The Fortunes of Experimental Fiction (I)

Nobody’s Experimental Novel

(This essay originally appeared in Denver Quarterly.)

No doubt the most pressing questions concerning the fiction of William Melvin Kelley are not about its merits, which are considerable and readily enough apparent, but have to be those related to the circumstances of its “rediscovery”: Why did Kelley publish nothing after 1970? (His first novel appeared in 1962, and Kelley died in 2017.) What accounts for the long period of neglect his work endured until recently, when all of his books were brought back into print?

For thirty years, only Kelley’s first novel, A Different Drummer, remained in print, but in 2020 the other books, the story collection Dancers on the Shore (1964) and the subsequent three novels, A Drop of Patience (1965), dem (1967), and Dunfords Travels Everywheres, again became available (all published by Anchor Books). The two most recently published (September) perhaps fortuitously give us salient clues in solving the mystery of Kelley’s disappearance from the literary scene. The stories in Dancers on the Shore are realistic and conventional, and while most of them could stand alone as short stories, they really work together in a dual-stranded portrayal of mid-century African-American experience, one strand focusing on the middle class Dunfords and the other on the working class Bedlows (particularly the brothers Carlyle and Mance). “Chig” Dunford and Carlyle Bedlow reappear in Kelley’s subsequent novels (and one story in the book, “The Servant Problem,” along with its white protagonist, reappears as the core focus of dem, which also features Carlyle), although they play much different roles, less clearly acting as illustrative types.

Indeed, although Chig and Carlyle are also the twinned protagonists of Dunfords Travels Everywheres (also published in September), they have largely been in this book separated from the context in which they are introduced in Dancers on the Shore and employed as the performers in a drama of narrative mutation and linguistic experiment. Chig is presented as a student traveling with others in an unnamed European country, notable for practicing a kind of voluntary apartheid whereby citizens divide themselves according to the color of their clothing (and thus it is possible to switch sides). We also become familiar with the other members of Chig’s group, including a white woman named Wendy, with whom Chig is in love. A second part of Chig’s story depicts his return to the United States on board a ship, one of whose other passengers turns out to be Wendy. Carlyle is a streetwise resident of Harlem who is enlisted in a scheme concocted by his dentist to trap the dentist’s wife in the appearance of adultery, so that the dentist might marry his mistress. Carlyle also helps a friend escape the clutches of a figure the friend claims is the devil (but who turns out to be a conman).

As unrelated as these narratives might seem to be, Kelley brings them together through the novel’s most conspicuous feature, a dream language reminiscent of that employed in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, into which both Chig and Carlyle fall, as if they have merged into a collective unconscious evoked by an amalgam of distorted discourse and vernacular African-American speech:

            The questjung reminds still. Why, when those off us that gowhine that way, run up Hattanhand, waving aisde Malma-Mae to buy boy bye the bearettes—why do skiers flie and fists flight? How do the tampors at Camp Tiwayo get out the shatgrins and flupipointed hats? When do the balls gangle over the palmbreaker’s bedpost? Why such constarenation?

The novel alternates between the two characters, with intermediate episodes related in this dream language, which ultimately invokes a hallucinatory vision of “New Afriquerque” that seems finally to unite Chig and Carlyle in a transformed racial (un)consciousness.

Readers expecting this novel to further develop the story of the Dunford family as initiated in Dancers on the Shore, or even to similarly expand Carlyle Bedlow’s character as introduced in Kelley’s immediately preceding novel, dem, surely found it puzzling at the least, perhaps literally incomprehensible. Although dem had shown Kelley departing from the conventional realism characterizing his first three books, few were likely prepared for the Joycean extravagance of Dunfords Travels Everywheres (the parallels with and allusions to Finnegans Wake are numerous and explicit).     For some critics, while this novel engages with the realities of black life in America just as profoundly as Kelley’s previous work, it evokes its themes with such modernist “difficulty” that the themes threaten to be lost. In these ways Dunfords Travels Everywheres seems to abandon the kind of social analysis to which Dancers on the Shore might be reduced and that arguably represents the approach readers and critics assign by default to the African-American writer. That Kelley spurns this approach could certainly help explain the neglect into which his work fell after the publication of what turned out to be his final novel, as no follow-up book ever appeared.

