Category: Books

Kelly Link‘s short stories, many of them collected in the volume Stranger Things Happen, are marvelous in ways that almost entirely defy description (well, at least they defy my powers of description). I could call these stories surreal, I could call them quirky; both adjectives are accurate, but they are both too bland, and have been overused too much, to give an accurate impression of the singularity of Link’s prose, and the acuteness of her vision. All her stories spell out compelling dreamlike scenarios, with absurdist frameworks, much humor in the details, and undercurrents of dread which nonetheless never gain the upper hand. They are disturbing and perverse in the ways that human desires are nearly always disturbing and perverse, if we look at them honestly and clearly enough; except that such phrases tend to suggest a kind of existential anguish and heaviness that is entirely absent from these stories; they have, instead, a childlike openness (they are in a certain way reminiscent of children’s literature, sort of like a Girl’s Own Adventure), which is also an almost inhuman, or superhuman, lightness, frivolity, and grace (I mean this as the highest possible compliment). Gender certainly has something to do with all this; I cannot imagine these stories, or anything like them, being written by a man, although there is nothing about them that is stereotypically “feminine.” But that is also an inadequate, although accurate, comment. The only comparison I can think of to Kelly Link is Jane Bowles. Actually, Link is not anything like Bowles at all, except for one thing: they both have a sense of humor that is somehow transcendental, that is to say, at the limits of possible understanding, not arising out of the situations being described, but somehow presupposed by those situations instead. I am not sure that I am making sense at all, but it is rare that a fiction writer, especially one I find so wonderful, leaves me so much at a loss for words.

John Crowley’s early novel Engine Summer (most easily available, with two other short novels, in the collection Otherwise) is a beautiful book whose seeming simplicity contains (conceals? or better, enables) great depth and affective power. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel, set in a future when humanity’s great technologies have crashed and burned, and various semi-utopian communities and isolated individuals or small groups survive and make their lives in the ruins, in a world that has been mostly reclaimed by nature, but also amidst the detritus of all that lost technology – and sometimes with bits and pieces of that technology that still seem to work, more or less. In the setting, the novel is basically a young man’s coming of age narrative; except that it’s also many other things at the same time: an exploration of different modes of life, different cultures, different values, different ways of relating to time and memory; and a reflection on the ways of negotiating these differences; and a meta-narrative about the ways that stories get told, and narratives organized, and about how the telling of stories relates to the lived experience those stories are about and which they claim to recount; and a bit of experimentation with psychedelic dislocation; and a meditation on love, pain, and loss, and irreparability; and a kind of lyric in prose, whose language and rhythms are always shimmering at the limits of the speakable and thinkable, even as they seem so clear and direct, only you can never quite pin them down. This book isn’t like anything else I’ve ever read (except for the only other Crowley novel I have read, the immense and stupendous Little, Big); its mode of thought, and very way of being are quite alien to me, or to anything I usually like; but the radical otherness of Crowley’s writing haunts me, in ways that I cannot account for, aside from on the basis of the beauty of his prose, and his books’ undertows of emotion, somehow mixing melancholy and a sense of having to live with impossibility and failure, with a kind of understated exultation.

Andy Clark‘s Natural-Born Cyborgs is an excellent discussion of what new information technologies mean for us as embodied, intelligent beings. Clark argues, rightly, that fears about “unnatural” cyborgization are unfounded. Human beings have always – as long as we have been human – used prosthetic devices to extend our intelligence. Language is the first and most important such prosthetic device; writing is a second, momentously important one. The list goes on, to include all the “media” (in Marshall McLuhan’s sense) that are woven into the texture of our lives. The point is that such technologies are not mere “tools” in contrast to ourselves as conscious minds who merely “use” those tools. Much of our conscious experience, from the way we “use” our hands and feet to the way we remember things that are not directly present to consciousness until we willfully recall them, is in fact based on “distributed systems” without clear boundaries. Through writing, for instance, we can do mathematical calculations, and create narratives and reasoned arguments, that would be impossible to articulate without pen and paper. The best way to explain this is to say that my intelligence is a distributed system that includes the marks on the sheet of paper (and the hands that make those marks, and the eyes that read them back) as well as the flashings across synapses. The result is that we can master a greater body of material than is literally storable in short-term memory. But this can be extended; looking at my wristwatch in order to know the time is no different, and neither is using software to access knowledge that isn’t always implanted in my physical brain, or using a telephone to talk to somebody thousands of miles away. There is simply no sensible way to draw the line between what we do “naturally” and what we only can do with technological prostheses. If anything, what defines human beings as a species is our “natural” ability to extend our bodies and intelligences – by using “technology”, and by exploiting the extreme “neural plasticity” of our minds to adapt culturally, rather than waiting for genetics, to new circumstances and new ways of being – in ways that other animals cannot. I think that Clark is entirely right in his arguments; it’s ridiculous to say that computers and mobile phones and future developments in virtual reality are “denaturing” and “alienating” us any more than using fire, or speech, or drawing marks in the sand has done. So Natural-Born Cyborgs is a smart and useful book; it is also admirably written by an academic philosopher in a readily accessible style (as is all too rarely the case). At times, the book seems a little thin, because the argument has been drawn out for more pages than is really necessary; but this is only a minor quibble, in light of the book’s many virtues. (Also, it’s nice to see a cognitive philosopher who’s savvy enough to cite William Burroughs and J G Ballard and Warren Ellis).

