. No accident, of course, that all this takes place just around the time Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams.

Then there is the fourth dimension, which some characters identify as time, but which others associate with the spiritual, the “invisible,” or “God’s unseen world.” God said, “Let there be light”; Against the Day collects ways our ancestors attempted to track light back to its source and replaced religion with alternative lights. There is the light of relativity, the odd light of electromagnetic storms, the light of the mysterious Tunguska event of 1908, when a meteorite struck Siberia or God announced a coming apocalypse. (The presumed source of Pynchon’s title is the verse in the Second Epistle of Peter, which states the heavens and earth are now “reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.”) For turn-of-the-century unbelievers, there is the dynamite flash, the diffracted light of Iceland spar, the reflected light of magicians’ mirrors, the “light writing” of photography and movies, the cities’ new electric lighting that makes the heavens invisible at night.

Of these four dimensions, the science is occasionally fascinating, the political plotting painfully coincidental, the sex generally gratuitous, and the spiritual possibly profound. But despite its partial achievements, the novel as a whole resembles the zeppelin that appears in its first pages, a giant bag of imaginative hot air, as the inflated language of the abstract implies. The Traverse family and social circumstances frequently are mere ballast that keeps the fiction from floating out into the ether of pure invention. Pynchon cheerfully admits the antigravity quality of his novel by way of the “Chums of Chance,” five youthful balloonists who go on Tom Swift–like exotic expeditions that are described in a series of “boys books,” the titles of which Pynchon supplies. The Chums appear in various locales, have counterfactual experiences (such as touring the desert in a sand submarine), and become somewhat more pessimistic about twentieth-century life as the novel proceeds. Scrupulously apolitical at the outset, by the end the Chums are giving aid to wartime refugees. Finally, though, they meet five female “Ætheronauts” and settle into banal middle-class life.

Too much like the Chums’ balloon, the novel is a vehicle of tourism, repetition, and entertainment. As always, Pynchon is a master purveyor of compressed atmospherics, the “spidery sketches” of the abstract: the minute, webbed details of physical setting, what people are eating, drinking, smoking, wearing, and hearing--and the feelings his characters project upon their surroundings. He has to do atmosphere well because his characters frantically change locations (they are the Traverses, after all) and his narrative rapidly shifts focus among the four siblings, their lovers, the acquaintances of the lovers, the sidekicks of the acquaintances, the crazed people met in bars, the voices of their dreams, and so on. Sympathy is expressed for members of the underclass wherever they are found--in Chicago slaughterhouses, Colorado mines, Italian tunnels, Mexican fields--but Pynchon rarely lingers long enough in a scene to dramatize the cause and effect the naturalists unmasked. American political life is thus rendered with a boys’-book Manichaeanism; Europe may be treated with more complexity, but characters who behave like distracted tourists never really inhabit their exotic destinations. In V., Pynchon mocked “Baedekerland,” but that’s what he gives us now.

Although Against the Day reuses only one Pynchon character name I recognize, O. I. C. Bodine, a seaman, it redeploys numerous types, situations, and references from earlier Pynchon novels. He has a character say, “Steal from the best,” and the author does. The prewar intrigue from Vienna to Venice is similar to the political machinations in V. Characters who distrust the London postal system communicate through gas connections, even more dangerous than The Tristero in The Crying of Lot 49. The Euro-wandering, mostly done by the clueless Traverses, especially the Yale-bought Kit, is like that of the Harvard-conditioned Slothrop of Gravity’s Rainbow. Against the Day also brings back the word entropy from all of Pynchon’s work. Maybe in its recycling, this new novel is supposed to be literary “negentropy,” but the reuse is too cutely self-chummy, a Pynchon Revue that treats readers who don’t recognize the old songs and dances like chumps.

At the end of the novel, “Psychical Detective” Lew Basnight complains about the movies turning “wild ancient days into harmless packages of flickering entertainment.” The abstract refers to “dangerousness,” but the characters’ occasional, rather cheap foretellings of trench warfare and poison gas cause few shivers, particularly since the war itself is passed over in a few pages. Perhaps an episode of haunting explains why this tale seems safe: The Chums find themselves visited by “Trespassers,” spirits from the Chums’ future, our present, beings “so fallen, so corrupted,” one of the Chums says, “that we--even we--seem to them pure as lambs.” The spokesman for the Trespassers is a Mr. Ace, who sounds suspiciously like the Mr. Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow. He tells the Chums that those who “came to understand the simple thermodynamic truth that Earth’s resources were limited . . . were denounced as heretics,” and that’s why the Trespassers have become “seekers of refuge” in the past. Instead of time-traveling into our dangerous future, as Cormac McCarthy has done in The Road, heretic Pynchon has trespassed back a hundred years to an era he has rendered harmless by his mode of representation.

Perhaps I should have said this earlier: Gravity’s Rainbow is the most important novel I’ve ever read. I’ve taught nearly all of Pynchon’s novels to unwilling undergrads and grads. And I once wrote, “Nothing succeeds like excess.” That is to say, I’m not James Wood, waiting to gouge anything by Pynchon (or DeLillo or just about any postmodern writer). But Against the Day lacks the ferocity and fear of Gravity’s Rainbow, the long-developed characters and the comedy of Mason and Dixon. The only readers (besides responsible reviewers) I can imagine finishing Against the Day are the Pynchonanists, the fetishizing collectors of P-trivia. I hope I’m wrong. I hope some future scholar will read the novel twenty times and either illustrate how it recapitulates the whole history of narrative or demonstrate how every piece fits together into a fourfold design that will replace four-base genetics as a model of all life. As the author himself says in his abstract, “visions of the unsuspected.”

Gravity’s Rainbow at 50

(Open Letters Review)

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

Those are the first two lines of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow released fifty years ago last month.. 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.

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. But I will insist against some critics that Pynchon doesn’t belong only to the professors (like I was) and that the novel, sometimes called heartless, is deeply empathetic to the victims of rocket states, those who Pynchon called the “preterite,” the unchosen.

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 Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. If you have read and appreciated one or more of these science-influenced mega novels, consider that it may be time to go back to the writer Powers called “Pop Pynchon” and Wallace called the “patriarch.”

If you are somehow unacquainted with any of Pynchon’s work, avoid the sloppy Inherent Vice and begin with the short satiric novel The Crying of Lot 49 or the long humorous ramble of Mason and Dixon. But the one that drills deepest and rises highest, the one that comes closest (Ukraine) and spreads furthest (the whole planet), the one that delves furthest into past and future, the one that could alter your brainscape (if it’s like mine) is Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s not too late. In the final words of the novel, “Now everybody--”

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. Since I’ve already been paid for these published reviews (well, some of them), I’m not asking for your money but am soliciting your comments. They might help me judge my next long novel, if I live long enough to review another one. If you find merit in the reviews, I’d also ask you to tell other long readers about this Substack.

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.