Yet Kelley’s fiction was never, in fact, either straightforwardly realistic or obviously rhetorical. Not even A Distant Drummer, no doubt his best-known book, could really be described as social realism, despite the fact it is the most direct treatment of racial conflict. The conflict is, at least at first, expressed in the absence of confrontation between blacks and white, in a situation that could be considered fanciful: One of the novel’s main characters, Tucker Caliban, suddenly leaves town (located in an imaginary Southern state squeezed between Mississippi and Alabama) after burning down his farm, prompting most of the rest of black population in the area to exit as well, although their motives remain obscure—at least to the white population—and their destination equally uncertain. Thus the novel’s white characters are left to ponder the ramifications of their own future existence without black people, a prospect that throws them into a kind of confusion that ultimately does prove deadly (in the most provocative twist Kelley performs on the “race novel” as many readers would have known it), but the exodus of the novel’s black characters necessarily makes it a story about the behavior of whites, to whom the behavior of Tucker Caliban, the narrative’s ostensible protagonist, looms mysterious, his “protest” undeclared.

If Kelley’s emphasis on the race consciousness of white people was a daring enough move in the midst of the civil rights era, his second novel, A Drop of Patience, seems to deliberately reject the temptation to follow up A Different Drummer with a more unqualified protest novel. It could be described as a character-driven novel largely restricted to the consciousness of its protagonist, a blind jazz musician named Ludlow Washington. Indeed, so confined is it to Ludlow’s circumscribed verbal awareness that although Ludlow becomes an acclaimed practitioner of the “new music” (presumably bebop), we get very little sense of the actual music he plays—no extended descriptions of its sound and texture, little effort made by Ludlow himself to explicate his own music. Much of the novel, rather, is taken up by accounts of Ludlow’s failures with women—several women enter with him into long-term relationships that all go wrong. Ludlow is essentially portrayed as a radical innocent whose affliction is in some sense a source of his talent but also, given his earliest experiences as a child abandoned to the custody of a group home, has made him ill-equipped to negotiate the expectations of a world where the motives of those he encounters are just as veiled to him as their physical visages.

Ludlow is far from a saint in his own behavior toward the women with whom he becomes involved, but the cumulative distress he suffers when every one of his romantic relationships falls apart is real enough (at one point a breakup actually drives him insane), and the prevailing atmosphere of A Drop of Patience could be called melancholic. In this it differs from A Different Drummer, which, if anything, at times verges on the comic in its tone—it would not be altogether a mischaracterization to say that this novel has a satirical edge to it, except that both the characters (the white characters) and the situation project a kind of absurdism more than they suggest the corrective impulse of satire. Certainly Tucker Caliban seems to have abandoned any expectation that the white people among whom he finds himself are likely to alter their attitudes or behavior in any meaningful way, such that simply leaving his life there behind him is the most sensible action. Aside from Tucker, the black character who has the most substantive role in the novel, Reverend Bradshaw, a civil rights leader from the North who picks exactly the wrong time to arrive in town in an effort to better understand his black compatriots in the South, is also portrayed somewhat satirically, although arguably this only underscores the unequivocal horror of his lynching at the novel’s conclusion.

If all of Kelley’s fiction provides a palpably off-kilter perspective on the narratives they present, dem is the work that could most accurately be called absurdist comedy, although the absurdism is tinged as well with something closer to surrealism, and at times the effect is less comical that just strange. That the wife of the protagonist, a white man named Mitchell Pierce, would give birth to twins, one black and one white, purportedly from different fathers, is certainly sufficiently bizarre, but that Mitchell’s response is to try and track down the father of the black child and persuade him to adopt it only compounds an initially preposterous situation. (Few other people seem to regard Mitchell’s plight as incredible, nor does Mitchell seem to consider his wife’s apparent infidelity with alarm or anger, while the wife believes Mitchell’s indifference toward her only encouraged her to be unfaithful in the first place.) The complications Mitchell encounters when on his quest hardly bring him serenity: at one point Mitchell injures himself and must spend several weeks in bed, during which time he becomes addicted to a daytime soap; later he sees a woman in an Automat (she turns out to be a prostitute) whom he insists is actually a character from the show, and he proceeds to follow her around the city.