I went to a great reading tonight by Samuel R. Delany. It was the last in a series of readings this summer sponsored by Clarion West. Delany read a lengthy passage from a novel he has recently finished writing, called This Short Day of Sun and Frost. (The title, he explained, comes from a phrase by Walter Pater). He said that the novel was fantasy, in the manner of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (a book which, I am ashamed to say , I have never read). But there was nothing fantasy-like, or non-naturalistic, about the passage he read. Set in New York in 1992, it was about sex, and sexuality, and AIDS, and mourning, and race, and class, and life, and death… and sex. Brilliant and utterly compelling, with an essential weirdness, and much about desire, and yet thoroughly embedded in the everyday, and in concrete, physical details: a strange and digressive, but naturalistic narrative. Delany is one of our greatest living writers, and it is always an immense pleasure to hear him read, so vividly and powerfully, from his own work.

Travis Jeppesen’s Victims is an oblique, enigmatic, and strangely beautiful short novel, ostensibly about a religious cult whose members self-immolate in the manner of Heaven’s Gate; but the rhetoric and story of the cult is just one of many strands, or languages, or perspectives, flickering through the book in concisely chiseled passages of minimal prose. The book circles around a basic despair at living, but contains everything from mock-nouveau roman close descriptions of next to nothing, to self-reflexive lyrical meditations upon vacancy and pain. It’s as if crystalline fragments of all the genres of contemporary fiction were somehow melded together. The novel was too delicate, too otherworldly for me to find it altogether compelling, but I find it haunting in its very ephemerality, an ignis fatuus I can never quite grab hold of.

Jack O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh is a hardboiled crime novel, and also a meditation on language and writing, and memory and complicity. (Thanks to Ashley Crawford for recommending O’Connell). Like Hammett’s Red Harvest, Word Made Flesh uses the detective genre, and a story about competing gangs in a small city (Personville, sarcastically called Poisonville, in Hammett; Quinsigamond, a kind of dream version of Worcester, Massachusetts, for O’Connell) to convey a hellish vision of power, of a world in which “people are brutalized for the simplest reason of all: because they can be. Because when someone else holds power, they can fuck you over in ways that your imagination has never even considered” (215). But O’Connell replaces Hammett’s gritty realism with a phantasmal irrealism in which violent economic and political power, expressed through horrifying assaults on the body, accompanies, and seem almost interchangeable with, the power (which is also the delusive anti-power) of words and texts. So the violent, noirish plot turns out to involve a quest for a missing book, an Anne Frank-like work of impotent, yet enduring, testimony to a massacre (or worse than a massacre, since it sought to obliterate, not just people, but the memory of those people’s ever having existed). And we encounter such phenomena as a gang of violent terrorists who seek, on philosophical grounds, to eliminate all written language; a parasitic disease that feeds on the language centers of the brain, as well as on the tongue; not to mention a bevy of competing bibliomanes, literary scholars, linguistic theorists, and religious visionaries obsessed with the Word. All in all, a strangely gripping and compelling novel.

I am a sucker for “true crime” books, and Aphrodite Jones is, to my mind, the true mistress of the genre; she does for crime reporting what Jerry Springer does for live television. So I was excited to read Jones’ new book, Red Zone, about the incident in San Francisco a couple of years ago where a woman was mauled to death by a pair of attack dogs belonging to her neighbors. I wasn’t disappointed. As always, Jones delves into the sleaziest and most sensational aspects of the case. She focuses especially on the fantasy menage a trois – maintained through letters, photographs, and drawings – between the lawyer couple who raised the killer dogs and the white supremacist prison inmate who was their legal owner. It’s never clear how much of this was just pornographic fantasy on the part of the three, and how much involved actual incidents and practices – up to and including bestiality – but Jones insinuates where she is short on concrete facts, effectively maintaining a feverish atmosphere for her portrayals. The dog owners come across as arrogant megalomaniacs without a shred of remorse, whose fanatical self-righteousness ultimately leads them into a state of absolute delusion. Jones’ writing, as always, is itself deliriously non-linear, piling on minute details in no comprehensible order until the reader feels lost in a labyrinth of amazement and stupefaction. Her prose style combines the hyperboles of yellow journalism with the plodding repetitiveness of a befuddled court reporter. Occasional sentences take my breath away, they are so brilliantly off: “”To Ana, animals were the only real perfection of nature” (243); “Noel’s act was really quite good, so the prosecutor decided to pull out all the ammunition, to wipe Noel’s charming smile away” (259). I could never myself invent, nor find in even my worst students’ papers, “bad writing” that resonates in quite this way. Aphrodite Jones is a genius of misbegotten prose. Do I need to reiterate how much I love this book, both for its content and its style?

