[Looking at discussions of Big Books, would-be monsterpieces, I kept seeing references to Jim Gauer’s 715-page Novel Explosives published in 2016 by Zerogram. Reading it, I found a reference to Pynchon. I make some references to him in the following review. You might be interested].
Novel Explosives is bigger than its page count implies, for the pages have narrow margins, rather small print, page-long paragraphs, and dialogue rarely set off in conventional fashion. Rather than exploding, the pages of Novel Explosives seem to be imploding into a dense black hole of print. Not the usual expansive method of most monsterpieces but appropriate for its initial first-person narrator who wakes up in a Mexican hotel with a knot on his head and with no memory of who he is or why he is where he is, a blank hole. His mirror suggests he may be in his mid-40s. His room furnishes few clues, but one is useful, a debit card in the name of Alvaro de Campos, one of many pseudonyms used by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. A one-time poet, the narrator knows Pessoa’s work but not who he, the narrator, actually is, the first of many improbabilities that he accepts but the reader may not. Although amnesia used to be a cliched device of soap opera plotting, Gauer doesn’t care, for it allows him many surprises as the narrator investigates his possible identity. But at first, the pages are filled with repetitious and therefore implosive and futile thinking.
Coincidence soon adds to improbability: a woman the narrator sees from his hotel window approaches him in a café and offers to help him identify the PIN to the debit card at a nearby bank where her uncle is the manager. He is happy to remind the narrator that he has twenty million dollars worth of Swiss francs and Chinese yuan in his account plus some gold bars in the vault, all of which the narrator seems to have brought in a duffel bag. The money may explain why the first-person narration had previously shifted to a bombastic and insufferable Los Angeles venture capitalist disgusted with his work and his existence. As the VC tries to write his life story, his part of the novel does explode with manic jargon-filled explanations of how his industry works, producing “absolute fictions” that often explode into gigantic losses for investors.
More extravagantly detailed inside information, from the illegal drug business, follows when the novel shifts to third-person narration about a couple of low-level dealers and debt-collectors—Ray and Gene--pursuing a man who has fled to Juarez with a lot of money their boss, Gomez, believes belongs to him. Ray learns this fugitive’s code name is “the Poet,” so after about 300 pages some of the book’s mysteries are clarified. The former poet called de Campos is the former poet VC (nameless but once identified as “JG,” the initials of the author who was a venture capitalist) who has unwittingly participated in an investment scam by Gomez, the high-end money launderer who employs the hit men. Now Gomez wants a share of the VC’s profit. Threatened with exposure and bodily harm, he withdraws the cash, follows directions to El Paso, crosses to Juarez—and eventually ends up in Guanajuato with the knot on his head. Thus ends the first half of the novel that takes place between April 13 and April 20, 2009, a period of implosion for the man with no names.
If you’re thinking, “This sounds like a movie,” you’d be right. But no movie would have the extended philosophical and literary ruminations of de Campos in Guanajuato, the extensive mathematical and financial lectures of the VC, or the drug-exfoliated meditations of Ray the Iraq war veteran. The movie might show the maze-like streets, poverty, and violence of Juarez, where Ray gets carved up by a rival gang, or the car chase when Ray and Gene escape from Mexico, but the movie would not have the novel’s voiceover, many pages of a sometimes arch harangue on the history of Mexican cartels and their effects, a rant that seems to come from an occasional super-narrator who is particularly knowledgeable about weapons and explosives. Written during a time when telenovelas in Mexico and drug-smuggling movies in America were popular, Novel Explosives may be an attack on those media, offering “real” novel information left out of films.