This episode, like a previous one in which a man from Mitchell’s office turns out to be a killer, is related and then dropped, with no subsequent references to the events and no indication they have affected the characters in any fundamental way, as if these are lives of disconnected moments, the characters unprepared to think about the consequences of their behavior since their experience consists of random and impulsive acts without continuity or purpose beyond their immediate occurrence. Mitchell Pierce makes strenuous efforts to locate Cooley, the supposed father of the mismatched son, but there is little sense that he understands his own motivations (his marriage is surely over, anyway), nor that he even believes that success in his efforts will solve his problem—he doesn’t really have a coherent conception of what his problem might be. In his portrayal of Mitchell Pierce, Kelley shows white racism to be less the expression of considered beliefs and more the product of disordered impulses, along with a need to dwell in a fantasy version of reality.

We could regard dem as Kelley’s attempt to align his fiction more closely with the increasingly adventurous practices introduced by American writers in the 1970s—from “black humor” to the surrealism of Donald Barthelme to the metafiction of John Barth—practices that would later be loosely affiliated as “postmodern,” although both dem and Dunfords Travels Eveywheres might be more precisely described as “neo-modernist” than postmodern. Indeed, even if a reader might consider dem to be primarily satirical   , its satirical message is not so easy to pinpoint, and what lingers most from reading both this novel and Dunfords Travels Everywheres are the unconventional formal and verbal devices Kelley employs, not really any specifiable themes. This is especially true of Dunfords Travels Everywheres, which is clearly an experimental work, albeit the experiment—the novel’s linguistic transformations—is recognizable as variations on the similar dream language of Finnegans Wake. If the expectation of an African-American writer in 1970 was that his work would inevitably foreground “content” (implicitly becoming some variety of protest novel), then certainly it would have been difficult to maintain that dem and Dunfords Travels Everywheres clearly meets such an expectation.

Writers such as Ishmael Reed, of course, also during this time wrote formally and stylistically unconventional novels, but Reed’s books as well exhibited a kind of thematic militancy that few readers could miss, and thus he was able to maintain a published presence in contemporary American fiction, although even Reed has suffered a relative lack of attention, given the level of his achievement. The same could be said now of Percival Everett, whose audacious and outrageously satirical novels do receive their share of critical praise but lamentably remain undiscovered by most readers. Kelley’s final two published books (he did not stop writing, but no further fiction has been posthumously published) show a writer moving increasingly toward artifice and experimentation, and we can only conclude that publishers’ reluctance to accept any subsequent work indicates he was continuing in that direction. Until and unless Kelley’s unpublished work is made available, of course, we can’t be sure, but the impatience with the difficulty of Dunfords Travels Everywheres expressed by reviewers at the time seems a telling sign of the response he would likely have continued to receive.

Fiction that is considered difficult or dissonant is generally deplored (when not simply ignored) by the preponderance of American readers, but it would seem that such fiction is regarded as especially problematic when indulged by an African-American writer. Perhaps this is merely the corollary of the notion that experimental fiction itself is a derogation of the writer’s duty to directly engage with social realities and to be “accessible” in doing so, and thus any writer is subject to this judgment. But surely not all readers and critics who might have found Dunfords Travels Everywheres puzzling or frustrating harbored this sort of intolerance of all norm-defying literary works. It’s just that in Kelley’s case the norm defied goes beyond the craft-based norms associated with the conventional novel. Instead, Kelley violated the cultural norm—held mostly by white readers—attached to African-American writers, the requirement that they be, if not strictly social realists, then writers of aesthetically transparent fiction, the value of which is above all sociological and political. Kelley’s work has such value, to be sure, but none of his fiction, going back to A Different Drummer, has as its purpose to reinforce this requirement: these are novels and stories whose achievement rises first of all from aesthetic invention and surprise, and have a thematic complexity to match their narrative dexterity.

At the moment, literary culture is permeated with calls for the inclusion of multifarious “voices,” voices that have previously not been heard (or not heard enough). If in referring to these voices we mean that more writers who are not white males should be published, these calls are certainly appropriate. By this measure William Melvin Kelley is a “voice” from the recent past to which more readers should attend. But the most common use of the term literally evokes voice as the opportunity to “say something,” often implying that the saying itself is even more important than the “something,” the declaration made or message delivered. Kelley is not a writer inclined either to “speak” in this immediately expressive way or to “make a statement” through the more indirect agency of fiction. He is more interested in the surprising things fiction might be made to do than the platitudinous things it is usually made to say. In addition to a voice, we should grant an African-American writer like Kelley his preoccupation with the medium in which he works, even when this makes some readers and publishers uncomfortable.  