Additional impetus for “Monsterpieces”: along with Elkins’ novel, I was assigned this summer long novels by Danielewski and Pynchon. I’ll be posting reviews of those novels, along with my reviews of their other long works, when the pieces on Tom’s Crossing and Shadow Ticket come out. The rest of the reviews follow in, essentially, reverse chronological order. For the sake of suspense, I’m not divulging forthcoming inclusions.

I’ll post a few reviews at a time. I won’t be editing out infelicities or modifying judgments in these already published reviews, even if—now—I might not write the same things about these books, particularly if I was considering them in the context of other long novels. I also won’t be sprinkling in “monsterpiece” to give a fake unity to these writings. Because the reviews were never meant to be read one after another, there are some redundancies, particularly in the books I use as comparisons. The novels reviewed are, I believe, at least 500 pages long; if not, they may be long in reading time because of the authors’ challenging methods. Most of the reviews are themselves rather long, outside the 800- and 1200-word boxes the New York Times Book Review used to insist reviews fit. One review is much shorter than the rest, part of a group review of NBA finalists, but I include it because it describes the worst long novel I’ve read in the decade covered here. You’ll have to wait for that one. A clue: the author’s last name begins with “Y.”

As for the fraught issue of selection, I’ll say that many of the novels were assigned to me. Other books I did ask to review, often because I’m especially interested in novels, such as those by Richard Powers, influenced by science, particularly ecology. When I was a National Book Award judge of fiction in 2005, my choice for the award—Vollmann’s Europe Central--elicited strong opposition from two members of the panel, so I expect considerable disagreement with my summary judgments here. I’ll try to respond to comments as long as they don’t contain unfamiliar obscenities or physical threats. Already I can anticipate “self-indulgence” for republishing pieces that are mostly available online. Facts are: several reviews are behind paywalls, and quite a few of the reviews here were published by the Barnes and Noble Review which has, sadly, gone out of business, leaving behind no accessible archive.

This introduction to “Monsterpieces: Long Novels, Long Shots, and Longueurs” is longer than I thought it would be, but I can point out that it’s much shorter than A Short Introduction to Anneliese.

James Elkins

A Short Introduction to Anneliese

Unnamed Press, 2025

(Open Letters Review)

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.

James Elkins

Weak in Comparison to Dreams

Unnamed Press, 2023

(Full Stop)

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 this year’s 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.

Two big suitcases. You must have passed those PSA tests.

Just one.

Taking a big chance, Tom.

I’m not changing my name to leave the USA. Not driving a hundred miles an hour in a passing lane.

I gave that up. I’m still here, still showing up, driving this taxi.

Assist man to the end. Key delivers. Driving to the grocery store and writing essays are not enough for me. Life here is happening in a “School Zone.”

So now you’re leaving to be an “athlete” somewhere else?

Just an old man who can’t shake his childhood sense of himself. Who doesn’t really want to shake it. Who wants to test his capabilities one last time.

Yeah, I read those essays you sent me. The ones about being an athlete are pretty good for someone who never got paid to pass or shoot a ball. “Play to play” could be one of my threes. And that piece about radiation made me glad my PSA tests are borderline. Now we’re both waiting for that next one.

But not here.

You moving back to New York?

Further than that.

Athens again?

Further than that. Hong Kong.

That’s about as far from the USA as you can get, no matter which way you travel, west or east. The Orient. Shit, Tom, that could be the dis-Orient.

That’s why I’m leaving, to be disoriented like you were when you first landed in Athens. Probably more English spoken in Hong Kong, but I’ll still need to be alert every minute, like you back then.

I was a lot younger then. And now you’re a lot older than me.

True that, but at last I want to be reoriented to Thisworld, turned away from myself, reinvigorated by the unfamiliar. Asian voices, alien food. New perceptions, different interpretations. From what I’ve read and what I hear from Kinga, who lived there five years, Hong Kong will give me more of a challenge than Athens or New York or London ever did.

A big chance. A tough final test.

Exactly. Isn’t that what all athletes—pro or amateur or imagined—do? Pass tests, tough ones they choose to take? Not the SAT or the PSA, those quick brain and blood probes, but extended physical tests. Body moving with other bodies in a city as crowded as a court. Hong Kong won’t be a contest, but walking and watching should be intense while I’m waiting for that next PSA test, maybe waiting for the last years of my life. Cancer made the slow time of San Mateo even slower. I want a place with pace.

Hong Kong gonna be your third or fourth or is it the fifth act?

No act, no script, no blocking, not made up. Action, maybe a chance to surprise myself or be surprised. The possibility of excitation and fascination.

A lot of “-tion” abstractions, Tom, for an athlete. You sure you’re not overthinking this move, overimagining it, all this stuff it’s gonna give you?

I think leaving will give me a change of thinking.

If you want excitation, I hope you’re not doing that chemical castration thing. For the tests you’re looking at, you’re gonna need all the test--tosterone you can get up.

Well-played. Another “Key’s Three”: “T. the Key.” But Hong Kong is not sex and the city.

I know you love big cities, but you may never have been anywhere like Hong Kong. It’s not Athens. Have you seen the skyscrapers huddled together, their top floors in the clouds? With all that density, you’ll be competing for short space with millions of people who aren’t very sympathetic to white folks, particularly the English-speaking old ones who might be mistaken for colonials. You’re not gonna be invisible. Tell me you’re not trying this test alone.

No, no, Kinga has a job there. She left earlier to visit Poland. We’ll meet up in Hong Kong in, let’s see, two days if I have the time zones figured right.

All this time with her and all those essays about your prostate, and you never wrote about testosterone.

You’re right, Key. Too intimate, too private, I guess. Involving not just me but another person. The radiologist decided he didn’t need to shut off the “T.” for a few months. I guess he’s confident his rays hit all the cancer. But like I’m waiting for the next PSA test, I’m also waiting for that “T.” to percolate again.

Seems strange to me that you’ve written a lot about being an athlete but never once do you give any credit to the “T.” It moves us, and not just in bed. Stronger bones, more muscle mass, higher aggression, the 24-hour-a-day dose of something like adrenaline.

Is this something you think about a lot, Key?

Not me. I’m done with the sex business. I never even check out short skirts in my mirror. But I worry about you. We’ve been connected for a long time. I’d hate to see you fuck up. Maybe you need that “T” not to fuck up. You know about Wilt’s records, on the court, in the sack.

Maybe Wilt had too much “T.” He was only 63 when he left our very own California.

Down in Lakerland. That reminds me, why are you leaving from down in San Jose instead of SFO? This ride is costing you triple.

There must be a lot of Chinese in San Jose. Turned out the flight down there was cheaper, so I might even tip the driver.

Forget the tip, Tom. But if you do put “Passing Lane” in a book, I want my share of the royalties.

It’s a bunch of fragments. It’s not an essay or a story. When are you going to pull it together?

Nah, now I like it the way it is. Like a small city, small but kind of mysterious. Maybe a test for the reader. “No game, no gain.” You know that drill. Actually, “Lane” is sort of like those essays you sent me, pieces rubbing up against each other but not exactly cohering, except maybe around luck.

You told me “love your luck.”

