Monsterpieces: LeClair

Monsterpieces: LeClair

[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.