Laird Hunt’s The Impossibly is sort of like a Dashiel Hammett noir novel as written by mid-period Samuel Beckett. But maybe that description is unfair, since it sells short the novel’s originality. The unreliable narrator seems to work for some sort of spy or criminal organization. He kills people under its orders, sometimes fails in his missions and is punished, falls in love and then wonders if his beloved has betrayed him on behalf of the organization, gets old, tries to investigate his own death at the hands of the organization. Nothing is conclusive, of course. Hunt manages to perfectly weld the epistemological concerns of the detective/spy novel with those of experimental prose and post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. The gap between perception and conceptualization, or between gathering evidence and solving the mystery, is the same as that between rhetoric and meaning, or performative and constative, or affect and signification. The Impossibly produces the emotion (rather than the philosophical resolution) of all these gaps, as trains of thought are derailed and lead nowhere, aside from the experience of carrying them out, and as the tough-guy persona of American detective and spy fiction quietly implodes. A beautiful book.
The Impossibly
Laird Hunt’s The Impossibly is sort of like a Dashiel Hammett noir novel as written by mid-period Samuel Beckett. But maybe that description is unfair, since it sells short the novel’s originality. The unreliable narrator seems to work for some sort of spy or criminal organization. He kills people under its orders, sometimes fails in his missions and is punished, falls in love and then wonders if his beloved has betrayed him on behalf of the organization, gets old, tries to investigate his own death at the hands of the organization. Nothing is conclusive, of course. Hunt manages to perfectly weld the epistemological concerns of the detective/spy novel with those of experimental prose and post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. The gap between perception and conceptualization, or between gathering evidence and solving the mystery, is the same as that between rhetoric and meaning, or performative and constative, or affect and signification. The Impossibly produces the emotion (rather than the philosophical resolution) of all these gaps, as trains of thought are derailed and lead nowhere, aside from the experience of carrying them out, and as the tough-guy persona of American detective and spy fiction quietly implodes. A beautiful book.