I did, whether it was bad or good. But you are mos def pressing your luck this time. Shit, Tom, you are zone pressing it, going up against a whole team of probable misfortunes. There’s the cancer, your age, all the shit you got wrong with your body, the metal hip, half your intestines, the bad feet. And don’t give me that “competitive” ping pong you play over here. You think you’re on Otherworld in the USA. You get over there and you’ll be on SomeOtherFuckingWorld. You could run out of what you think is your dumb-ass luck in two weeks. Get trampled by a bunch of mainland Communists rushing onto the subway. Have a heart attack walking up those stairs and mountains. Fall off an overcrowded ferry and go down to the Underworld with no guide.

Quick exits. Not so bad. You know that drill. Passing lane, not passing away.

I’m not shitting you, Tom. I’ve seen the photos. All those people carrying open umbrellas when it’s not raining. I’ve heard the visiting Chinese talk to their American cousins in my back seat. The natives want out. Hong Kong is too late for a man like you to test your luck.

It’s not a man like me. It is me, with my recent history. You remember things I don’t, so you can’t have forgotten our trip to Athens together a few years ago. You tried to talk me out of my luck with the photographer. You were wrong, Key.

This is different, Tom. She might have broke your heart. Hong Kong could break your spirit, your faith in being an athlete, even your faith in mystery. Once you start living there, you can’t say, “I pass” when confronted with some fucked-up problem. If there are a bunch of tests you can’t pass, are you still gonna be an athlete? You’ll start thinking about the cliff.

Sometimes I think you made up the cliff. You know, a cliffhanger. It’s hard for me to believe you could be that desperate.

I’m not in the fiction biz, Tom. Maybe you can’t believe because you were never an athlete all the way down. You talk about embodiment, but you were a professor who read books and gave tests to others, not an undersized guy trying to make a living by testing his body against the biggest and the best bodies that growth hormones and steroids could produce. You have a pension. I have this Uber rig in my car. You have a partner. I have a Tesla. You’ve been desperate writing about your diagnosis and treatment the last few months. I understand. But what if that desperation cooled down over decades and turned into despair? With various other losses, that under-skin despair can accumulate and push to the surface. Sort of like your cancer pushing against the wall of your prostate. Like cancer, despair can test your drive to live.

I’m sorry, Key. That’s my bad, my failure of imagination, of empathy. I appreciate your concerns. You’re still the assist man. But listen, if Hong Kong is too much of a test for me or if the PSA tests I get there go bad, I’ll slink back and call you to pick me up at SFO. Hong Kong is no suicide ride, no terminal tour.

So what you gonna do there besides ride the escalators and jostle with millions of King Kongers? Keep writing essays? Seems like there are some gaps you could fill.

You think I should write more about you?

Nah, not me. Maybe more about what you did wrong. If a man believes death has entered, I’d expect he’d be remembering and thinking about all he could be confessing.

Blame that gap on the Jesuits. I thought outside their black box, their dark confessional. But if you’re worried, I’ll try to remember my encyclopedia of sins in case I do call in a priest on my deathbed. I don’t have your memory. I wrote some of those essays to have a record of facts that I’m afraid I’ll forget. I think I’m done with the essays.

So if not essays, what will the speck do when he gets tired of walking? Go back to writing stories? “USA ping pong player takes over the HK Senior Games—until authorities discover he’s 80, not the 90 he claimed.”

That story sounds familiar. No more stories. Maybe I’ll buy a serious camera. Kinga and I have a collaboration in mind. “Passing By.” As she takes an art photo, probably some form of nature surviving in the city, I take a shot of whatever happens to be behind her, the random, cluttered world outside the aesthetic frame, the scene everybody would pass by without looking. No characters, no invention, just my reorientation to unpredictable solid Thisworld.

Knowing you, Tom, I figure you’ll find some way to fictionalize, to rig the reverse shot, find a better scene somewhere else to double up or contrast with hers. You’re not going to be satisfied to do random facts while she does the artistic compositions.

No, Key, I’m telling you, I vowed after that essay on Banks no more fiction, and I certainly won’t be writing about myself. The cancer freaked me out, fucked me up. I admit it. Facts were piling up from the high PSA to the MRI to the biopsy to the inserting of little gold seeds for the radiation, to the five sessions in Otherworld, to the burning urine, sleeplessness, and fatigue afterwards. Time was passing slow. Too much down time. During all that time just about all that I could think about was myself.

Yourself and the books you’d read.

The point’s point?

Just that much of that writing you sent sounds pretty bookish to me. Maybe that’s why the pieces seem fictional. I don’t mean imagined or invented but relying a lot on literature, all the fiction you’ve read and even some you’ve written. It’s like books were the anti-cancer in your brain contesting the cancer in your prostate.

That would be a losing bet.

Like life itself. You say you’ve been doing a lot of wondering. I wonder if thinking through fictions was a way for you to avoid thinking directly about the possibility of dying.

“Lit a Lie.” Another Key’s Three? Fictions as a way of evading myself, lying to myself? A strange accusation from the unreliable guy who was once called the “Lying Cretan.”

I’ve been trying to give it up, but sometimes lying is necessary, Tom. Like the belief in good luck for you.

Now “Luck a Lie.” You’re on an L-alliterative roll, Key. Have you forgotten your bad-luck busted hip?

Feel it every day in this seat. Just like athletes know luck every minute they play. But you’re no athlete, not really, not any more. For you, luck is something that comes along once in a while and you string the episodes together into a run of luck. Luck is not a lie, but that run you believe in—the connected sequence--is something like fiction, fabricated.

The series of improbable and fortunate events in the last few years is a fact, a set of facts. Like the referee you once were, I call `em like I see `em.

About that seeing--Do you remember those “Be Like Mike” commercials that presented that killer Jordan as a friend of children?

Of course, for Gatorade. I can probably hum the tune.

Okay, so here’s the thing I see in your recent writings: now you say you want to be like this Mike was in Athens decades ago.

Keever the navigator.

But you don’t want to see like this Mike when we talked about pancreatic cancer and passing away.

See like a simpleton.

See without filters.

Is driving a filter? Or a distraction?

Driving could be both, but it’s not imagined. Not like a run of luck. There is no run, Tom, no order, no plot. Just run and done.

So life is not random, it’s “rundom.” Seems rundumb to me.

Maybe so but even dumb athletes know every moment of action is lucky. Or not. Go down with an injury and the life you know could be done.

That’s every moment. Every night after the radiation felt like a long run to me. In the dark, the writing never seemed filtered through fiction. More like compelled for comparisons. No lie. Some of those pieces I had to write to sleep if I was going to pass the daylight test of creeping, invisible desperation. I was in the center of myself whether I wanted to be or not. Instead of lying, I think of those post-cancer writings as speck-asserting. Isn’t that what you were trying to do in “Passing Lane?” Putting words together to contest mortality.

A tough test. One I couldn’t pass. No order, just some fragments.

“Shored against my ruins.”

Literary to the end of the ride.