On page 578, after the VC has survived a couple of crossfires, a double-cross, changes in gang loyalties, and double substance abuse, he says that he’s “in the middle of a B-thriller plot, shot in black and white from an improvised script, using live ammunition and imaginary film stock, involving drug lords and gunmen and possibly stolen loot, and a femme fatale. . . .” In fact, though, in the second half of Novel Explosives action slows down, gradually implodes, basically ends with all the characters in the same room--and the reader concludes the “movie” is just a pretext (literally “preceding” Gauer’s text) for him to create a book of riffs that occur, mostly, in the mind of the VC and in the somewhat less febrile consciousness of Ray. Initial improbability of plot and thought explodes into the novel’s discourse. The riffs resemble nothing less than the loopy routines that make up Part IV, “The Counterforce,” in Gravity’s Rainbow. When the VC is under mortal threat in Mexico, Gauer riffs with his character’s knowledge--of science, both theoretical and practical; of weapons, traditional and “novel”; of poetry and philosophy, recent and old—to radically slow down the VC’s consciousness, “time dragging around at an absolute crawl,” when quick thinking might be more likely.
For Gauer, events are occasions for language he will make happen at the pace he chooses. The riffs are improbably lengthy. Gauer doesn’t seem to care. Sometimes the riffs are humorous. Other times they offer unique and maybe even profound ways to think about the thinking that the VC is supposedly doing. Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard often get the VC’s mind to whirling round and round, backward and forward—a recurrent theme in the novel. Mathematics, relativity, and quantum mechanics also create loops. For all I know (for sure), Gauer may be inventing some of the more exotic sources for his riffs. But what I do know is that they become repetitive, not just their digressive, associative structure but their material. When Gauer’s focus shifts to the mind of Ray, the riffs are just as frequent but more banal, the thinking of a former soldier suffering from blood loss. At least some of Ray’s wandering thoughts are caused by physical reality, the knife wounds on his chest.
What follows is a brief excerpt from the VC’s thinking (about implosion) while in the middle of a firefight between narcos and the police. Notice the present tense, as if the VC is having these thoughts when hunkered down in a car. The “we” and the “you” increase the unreality of this patch of thinking, interesting as the concepts may be.
What’s happening to me here, however, is a common enough occurrence, an instance of stumbling upon a spacetime boundary, and reaching what cosmologists call the event horizon, where everything freezes in a redshift tableau; we don’t need to be wandering around the General Relativity field equations, searching for enough true degeneracy pressure to keep things from literally just totally collapsing, to be able to spot the signs of a spacetime deformity, or to know what it feels like when a place implodes; I’ll tell you one thing, you ever go through this, you won’t care at all that it can’t be considered a literal implosion.
As in Pynchon’s Book IV, the climax of Novel Explosives comes with the launch of a rocket, in this case a shoulder-held with a thermobaric pay load, a “novel explosive.” Time and the novel reach their slowest state as Gauer describes over many pages the sequences of nanoseconds involved in the thermobaric process and its effect, which monstrously exceeds traditional weapons’ power to kill humans. The pages are not a psychological riff of a stressed or damaged consciousness but a set of technological facts about the physical damage such weapons inflict. Given some of Gauer’s comments on environmental damage in Novel Explosives, I think its thermobaric explosive is the summary symbol of humans’ destruction of the planet, as rocket-delivered nuclear weapons were for Pynchon. The poverty and drugs and violence of Juarez represent a slow-acting past. The thermobaric weapon is the fast thermobarbaric future.
Novel Explosives definitely practices what I used to call “the art of excess.” The VC’s term is “information-excess absorption overload.” But is the novel a monstrosity and monsterpiece? Gauer occasionally uses the word “monsters,” usually referring to drug cartels and investment cartels. But three alternating narrative strands are not all that formally provocative or inventively monstrous. True, the discourse is almost always monstrously hyperdeveloped, massive passages of worldly information, long digressions of consciousness back-tracking, forward-imagining, and etymology-tracing. But a monsterpiece? My term is meant to echo “masterpiece.” I don’t get that echo with Novel Explosives. It’s a first novel (as well as an only novel). Pynchon, author of V., is mentioned. Gaddis’s The Recognitions is longer. DeLillo’s Americana bears some similarities. But despite their length and excesses, these three first novels have an underlying aesthetic discipline and proportion. Perhaps they are what Gauer aims to explode, but the page upon page of dense and often context-trivial information frequently exist to no point except, it seems, to flaunt the author’s arcane knowledge. Even more off-putting: Gauer delivers culturally important information in the second person with a hectoring tone of condescension, suggesting “you” readers should have known all along these facts about capitalism and drugs and the relation between the two. Readers are also expected to recognize the relevance of the many allusions to Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, the poets whose work the VC has memorized (see the list on 371), and even some quotes from—of all works!—Pound’s obscure Cantos. These references Gauer may have dropped in to demonstrate that he could have written a different book, one more conventionally artful. But he has chosen to weaponize the novel form—not to kill but, possibly, to save humans from themselves.