No Apology or Cuteness 

(This essay originally appeared in the Review of Uncontemporary Fiction.)

To even the most well-informed readers of fiction and poetry who reached their age of literary maturity after, say, 1970, Gil Orlovitz is no doubt a mostly obscure, if not totally unknown figure. Orlovitz died in 1973—although he had achieved sufficient obscurity even by then that his body was not actually identified until several months following his passing—after a nearly 30-year career as poet, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, and while some effort was made in the years just after his death to appreciate and preserve his achievement, in particular through a 1978 special issue of American Poetry Review, in the years since then his books disappeared from sight and his name dropped out from most discussions of postwar American literature.

In addition to pathos there is some irony in Orlovitz’s fading from view, since he became something of a ubiquitous presence in American literary magazines in the 1950s and 60s, although he never really found a place in the most prominent publications, his work generally regarded as overly “difficult” for mainstream tastes. His novels Milkbottle H (1967) and Ice Never F (1970) certainly did little to connect him more firmly to those tastes, as both were conspicuous failures, both commercially and critically, although the critical response was decidedly more positive in the U.K. and Europe, where Orlovitz established a favorable reputation as an innovative successor to the great modernists. Whether these failures significantly contributed to what appears to be a subsequent downward spiral (he had especially invested some hope in the mammoth and ambitious Milkbottle) is somewhat uncertain 50 years later, but by 1973 he was more or less down and out, when he died in what remain rather murky circumstances.

As I look at the whole of Orlovitz’s available work (Tough Poets Press has commendably republished most of the fiction, including the novels, as well as some of the poetry, although much of the latter is still essentially inaccessible after a half century of neglect), it seems to me that the contemporary writer he most closely resembles is Gilbert Sorrentino. Both writers fundamentally were poets, both loosely associated with the poetry of Pound and Williams through the Beats, and both went on to write radically iconoclastic and disruptive fiction, Sorrentino on a more sustained basis and successful enough to maintain a relatively long and productive career. Sorrentino’s fiction is more uninhibitedly comic, ultimately more unruly, than Orlovitz’s, but both Milkbottle H and Ice Never F, like Sorrentino’s novels, are full-on aesthetic deconstructions of novel form, although where Sorrentino reconfigures the form with his own skewed versions, Orlovitz comes in these two works as close to formlessness in fiction as may be possible while still maintaining a connection to the genre.

Both Sorrentino and Orlovitz in their different ways expose “form” in fiction as at best a transitory convenience, a provisional invention always subject to modification and metamorphosis, insisting that the only constant in literary art is the imaginative play of language. Thus it is indeed that fiction has its origin in the poetic impulse, although in Orlovitz’s case this means that his two novels are as idiosyncratic in their verbal manner as his poetry. A newcomer to Orlovitz’s poetry is no doubt likely to identify it as hermetic, or perhaps surreal, but further reading reveals it to be less surreal than radically informal and heterogeneous in its imagery, less self-enclosed than veiled in its personal references, invoking characters and scenes at times parallel with or abstracted from the poet’s direct experience, at others more fully displaced, closer to Orlovitz’s practices as a writer of fiction. While some of Orlovitz’s poetry could appropriately be called “lyrical,” it is a lyricism of strange juxtapositions, colloquial diction, and punning wordplay, not the usual sort of figurative expression.

The most illuminating analysis of Orlovitz’s poetic practice is an essay by Gerald Stern, part of the special section on Orlovitz in the 1978 issue of American Poetry Review. (“Miss Pink at Last: An Appreciation of Gil Orlovitz.”) Stern groups Orlovitz’s poems into three categories—lyrics, sonnets, and satires. To the extent Orlovitz is still remembered as a poet, it is probably first of all for the sonnets, although his most striking use of language is arguably in the satires. (Sterne’s use of this term may be a little too capacious to really encompass all of Orlovitz’s poems outside the lyrics and the sonnets, two categories that themselves have a good deal of overlap.) As Stern himself says, the matter of Orlovitz’s satirical poems arises not from a motivating “idea” but grows “inevitably out of the language”:

As such, there was no satirical “mask”; there was instead the haunted satire-riddled face, or voice, of Gil Orlovitz himself, nothing now standing between him and his subject. I mean myths, yes, “poetic” masks, metaphors, echoes, ditties—because he was a poet—between him and his reader, or among him and his readers, but nothing between him and his subject, no apology or cuteness.