I never got much respect for my literary productions. Maybe I felt writing facts about my death and life would break through. A late break. You know, like a last-second game-winning shot from half court played and replayed on ESPN.

Always a lot of blind luck involved in those buzzer beaters but no “mysterious significance.”

You may think me blind or vision-impaired, but let me leave you with one last literary phrase. There is no “transparent eyeball,” not down here in Thisworld. The older we get, Key, the more floaters and filters and fictions we have.

Add “failures” and you got yourself a 4-F.

“Farewells” would give you a finishing five. Let’s stick to threes. Keep showing up. Wear your contacts. Make your runs. Observe speed limits. Remember Key delivers. And if you turn our conversation into a story, send it to me.

You, too, Tom.

Stay where you are, Key. I’ll grab the suitcases myself. Thanks for the tips. HK or Bust. “Trust the body,” Key. Test the body one last time.

Good luck, Tom. But nah, not “last.” I know you. If you pass Hong Kong, you’ll keep on passing. You’ll be passing along and passing around with your lit and your luck until you end up in Athens, that old center of the world, the locus that created both of us, artists of the scam and sham, adepts at passing off.

--Last--

“Last Post”

My first PSA test was 1.2, a steep and sudden drop with which my radiologist was very pleased. He said there was no reason to not move anywhere that I can get another test in three months. So my partner just accepted a job offer in New York City for the fall. Nathanael West’s characters came to California to die. West left New York and died on a California highway. I’m going back to New York to live. One is not cured by the revolving machinery of Otherworld, but one can be relieved of some fear by those rays. Should problems arise, I’ll be seeing my former doctors at Sloan Kettering, one of the best cancer hospitals in Thisworld.

The job is in a Williamsburg school next to the East River, one stop on the L train from the furnished apartment we’ll be renting for a year at 1^st Avenue and 13^th Street, one block from the L train and my favorite Greek taverna.

I call this piece “Last Post” because it’s my final essay in Passing Down and because I hope this posting to New York puts an end to my nomadic period. I have bought three toasters in the last four years. The East Village apartment has one. Having never lived in Manhattan, it will be both somewhat disorienting and definitely convenient for the wayfarer, a 15-minute walk to the Strand bookstore and Union Square. Ten more minutes if I want to play ping pong with Jerome Charyn at SPiN. I might even take the train over to Williamsburg one night to the original Café Mogador with its excellent merguez sausages.

Manhattan should be even better for Kinga the photographer. She can shoot its streets, visit its galleries, and walk to Fotografiska and the International Center of Photography. We have been to the city twice since moving to California, and she has never been anxious to return to our suburb. She won’t eat sausages but likes the pirogi at Vesselka, about a 10-minute walk, and at Little Poland, two blocks away.

With all due respect to the Keever of “Passing Tests,” I’m calling this surprise move to a locus a lucky break. To remain in the USA with her kind of visa, Kinga must be employed as a teacher. She had not been able to apply to Montessori schools in New York City because almost all require a degree in childhood education. The school where she will work does not require the degree and needs someone with just the kind of dual-immersion experience—Chinese and English--that she has from her years in Hong Kong and San Mateo. So, Michael, can I claim her good luck as my own? As an addition to my run?

Looking several months ahead to New York and looking back at the pieces in “Later,” I see how many of them are about the future. After death enters, the countdown to zero begins. What do you want to do in whatever time you have? What will you be able to do? How will you think about your time? But it’s not “you” now, not speculative. It’s “I” in time unknowable despite what doctors say. I want to keep time in my mind, the “New York minute.” Difficult to do when one—no, make that I—is tranquillized by suburban boredom, discouraged by my inability to break out of it. The walk lights in New York give you the seconds you have to cross the streets. Take too long to get on the train and you have to wait for the next one. Forget to take a number at the deli and watch others order their food. The street is not as quick as the ping pong table, but daily life in the city makes one—that’s me, again—alert and engaged. If not any longer like an athlete, maybe like the street photographer is alert. “Don’t walk with your lens cap on,” said a famous snapper of the sudden.

The future I want is the next minute, the next hour and day. Perhaps this imagined future immersion in what Gertrude Stein called the “continuous present” is an evasion of the sure future, the end of my time. Or maybe this desired future is just a compressed version of old literary advice, Horace’s “carpe diem.” Or Keever may again be my navigator and living in New York City will be like one of his Terminal Tours, intensity and pleasure running on and on and on until the last thing.

June, 2024

Conclusion

“This World is Not Conclusion” begins one of Emily Dickinson’s poems. This Conclusion is not resolution but is an ending, something like one of Kierkegaard’s beginnings, his title Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. You will have noted that the Introduction and, now, this Conclusion are in a different font than the rest of Passing Down. “Font,” I learned, is derived from “fount.” Think of the beginning and ending, if you don’t mind the caps, as flowing from the AUTHOR, a somewhat different and more authoritative personage than the authorial character Tom LeClair who appears in and narrates much of the rest of Passing Down. This AUTHOR doesn’t enter now to suggest what to conclude about the book you have almost finished but to explain why you are left to conclude.

Admittedly an inveterate creator of unreliable narrators in his novels, the AUTHOR realized after collecting the writings here that he may have been creating an unreliable author in this memoir, one way to suggest that all memoirs have a fictive quality. Another more intentional way was adding to the essays fictions about or by an unreliable character, fictions that emerge in the book during difficult times for LeClair. “No game, no gain,” Keever has said. When constructing Passing Down, the AUTHOR’s game was eliciting readers’ interest in and sympathies with LeClair, then testing how far they would extend as he becomes increasingly reliant on fiction and imagination in his “half year of mysterious thinking.” This game I found more ambiguous and, therefore, more artful than the “magical thinking” Didion makes explicit, but I could only hint at the game—could not give it away--in the “Introduction.” More artful and possibly more helpful to those with less than terminal diagnoses, as I say in the Introduction.

In “Passing Tests,” the fictional character Keever attacks the authorial character LeClair’s thinking. LeClair defends himself at the end of that story and in “Last Post.” Now the test passes to you to conclude, to judge their conflicting conclusions—and judge the merit of the AUTHOR’s choice to present a possibly unreliable author figure in Passing Down. Both Keever and LeClair praise action, physical exercise. Perhaps you will forgive my taking you into a game that might give you the gain of emotional and intellectual exercise, challenging activity when the subjects are luck and living, disease and dying. If it’s any consolation, the AUTHOR has not decided whom to trust—Keever and his “run and done” or LeClair and his “run of luck”--so Passing Down is not just a game with its readers but an onrunning game—a conflict without resolution—within the AUTHOR. For now, these are his last words.

When the radiation treatments ended, fatigue set in, as if to demonstrate daily my sense of deceleration during the treatments. A month or so after they finished, the fatigue began to ease, but waiting still made me feel suspended in time. On, I guess, a whim, I bought a basketball, the first one I’ve owned in more than 20 years. I felt no desire to return to ping pong. I don’t know why. I wanted to shoot baskets. I had no intention to play. I can’t run and I can’t jump, and I’d be helpless on defense. I just wanted to have the ball in my hand again, dribble it, pass it off the cement wall at the playground, catch it, and shoot it.