Novel Explosives is a strange combination--the density of Gauer’s journalistic information and the frequency of his high culture references, his altruism and narcissism. Gauer obviously empathizes with impoverished Mexicans and the dump dwellers of Third World cities, but there’s another strange--and estranging—quality of the novel: no such individuals have roles in the book. Although Gauer describes himself as a Marxist, the poet and the VC, one and the same, hog the stage, and the workers are an off-stage class of victims. This lack is a crucial difference between Gauer and Pynchon, who includes individual members of the “preterite.”
Gauer has said he never intended to publish Novel Explosives (which reminds me to look up Lawrence’s exact phrasing: “Never trust the teller, trust the tale.”). Gauer’s assertion might be true. The novel could be taken as the outpouring, the explosion, of a prodigal amateur or over-stimulated hobbyist because Novel Explosives has certain qualities of the probably unpublishable. It’s partly autobiographical, partly self-congratulating, and partly politically enraged (like Roberto Bolano in 2066). Add in the possible influences of Hunter Thompson’s self-asserting gonzo methods, of Burroughs (referred to in the novel), and maybe of Vollmann’s appearances in his own fictions—and you may have a drawer-bound manuscript.
Of published novels I consider monsterpieces, Novel Explosives is probably closest to Infinite Jest—its density of information about the tennis academy and AA meetings, its pleasure in the characters’ bullshitting about anything or nothing, its joy in specialized, often technical languages. Gauer’s de Campos thinks language is “the stuff out of which we are mostly made.” In his discussion with a learned hermit, the poet hears numerous scientific words about abnormal language use including “circumstantiality.” Gauer quotes Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” What Gauer can say about almost anything seems limitless, but his “lexical tangentiality” and “logocentric derailment” and “logorrhea” (all from the hermit’s conversation) limit his readership and--more importantly and unfortunately--limit a rhetorically effective communication of his political passions. Gauer frequently quotes Kierkegaard on “patience.” I believe that I’m unusually patient with novelists who create radical forms of excess, but I admit to skimming and skimping some of Gauer’s longest riffs, particularly the ones about weapons even though I owned a pistol, a shotgun, and two rifles when I was sixteen. If you go to a shooting range every weekend, you may feel differently about Novel Explosives.
At the novel’s beginning, the poet is self-cancelling. By the end of Novel Explosives, it seems self-defeating. Not like a Beckett novel with its epistemological and ontological nihilism, but like, say, a Grapes of Wrath so encyclopedic about kinds of dust and makes of jalopies that no one would finish it. Monsterpieces that have the masterpiece echo, mature works such as Gravity’s Rainbow, J R, and Underworld, use Brechtian alienation effects and recondite information to solicit new ways of thinking from readers. Gauer often appears to be just alienating readers that he considers too dumb or too comfortable to be solicited. Maybe he’d associate soliciting readers with prostituting his art. Intentionally, aggressively, and repeatedly unsolicitous, even anti-solicitous, Novel Explosives is a daredevil fiction. I’m more impressed with the author’s risk than the book itself. You don’t run much risk giving it a try, testing your patience. You’re not the one jumping your motorcycle over 50 crushed cars. Or change the metaphor: Novel Explosives is like one of those monster truck shows where huge and noisy machines, Frankensteins on four wheels, drive round and round crushing cars. In those performances, the audience risks being hit by exploding car parts. You don’t want to sit too close. Gauer keeps you at a distance.