This seems an apt characterization of Orlovitz’s writing (poetry and fiction) in general, not just the explicitly satirical poetry. The poems are indeed strongly engaged with their subjects—often framed as seemingly direct personal experiences, but even those poems employing a persona seem like pretty thinly displaced vehicles for the poet’s experience as well. However, the treatment of those subjects depends not on their inherent lyrical connections but on the verbal connections (or disconnections) the poem leaves in its unpredictable turns of language. The poem “Hymn” begins, “fivethirty a.m./the electricgenerator/started off like an immortal scream,” presenting us with a coherent if clamorous aural image, only to abruptly mix it with a discordant and somewhat grotesque visual one: “whelped in low key and smothered in thin snot/and exploded into a sickbelly throwup of fiery/eels. . . .” After a pause (the first of several caesuras in the poem), as if preparing the reader for the change in orientation and focus about to occur, the poet’s own perspective is suddenly altered: “and there was my woman/my love/outside my window. . . .” But before we can adjust to this strange development, mid-line our attention is again disrupted as the speaker avows that “god in the alleyway/went infinitely upstairs in a striped prisonsuit/of irondrunken firescapesteps. . . .”

 Although we return to “my woman/my love” (who beseeches the speaker, “don’t let me die”), by the time we reach the end of this relatively short poem our contemplation of its imagery has become so thoroughly unsettled that it is indeed tempting to declare it a piece of surrealism that deliberately resists our full assimilation—or even to consider it simply incomprehensible. Perhaps we could interpret it as a species of dream—although the poem’s title seems oddly inappropriate for this sort of exercise—or, somewhat more fruitfully, that it represents the movements of the poet’s consciousness at a particularly fraught moment. But while either of these perspectives might afford a kind of cursory coherence to a poem like “Hymn,” since many of Orlovitz’s poems unfold according to similar sort of discontinuous logic (or nonlogic), it seems more applicable to say simply that his poetry consists more in self-contained flares of veiled expression than in the subordination of such expression to the broader development of a poetic “thought,” a more visible unified aesthetic construct.

Probably the most conspicuously indulged display of verbal excess in Orlovitz’s poetry is the frequent use of puns, most often in the satires, as in the very first stanza of “The Rooster”:

the rooster crows in my belly

an old hangout for the billiard cues of the morning

and table-hopping hail hail the ganglias all here

after sunset like a mouthwash last yesterlight

and the white tails of the gorillas on television

and that liberal politician stumping for twilight supremacy

down by that old

                    shill

                    stream

As I buttonholed the Ancient Auctioneer

how goes America going

                           going

But Orlovitz just seems to ignore any strictures against punning as a disruptive or self-indulgent gesture. His poems cultivate the disruption as another turn of language, the introduction of disparate elements to form another brief image—the politician both creating and standing beside the “shill stream”—that reinforces the poem’s reliance on adjacent figurative and imagistic verbal devices rather than continuous elaboration of thought.

The insistent punning in Orloviz’s poetry seems most reminiscent of Finnegans Wake (it and Ulysses continue to be a dominant influence on Orlovitz’s fiction as well), and perhaps the dream language of a work like this could itself be taken as a further analogue to Orlovitz’s practice as both poet and writer of fiction. Certainly the perpetual juxtaposition of disconnected images in the poems creates a background of distortion comparable to dreams, but it seems to me that Orlovitz is less interested in mimicking the unconscious mind that in reorienting the conscious mind—the reader’s. The poems ask us to not presume that the poet’s language is a representation of a recognizable reality, nor even an attempt to cloak that reality in a misrepresentation that might still be reclaimed for interpretation, but is instead a transformation of the poem into a source of reality itself, which the reader experiences through the multiplicity and incongruity of its images.