I stood under the basket where one shoots layups. My first attempts were a foot short, not even reaching the backboard. I couldn’t believe this. I asked a guy shooting at another basket if the hoops were too high, more than 10 feet off the ground. “Maybe by an inch or two,” he said. My shots were 12 or more inches short. I couldn’t believe how weak I had become, not just from radiation but also from playing ping pong, swinging that light little paddle at the much, much lighter ball. My legs were okay for sliding right to left and back at the table, but I was weak in the knees, where basketball shots begin even if the shooter is not jumping. Get up on the balls of your feet, bend your knees, and come up from there with your back and abdomen muscles, your shoulder slightly back, your arm raised, elbow cocked, your wrist ready to snap, your fingers holding the ball away from your palm. Since my father put up a hoop on the side of a barn when I was around 10, I must have gone through these motions a million times. Now I not only lacked “touch,” fine motor skills, my arm lacked strength.

This failure was not a disturbing Otherworld experience but shocking to someone who still wants to consider himself an athlete. After I managed a few layups, I moved five feet away from the basket but directly in front of it. All of my attempts were short, some of them air balls. I’d never been a great shooter from distance, but from 20 feet in (the top of the key) I was reliable and even better when shooting bank shots from either side. Now I could not shoot. I didn’t move back to the foul line, 15 feet from the hoop. From there I’d have to hoist the ball up underhand, as one sees little kids do when they’re trying to play on a regulation basket.

Just five years ago I was playing ping pong in a recreation center where the tables were next to baskets. When tables were full, I was making shots from 20 feet out and hitting a high percentage of foul shots. There I had one of the happiest moments of my life in ping pong. A Chinese ponger, a guy a few inches shorter and decades younger than I, a guy who always beat me, came over to the court and asked me if I wanted to play one-on-one. He couldn’t shoot from more than five feet out, so I was able to block his shots and then back him down and shoot over him from in close. The former baller beat the current ponger. It was an old story, the young with false expectation of the old.

Go back another five years to outdoor courts in Brooklyn Bridge Park. I was just shooting around with another person’s ball when some guys at the hoop beside mine needed an eighth for half court and asked me to play. Mostly young Black men, a couple of white guys, and, again, a short Asian who seemed to have never played. He was assigned to guard the old man. I could still move back then. I went around him, forced better players to switch onto me, and then hit the men they left open for easy baskets. We won, and then “ran it back,” as players say. This time a very quick young guy was told to guard me, and I was done. He was so quick I was afraid to dribble the ball, say nothing about attempting to go around him. But I didn’t feel bad. I was still able to shoot if the quick kid left me open.

Of course ten years changes a body, and even five years without vigorous exercise can change a body, but not being able to make a layup? That astonished me. So I kept going to the playground, kept practicing, started building some strength until I could at least make some foul shots and take some pleasure from the exercise, even if I never had the sense that it could lead to play, to quickness.

Shooting, though, was not enough for consciousness. Not while shooting but afterwards, I started wondering: why would I give up ping pong and want to shoot after being radiated? Nostalgia is the obvious answer, maybe going all the way back to my father and I shooting together when I was a kid. But come forward a few years and my memories are not so sweet. Playing in youth leagues and then in high school, I was never very good. When I got to Boston College, my game improved, not so much in the gym as on the playground where most of the players were Black. No need to tell here the next thirty years of my hoop history.

So probably nostalgia, but also, I think, faith in muscle memory, in embodiment. If my verbal and visual memories were slipping away, if Otherworld enervated me, muscle memory would have to connect the diseased octogenarian to the healthy youth. My prostate cancer should not interfere with my shooting, so I counted on physical continuity despite loose skin where muscles used to be. If my muscles remembered, most were too weak to respond. Now they are being strengthened. I will never remember birthdays better, but with a lot of repetition muscle memory is coming back and my shooting is improving.

What else brought me to the basket, I wondered? The basket was stable, always the same dimensions, always the same height, but that couldn’t be the attraction. Not other players because I’ll never be able to compete. Not the language of hoop because I am almost always shooting by myself. Not the sunny California weather because I’d much rather be shooting inside with no wind and no sun to interfere. Maybe I came to the court to avoid the table, the competition there, the losses even if they did not outnumber the wins. Shooting by myself, I was like myself as a kid practicing passing like Keever, bouncing the ball off the walls to myself, nobody else involved, no losses. I had not lost my prostate, but I had lost some faith in myself on Otherworld.

Wondering away about my unlikely return to shooting, my mind wandering away from the obvious, I hit on the ball. It’s not the shooting that took me back to basketball--it’s owning the ball! As the point guard like Keever, I “owned” the ball when playing. No one was going to take it away, and I decided when and where to give it away, to pass it. I was in control of play, at least on offense. In the last seconds of a close game, my decision about what to do with the ball often meant winning or losing. “Mine,” I used to tell my teammates, short for “the ball and the game are in my hands.”

“Mine” bled outside the court. When I used to travel back and forth to Greece every summer and play pick-up on playgrounds there, the point guard always brought my ball in my carry-on. Fully inflated because the first time I took the air out I had trouble finding a place in Athens that could inflate the ball with the needle I had. I brought my ball because the Greeks always had cheap lumpy ones—and because dribbling and shooting my own familiar ball gave me a slight advantage. My Greek wives questioned my taking up space that could have been used to bring back olive oil and other edibles. But I resisted, and after many trips across the Atlantic my ball became more than a ball. For me, who used to be nervous about long flights over water, my ball came to seem like a talisman, a good luck charm, a guarantor of a safe flight. My wives couldn’t deny that it worked. I never had to use my ball as a flotation device, and I never lost my ball, safely tucked between my feet.

For decades, I claimed, erroneously of course, that I didn’t dream. I also had little truck with the unconscious, even though literature often did. I believed in the conscious and the pre-conscious, the body’s lucid mind. Telling my wives that the ball was a talisman was a joke, but repeated usage of “talisman” somehow gave the irrational a basis, at least in my mind if not in objective reality. I was not really superstitious. I liked the word itself. For me, it combined ancient Greek “telos,” meaning end or completion, and English “man.” Talisman was much better than charm or amulet.

Flash forward 30 years. Among all the things that I forgot over those decades, why did I remember “talisman”? I have to wonder: Did I buy a ball as an under-conscious talisman against my cancer? If that’s the case, do I have to keep shooting the ball to make its luck work? Or is owning the ball enough? On the night I brought it home, before my partner came to bed, I placed the ball between our pillows. I told her I always slept with my ball, but she wouldn’t believe me. Right now the ball is resting in our only chair, right across from the couch where I’m typing this. We found the chair on the sidewalk and will leave it there, along with a lot of other things, when we move from California. We travel light, two suitcases each on the flight from London here. I wonder if I will take my ball on our next flight across wide water.