China Mieville gave a reading tonight, as part of the Clarion West series of summer readings in science fiction/speculative fiction. It was quite a treat: China read a chapter from his as yet unfinished new novel, which I am happy to say is set in the fabulous and tragic city of New Crobuzon, twenty years after the events of Perdido Street Station. In a not-yet-published essay, my friend Carl Freedman writes about how Mieville is a great urban writer; he gives an almost Dickensian or Joycean sense of the currents of city life–even though his city, unlike Dickens’ London or Joyce’s Dublin, is entirely imaginary. The background textures of city life were an important part of the power of Perdido Street Station; the subsequent novel, The Scar, though set in the same world, drew us away from New Crobuzon to a very different kind of city, interesting but not as rich (I mean the city was not as rich; the two novels, I feel, are equally rich, in their different ways). China said he hoped to have the novel finished by the end of this year, if not earlier, which would mean a publication date of about a year from now, summer 2004. It was nice to get a tantalizing glimpse of it, while we are waiting.

Maurice Dantec‘s new novel, Villa Vortex (in French only) is a stupendous book of over 800 pages, brilliant and obnoxious, exhilarating and exhausting, radical and reactionary–all of this in ways that are difficult to disentangle, or even to describe coherently. The book starts out (after an introduction in which the narrator informs us that he is already dead) as a kind of police procedural, a cop investigating various gruesome serial killings, against the backdrop of world events from 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) to 2001 (the bombing of the World Trade Center). The cop has more philosophical ruminations than is usual for a police procedural–way too much Eurocentric whining about the decline of Western Civilization for my taste–but for a while it doesn’t seem all that unusual. But then, as the book proceeds, we get all sorts of unexpected genre shifts, strange discontinuities, and many amazing and wonderful individual passages (I especially loved the chapter where the narrator, strung out on methedrine, is hallucinating on Omaha Beach, where the Allies landed in 1944, thinking about, not only the carnage of that invasion, but of Hiroshima, Nagasaki as well, and beyond World War II of burning oil wells in Kuwait after the first Gulf War, and so on). After that, there are all sorts of metafictional twists; the narrator comes to think he is really a character in an unwritten novel by a French journalist-photographer who died in Sarajevo covering the Bosnian war; we get more and more paranoid formulations of the narrator’s general thesis about the “suicide” of Western Civilization (of which 9/11 is only the confirmation–Dantec sounds a lot like Baudrillard in places, despite his apparent dislike of Baudrillard). And then–the narrator is killed (as foreshadowed at the start of the book) with over 200 pages left to go; and that’s when things really get crazy, as the writing of the book itself is dramatized within the book as a messianic act capable of undoing and inverting history, by means of a comic book science-fiction narrative that combines the visceral experience of video games with theological speculation mixing Maurice Blanchot with the Kabbalah, with the 2nd-century Church Fathers Iranaeus and Origen, and with crackpot theorizing about the mystical powers of the DNA “meta-code.” Whew. On one page I will be blown away by the sheer excess of it all, and the weird, unexpected connections Dantec keeps on making; then, on the very next page, I will be irritated by inane rants about the evils of technological domination in the modern world, or about the need to stand firm with America in its fight against international terrorism. All in all, I’d say that Dantec is taking some very particular gripes he has that are parochially exclusive to France in the 1990s, and blowing them up to world-historical proportions. I’m also disappointed that Dantec seems to have dumped Deleuze (who was the main philosophical influence on Dantec’s previous book, the brilliant , and also apocalyptic, Babylon Babies, which I wrote about earlier), instead, the key philosophical figure here is a French writer I know little about, Raymond Abellio, but who seems to have made a bizarre synthesis between phenomenology, on the one hand, and a Gurdjieff- or Rudolf Steiner-like mysticism, on the other. (As far as I’m concerned, it’s hard to decide which I find more boring, phenomenology or Gurdjieff/Steiner/etc). In short, Dantec is “too French for his own good” (as Pauline Kael, I believe, once said of Marguerite Duras); in spite of which, Villa Vortex is filled with much that is audacious and wonderful. (Not to mention that, in the French context, there’s a lot to be said for a book that takes, as one of its key allegorical images of evil, the architectural monstrosity that is the Mitterand Library).