The discontinuities of Orlovitz’s writing not only undermine whatever expectation we might have that it will resolve itself into a completed thought (a thought about something outside the poem, not a concrete experience of the poem) but makes interpreting a poem’s images as potential symbols mostly fruitless and beside the point as well. Indeed, Orlovitz himself, in an essay entitled “The Ubiquitous Symbol” (What are They All Waiting For?. Tough Poets Press) tells us that “my intent is quite simple: to transmit through images the paradoxes of experienced phenomena.” However, the image “will contain the paradox of the experienced phenomenon, but it will go further: it will try to convert the experienced phenomenon into an experience itself. For me, symbols in poetry do not simply connote reality: my intent is to make the symbols pieces of reality themselves.” Orlovitz may seem to be conflating “symbol” and “image,” but what he is really doing is attempting to explicate the way in which his poems are enclosed in the poet’s digressive language, which seeks to realize the “paradox” that only the verbal turns themselves can signify.

Few writers are as radical in their determination to make language itself both the form and content of the literary work as Gil Orlovitz, in his poetry and his fiction alike. For this reason alone it is perplexing that both the poems—or at least the best of them—and a novel like Milkbottle H have so thoroughly fallen out of the collective literary memory. The latter especially remains a prodigious achievement, as notable a product of the late modern/postmodern sensibility as any written by an American novelist, even Sorrentino, Gaddis, or Pynchon. Perhaps, however, what those writers provide in addition to their formal audacity is something that Orlovitz’s work may be lacking: Each of them substitutes for the more conventional pleasures of traditional narrative fiction—familiar plot devices, recognizable types of characters—alternative formal and stylistic strategies that work to offer not “entertainment” in the most reductive sense of the term, but certainly an experience of aesthetic delight that ultimately redeems whatever “difficulty” the work at first seems to present the reader. Both Orlovitz’s poetry and his fiction may seem to some readers to cultivate difficulty for its own sake.

This impression is no doubt especially strong for the reader who takes up Milkbottle H. It was certainly the impression left with contemporaneous American reviewers, one of whom declared that “it is written in a pseudo-Joycean manner that is relentlessly monotonous, persistently garbled, unendingly devious, a manner that lacks the humor of Joyce’s that unlike Joyce’s obfuscates rather than reveals” (Carleton Miscellany, Spring 1968). This reviewer likely means by the Joyce comparison no more than that Milkbottle H is an unconventional work that lacks the usual markers of a proper novel, markers of plot and character that allow the critic to assess the work according to the usual formulas, without needing to more closely examine the actual strategies the writer might be using, or consider the effect those strategies may be designed to produce. If the critic were in fact interested in pursuing the connection to Joyce, he might have noted that the “manner” of Milkbottle H only superficially resembles the conceit structuring Finnegans Wake: Milkbottle H may indeed depart freely from the constraints of time, space, and consistency of character, but not because Orlovitz is casting his narrative as a dream. Instead, Milkbottle H treats reality as if it already possesses the mutability of dreams.

Thus the reader is given a few ostensibly stable features consistent with most novels’ narrative trajectory—a protagonist, named Lee Emanuel, a setting, in the city of Philadelphia, certain recurring images such as the street sign that gives the novel its title—but those features do not reinforce expectations of conventional development. The novel does loosely follow the life experiences of Lee Emanuel (who is a not very heavily disguised version of Gil Orlovitz), especially focusing on his love affairs and marriages, yet the chronological displacement in the novel’s rendering of his experiences is so thoroughgoing  and extreme (in a novel of over 500 pages) that even his identity at times wavers, while the other characters so frequently transmogrify into each other that ultimately it is questionable whether we should finally even identify them as specific characters at all. Given the novel’s disarticulated structure, with its seemingly random fluctuations of scene, we might regard Milkbottle H as a synoptic view of Lee Emanuel’s life all at once, blurring the distinctions of story and character that normally a work of fictions seeks to clarify.

 Although the novel can seem largely formless, ultimately we could say that this formlessness contributes to a more encyclopedic kind of form. This promise of an ultimate unity of sorts, however, doesn’t quite provide a plot. Indeed, the novel’s amorphous formal quality serves it best if it deflects the reader’s interest away from the prospect of formal or narrative resolution and draws it to the execution of the discrete episodes in their acts of metamorphosis and displacement. Many of these episodes are in fact very funny, although it is true that Orlovitz is not necessarily trying to be a comic writer. (Sometimes anger seems a primary motivation.) He is instead attempting to be all-encompassing in his accounting of Lee Emanuel’s life (an effort which is supplemented by Orlovitz’s other published novel, Ice Never F, also featuring Lee as protagonist), and this necessarily involves the more embarrassing moments in Lee’s life—such as his cuckoldry, brought about by his unfaithful first wife, or an extended scene (extended in fact throughout the novel) in which Lee attempts to take a bath without letting any of the dirt that he washes off touch him again.