Here’s another detail I wonder about. I could have bought a Wilson or a Nike or some other brand. Maybe not a Wilson because I wasn’t planning to talk to my ball as Tom Hanks does in Castaway. I chose a Spalding, probably because it used to be the NBA ball, possibly because Spaulding was my grandfather’s name. Not just any ball, then, but one that connected me with language—if not with muscles--to my past.

The more I wonder about buying my ball, the more I wonder about “wonder.” Call it meta-wondering. Could a cancer diagnosis cause one—this one, in fact—to engage in improbable and possibly irrational behavior, symbolic or otherwise, and then wonder why? I’ve said that in the past I’ve played sports to surprise myself. Buying that ball surprised me. Did I buy it to shoot it or to own it—or to surprise me, to demonstrate to myself that I was capable of doing something unlikely? That is, an 80-year-old man with cancer buying a ball that will last years after his death. An improbable action but, if wondered about long enough, that action could possess a hidden likelihood that I might find. Find or imagine? Another question to wonder about. In The Moviegoer, Percy has his narrator Binx talk about living in Gentilly: “And there I have lived ever since, solitary and in wonder, wondering day and night, never a moment without wonder.”

Why “wondering”? A question for me, but probably not for you, so I’ll move on to two actions I performed. First, I did a word search for “wonder” in the manuscript of these writings. The word pops up a lot, in almost every piece but moreso after my cancer diagnosis and my vision of Otherworld. “Signs are taken for wonders,” says the old man in Eliot’s “Gerontion.” I know my diagnosis is no wonder, and yet it seems to have elicited considerable wondering—and wondering, I now feel, could be a prelude to imagining, to fictionalizing. Perhaps “wondering” should be added to Percy’s “waiting and watching.” He said, after all, that the wayfarer “is open to signs.” Wondering while wandering.

My second action: as is my practice when wondering, I checked the etymology of “wonder” as a verb. In Old English one meaning of “wonder” was “magnify.” Maybe the act of wondering about something does not just display curiosity but also magnifies that something. Even if one’s curiosity is never satisfied—especially if it’s not satisfied--the something that one wonders about would be given a mysterious significance. Like some books, like my ball.

“Action Writing”

In 1975, I reviewed in the New York Times Book Review Russell Banks’s first book, Searching for Survivors, a collection of stories published by Fiction Collective, an experimental small literary press. Banks was 35. I was 31.

When Banks was in his 60s and famous, he came to Cincinnati’s Mercantile Library to give a reading. Before the reading, he was encircled by a group of 10 or so admirers sipping wine. I pushed in, affected a boorish tone, and said, “Are you Russell Banks? I’m Tom LeClair, and I discovered you.” The admirers were taken aback, but not Banks who laughed and assured them, “Yes, yes, he’s right. He gave my first book a positive review in the Times.” We chatted for a minute, about what I don’t recall, and I let him get back to his other admirers.

Banks died in 2023. Now I’m reading his just published posthumous book of stories, American Spirits. Although our only personal connection was that minute in Cincinnati, I miss Banks. For me as a novelist, he was an exemplar--for the variety of forms he worked in and for his unusual loyalty to and sympathy with his struggling small-town people, my Vermont cousins to whom I have little attended. We are unlikely to see again his working-class, not academicotheoretical, progressivism.

I was sad when I learned of Banks’s death from cancer a year ago, but now thinking about his death adds to my anxiety about my own possible death from cancer even though that event may be years in arriving. This is embarrassing to admit, this memento mori narcissism.

But perhaps there are reasons for this negative self-indulgence, what Ahab calls “the little lower layer.” Several years ago, I was asked to write a long advance obituary of Don DeLillo for an online magazine. Since I count him as both an artistic model and a friend, the writing was difficult. That obituary was the only thing I’ve ever written that I never wanted to see published. I wanted him to keep writing more novels though, like Banks, DeLillo was into his 80s. Now Banks is dead, and DeLillo has said his final novel is The Silence, published in 2022. When I visited him a year ago, in his study things were piled on his old manual typewriter. He said he doesn’t read fiction, say nothing about writing it. Around his study were small scraps of paper, notes to himself I assumed.

The man whom Ahab calls his “pilot,” the Parsee named Fedallah, tells Ahab near the end of Moby-Dick that “I shall still go before thee.” The prophecy comes immediately true when Ahab sees Fedallah fastened to the whale with tangled lines. Very soon Fedallah’s prophecy of Ahab’s death also comes true. Banks and DeLillo, two “pilots” or guides born before me, have been silenced before me. Are they my Fedallahs? Are Fedallahs reverse talismans, not insurers of safe living but predictors of imminent dying?

Two other novelist friends, Jerome Charyn and Joseph McElroy, were born even earlier than Banks and DeLillo. Can I take comfort because Charyn and McElroy have somewhat improbably kept writing? Perhaps they, not Banks and DeLillo, are my Fedallahs. They are my friends, I don’t want them to be “other guys,” the people with a fate worse than my own that I described in “Otherworld,” and yet I also do not want to go before them.

Since I believe these admissions and questions will induce cringes from just about anyone still reading, they raise two other questions. Have I taken Moby-Dick too personally? Probably. I’m not the captain of a whaling ship. I don’t believe in prophecy. I know the older don’t always go before the younger. The second question is more troublesome. I’ll put it in the present tense: why am I writing what you are reading now? I wonder if I’m admitting my self-indulgence and superstition to be a “pilot,” to show readers what just a cancer diagnosis—even one with a likely decent prognosis--can do to a mind that I thought was lucid and reliable, to emotions I felt were normal. I’m not terminally and desperately ill like the protagonist of Banks’s previous novel, Foregone, who in his last day alive can’t seem to stop confessing and criticizing himself for confessing. I’m not literally living on Otherworld, though it does seem to live in me. Yes, death has entered like a swimming sperm but who knows how long it will take to mature.

Maybe there’s the lowest layer. While waiting these slow months after radiation for my first PSA test, perhaps I’m writing to be writing, an act of magical acting. If my pilots are no longer writing, at least I can continue tapping the keyboard, the Key-board. This is not writing to fix pre-radiation fears on the page, discussed in “Living, Leaving.” It’s not writing attempting to resolve habitual wondering, as in “The Ball.” No, this writing here may be psychologically necessary daily activity, like driving for Michael Keever. Possible repetition of content and probable alienation of readers are largely irrelevant to this run of writing.

Maybe what you are reading is not so much a confessional essay as it is action writing, like action painting. It’s been said that action painting came from the body, an expression of physical knowledge and needs. Perhaps this writing of mine, though not splashed on the page, comes from the athlete’s body. In my case the body’s old activities of throwing balls and hitting balls. Do or die. Run or done. Move or mourn. Write on and on and on, as the motto of Terminal Tours says. My autoreview of myself? Compulsive writing about writing—meta-writing like meta-wondering—could be a disorderly consequence of experiencing Otherworld.

I don’t know, not really. I do know that, like the ball, action writing has for me a “mysterious significance,” perhaps significant because mysterious—like no-look passing, like no-knowledge dying. Three pages from the end of The Year of Magical Thinking, in which Didion records her fantasies of bringing back her dead husband, she writes: “I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account.”

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus says of the ever-active Sisyphus, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Unlike the mythical figure, I know that my action will one day end. Until then, perhaps I should be happy that cancer has given me something—something new—to write about even if it is again and again.

When not writing on and on, I have now finished reading Banks’s three stories, oddly old fashioned in their narration, as if his northern New York imagined town of Sam Dent were Winesburg, Ohio. The stories are also derivative. One story relocates and closely reworks a 2018 California murder of adopted Black children and the suicide of their two white “mothers.” Another takes many of its details from a north country 2020 kidnap by Canadians of two American grandparents in a drug deal gone bad. The third also seems to have been inspired by a local upstate 2020 murder resulting from a dispute about hunting rights on land once owned by the victim’s family. I’d like to think the characters are the ghosts—the spirits—still circulating from Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which was set in upstate New York and heavily influenced by a murder there. But because the language of Banks’s MAGA narrators is dull, even banal, American Spirits seems like footnotes or endnotes to a vigorous career.

Once I looked into the stories’ likely factual sources (the first was obvious), I reluctantly concluded that even the famous novelist Russell Banks near the end of his life may have been writing to keep writing. Not his usual long fiction but linked facts and fictions—like Passing Down.

In David Foster Wallace’s story “The Depressed Person,” that suicidal person, as well as the narration, seems to endlessly spiral inward and downward in self-recrimination and self-sabotage. The same happens in Banks’s Foregone whose protagonist says he’s telling his increasingly muddled story trying to stay alive. If I stop writing down my words here—right here before the next clause--will I show that I’m no longer writing to keep writing to keep living? Playing to keep playing. Probably not. But it does occur to me that this action writing of mine may recall what Keever says is the end of running the suicides that finishes only when one of the running players can run no more, goes down on the gym floor, and vomits.

The longest I ever waited in a TSA line was 75 minutes at JFK. I wasn’t worried, like some around me, about missing my flight because, as always, I got to the airport earlier than recommended. What did worry me was being in such close proximity to travelers not wearing masks. I was going to Greece, and I didn’t want a repeat of my COVID experience there. I didn’t have to wait long for my flight (on which few passengers were masked), but I’d have to wait a few days or take a COVID test to see if the TSA line or the Delta flight had infected me.

Now that my radiation treatments are finished, I have to wait three months and take a PSA test to see if the radiation has begun to succeed. Feeling decelerated by the otherworldly machinery, I know waiting will be long and slow—and sluggish like weighting. Death had entered. Imaging showed it, but no imaging can determine if it has exited, the cancer eradicated by the rays. Radiation is mysterious. It has physical (and psychological) effects, but it’s not physical like the Whipple—no cutting of the body, no removal of organs, no scar, no immediate resolution. Radiation is more like a COVID hotel stretched from two weeks to a waiting time unknown in Otherworld.

None of my after effects--such as frequency and urgency and pain of urination--would indicate success or failure. Only a future PSA test, which should show my previously high score much lower, will resolve the mystery—but only temporarily. I will have to wait again, and not just for three months. I will need to take a PSA test three months after the first, and then another three months after that, one or two more after that, and then every six months, ad infinitum or ad terminum. Waiting for the PSA will be like standing in a slow-moving, never-ending TSA line. But maybe this run of tests will not be just a series but a sequence showing ever lower results, a sequence leading to a conclusion.

I can go through TSA lines in the next few months without a PSA test but should pass more than one before packing my two suitcases, leaving the TSA behind, and be moving to some city outside California and the USA. A character in Passing On seems to improve after her cancer diagnosis by moving constantly, Turkey to Egypt to India to France to Greece, but that was a fantasy dedicated to a dying friend and inveterate traveler. I don’t particularly like to travel—the TSA, the bad movies, the jet lag, the hotel rooms, eating every meal out. By “moving” I mean residing elsewhere. I’m not afraid of being killed by California drivers or murdered by some gun-crazed American. I’m too old to be much affected by USA pollution and supersized meals. But I still want to move—to a city where I won’t have to drive.

So what is it that urges this cancer patient beyond the TSA? Once again—maybe strangely again--I rely on Keever as my navigator, not on his knowledge (as in “Passing Strange”) but on his ignorance in Passing Off, experience I wish to imitate. Residing in Athens where he didn’t speak the language and couldn’t read the alphabet, he had to rely on his perceptions, silent sensory data rather than linguistic communications. Moving through the world outside the gym, he employed the sharp non-verbal awareness that he trained himself to have when playing. His perception-reliant understanding of Greek culture and behavior is often superficial and sometimes mistaken, but he can also sense things his language-dependent wife cannot.

For many years living off and on in Athens, I had and even tried hard to preserve Keever’s athletic ignorance, his reliance on his embodiment. I believed I was apprehending and appreciating more of the textures of life that way, and non-verbal consciousness was a relief from my word immersion in the USA. But I gradually learned to understand some spoken and written Greek, so my sensory awareness of the Greek environment dimmed. As a substitute, I investigated the ancient Greek origins of contemporary Greek and English words. That is, those old athletes’ literal and concrete roots that disappeared in modern language.

“Prostate,” for example, came from the word for “ruler,” someone “standing in front” (because, looking up, the gland is in front of the bladder). “Metastasize” has within it the contemporary Greek word used for bus stop and an old root, also in metaphor, meaning “change,” particularly change places. When I heard Greeks, I was always listening for their words’ athletic—that is, concrete, physical—past. That active linguistic uncovering was my replacement for Keever’s careful looking outside the USA. Now I want to go to some new and strange city to renew my ignorance.

The ancient Greek word “athlete” meant someone who engaged in a contest. Basketball contests in Keever’s Greece were often affected by actions beyond the floor—fans throwing objects, clubs manipulating temperature, a heat wave, pollution in the Athens basin. And Keever felt that the streets of Athens were like contests in the gym. Pedestrians crowding him and his family on the sidewalks, fanatics at a political rally impeding his trip home, drivers taking suicidal and murderous chances on the highways. He had to be perceptually sharp because he was so frequently in competition with others and their surprises.

While I don’t seek the kind of dramatic contests with foreign natives that Keever had, I have felt as an outsider a low level of friction, if not precisely competition. The natives do not understand what I’m asking and I don’t understand what they are telling me. Because I’m an outsider, Greeks at the farmer’s market believe I can be easily cheated. I need to be alert. In Greece I am sometimes referred to as an “Amerikanaki,” meaning “little American,” naïve, childlike. Despite my desire to enjoy the differences a foreign land offers, I often found myself at odds with it. This friction increases the intensity of the relationship—and even sometimes leads to understanding, not just frustration. An athlete away from home wins some, loses some.

Living so completely in his body in Athens, in an almost constant state of excitation, Keever loses American inhibitions and becomes involved with a Greek woman not his wife. At 80, I’m not interested in changing partners, but there is something erotic about being a body in another country, a sense of physical stimulation and possibility. This I know from my own past. When I first lived outside the USA, I left my American wife for a Greek student, whom I later married. Twenty years later, she was left for a Greek woman I met at a hotel pool in Athens. And now my partner is a Polish woman I met by accident in an Athens café. Changing partners will not be my future, just a memory from the past stimulated by the new.

Outside the USA, Keever was able to pretend to be someone he was not and reaped many benefits from his pretence. When his fake identity as Kybernos was exposed, he abandoned it and disguised himself as a tall tourist to evade the authorities that would keep him from leaving the country. In Greece, I have enjoyed being mistaken for a native, asked for directions, for example, in Greek. I don’t attempt to pass myself off as Greek as Keever initially did, but I like slipping unnoticed through Greek lives, being able to observe as if I were a fellow native, not a largely ignorant tourist or temporary resident. I don’t attempt to exploit my invisibility as a character does in DeLillo’s novel set in Greece, The Names. I don’t see invisibility as a contest exactly but more of a harmless game that helps give me access to the particulars of life outside the USA.

There are many serious advantages from residing in another country, a different culture. I’ve mentioned none of them. What I’ve described are subtle but constant personal pleasures, close to unconscious much of the time. I fear cancer will deprive me of these pleasures I associate with being like Key, an athlete moving to and moving in a large foreign city, one that does not remind me so much as the USA does of Otherworld.

My problem: I can get periodic PSA tests in any country, but I would not feel secure living abroad because I would constantly worry that the next PSA test would require me to uproot my expat life and return to the USA for further medical treatment. I would not be residing, I’d again be waiting, waiting to leave. So already, even before my first PSA test, I have begun to wonder how long I will have to wait to safely leave the USA, how many favorable PSA tests it will take before I can confidently go to the airport, check in my two big suitcases, stand in the TSA line, pass through the TSA X-ray machine with its reminder of my radiation, and then be on my way to some city and country where I will every day feel like an athlete when I walk outside my new residence.

“Wayfaring”

Still waiting for my first PSA test, I asked my former wife to send me my dissertation if it remained in her Brooklyn bookshelves. Death had entered. Maybe it had stayed. I wanted to see what I thought about it more than fifty years ago when I wrote “Final Words” about five then contemporary (now all dead) novelists. More backward thinking, back before the influences of cities of words.

My writing was not as grad-student pedantic as I feared. I was up on the work of then current thanatologists and older Existential philosophers. The analysis of five focal books was skilled and thorough for a kid, and even ventured into critical judgments. But most of the novels were about evasion of death, either literal dying or thinking about it. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, with its adoption of science fiction as a response to mass death, was the most inventively evasive. Barth’s protagonist in The Floating Opera plays with the elaborate idea of blowing up a riverboat with himself aboard as a response to his father’s suicide. In Hawkes’s Second Skin the protagonist and narrator creates a second, innocent identity to cover up his guilt in others’ deaths. Sebastian Dangerfield in J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man practices manic hedonism to evade his “case of death.” One way or another, the characters are clownish, assertions of the ancient comic faith that no matter how tragic life is one may be able to survive it for a while and even enjoy it if one has enough energy and ingenuity. “Run, run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.”

Of the five, only Walker Percy interests me now. To write about his novels, I had read all his non-fictional prose in which he often discusses Kierkegaard and Heidegger, Camus and Sartre. Here was a writer with more weight. After I received my degree, I decided to write a book about him. I read a lot of Kierkegaard, Being and Time, Gabriel Marcel’s The Mystery of Being and Homo Viator. I corresponded with Percy, and even had a book contract, but then another critic published the study I had begun to write.

I had already written chapters on Percy’s first two novels. Death has entered both The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman, as a failed suicide in the first, as a character’s terminal disease in the second. How the protagonists respond to death posed an interesting problem for Percy, who was a Catholic. How to balance the strong influence of the secular Heidegger with the possibility of salvation? Basically, Percy followed Heidegger on accepting—even embracing--one’s death as an “opening” to an authentic existence. Eventually that existence could include religious faith. In The Moviegoer, the protagonist, wounded in Korea, uses this opening to begin a search for a life unlike that of his traditional Southern family sunk in the malaise of what Heidegger called “everydayness.” In The Last Gentleman two main characters offer dueling responses to a terminally ill youth. One attempts to “tranquillize” (Heidegger again) the boy, hide his death from him; the other character, a suicidal pathologist, takes extreme measures to have the boy accept his dying—though it doesn’t give him much time to be authentic.

Along with his philosophical writings, Percy wrote a number of essays about language, the limits of clichés, the need to revitalize old words in the presence of death and alienation. The Moviegoer uses “search”; the keyword in The Last Gentleman is “quest.” Both seem rather hackneyed to me, but another word Percy often used in his non-fiction—a word I’d long forgotten—does speak to me now: “wayfarer.” Somewhat archaic and with a hint of the religious about it, wayfarer means “one who travels, primarily on foot.” When I checked English language uses, I often found the suggestion of wandering, rambling, passing through, exploring but without a definite purpose. For Percy, the person who passes the Heideggerian test of accepting his or her mortality separates from all the others who evade this fact (“Das Man”) and becomes a wayfarer who is radically open to the world, constantly alert to its concrete mysteries, and always ready to receive what Percy calls “the message in the bottle,” some surprising revelation that will illuminate a person’s life and, perhaps, make it authentic.

Maybe my cancer diagnosis and my speck sense of Otherworld are a Heideggerian opening. Could Percy be my guide? He said the wayfarer is a “waiter and watcher.” I’m definitely waiting. Maybe instead of waiting at home to resume the everyday life I was living, I should be wayfaring or, at least, think of myself as a wayfarer. The wayfarer is also waiting, but on the move. Walking, not running like Donleavy’s gingerbread man or like Keever’s hoopsters. For Percy, the wayfarer is not searching or questing for some predetermined end but watching while waiting for some future experience beyond the ordinary. Rebecca Solnit would be a good example, her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Or further back, Thoreau’s Walking. The wayfarer is not necessarily a nature watcher, more like an urban flaneur. The wayfarer is also not on a journey, that cliché in nearly every social media post and celebrity interview. “Journey” implies a future end, suggests a purpose. The wayfarer, what Marcel called “homo viator,” proceeds with the hope he or she will happen upon the mysterious.

Happening onto the word “wayfaring” fifty years after I had forgotten it was like finding Percy’s message in a bottle. The unlikelihood of the recovery appealed to me. It might be a reappearance of my luck. I know a message in a bottle could be meaningless, but finding the bottle, Percy said, was itself a sign of mysteriousness to which one should be open and alert. Wayfaring was a newly discovered word that confirmed an old athletic faith in movement, time spent in acting not in waiting still, not passing time. Wayfaring would mean permanent process, the perception of novelty, the possibility of epiphany, even, I suppose, an absurdly lucky Kierkegaardian jump back into faith.

First step: get out of my home.

Second step: get out of my car.

Next step: remains to be seen, remains to be taken.