Lee Emanuel is not really portrayed as a foolish or hapless figure, but it would also be difficult to describe him as a “sympathetic” character, either. So fragmented and so subject to shifts in time and perspective is Lee Emanuel as presented in the novel that we can’t finally get close enough to him to really judge him at all. He is not a coherent character of the traditional sort (“flat” and “round” seem beside the point) but is mostly an artifact of the author’s insistently discontinuous method of composition. He is neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic but acts as the novel’s discursive point of attraction around which its narrative transfigurations swirl. To an extent, these transfigurations do serve in their very distortions to illuminate Lee Emanuel’s experience and evoke his personality, although they are not designed first and foremost as an alternate means of creating character. Something like the opposite seems predominantly the case: Lee Emanuel, his perceptions and experiences, is the vehicle for the work’s formal and verbal variations.

Certainly Lee’s experiences include the sort that most readers would expect to find in a more conventional chronicle of the ordinary circumstances of its characters’ lives—which is essentially the focus of concern in Milkbottle H, however much that focus is prolonged beyond the scenic confines of most realistic fiction. Perhaps the most prominent of these would be Lee’s interactions with his family, especially with his parents, as well as his efforts specifically to reckon with the relatively recent death of his father. The glimpses of the parents at various stages of Lee’s life do actually provide a kind of summative account of family influence, although as with all of the other episodes depicted in the novel, it is an elliptical account that asks the reader to hold immediate meaning in abeyance, to allow that a literary work can accrue meaning through juxtaposition and contiguity rather than asserting it through linear progression. Perhaps it is here where Orlovitz’s fiction shows the greatest affinity with his poetry: It is not so much that the language of the novels is conspicuously “poetic” (although neither is the poetry itself poetic in any conventional way), but that image in the poetry and narrative time and space in the fiction are set loose from the imperative to unfold according to a sequential logic that essentially renders literary language invisible. In Orlovitz’s work, language is indeed “real.”

This attribute is also on display in Ice Never F, published after but actually written before Milkbottle H, although its structural dislocations are somewhat less radical, and thus at its briefer length Ice Never F is arguably more accessible. It also involves Lee Emanuel, as well as most of the cast of Milkbottle H. (The two extant novels seem to have been at Orlovitz’s death part of at least a trilogy set in Philadelphia and centered on the life of Lee Emanuel, but the existence of third unpublished novel in the series, while the object of rumors in the years since, currently seems uncertain.) While no conventional work of narrative fiction, Ice Never F nonetheless ventures less into the mixing of identity, and its scenes are often more fully sustained, although still sharing with Milkbottle H a paradoxical kind of narrative scheme, offering a constant flow of narration subject to incessant and unannounced time shifts covering all phases of Lee’s life (including a good deal about his childhood). Also as with Milkbottle H, the actions and events depicted in individual episodes work less as pieces of an ongoing narrative than as the parts of a larger verbal and discursive mosaic registering Lee’s presence in the world that has made him.

Perhaps Ice Never F might serve as a less intimidating introduction to Orlovitz’s fiction (in something like the way Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 has been a more compact alternative to the meganovels), but it is Milkbottle H that will be the center of attention in any widespread reconsideration of Gil Orlovitz’s achievement as a writer (if such a thing could plausibly happen). The poems certainly reward the effort to understand the aesthetic principles motivating their discordant imagery and seemingly capricious wordplay, but it seems unlikely that Orlovitz’s variety of “difficult” poetry sufficiently stands out against, say, the work of John Ashbery or the Language poets to find a place among their company. Milkbottle H, although surely an experimental novel by any definition of the term, is not exactly “postmodern”; it does not interrogate the authority of fiction as a mode of representation but seems more like an extension of the modernist aspiration to represent reality at a more fundamental level than surface realism. In this case, Orlovitz’s novel seeks to eliminate all constraints of narrative and place in the name of a more comprehensive rendition of experience. There really is nothing else in American fiction, that I can think of, at all like it.

Events, of a Sort 

While the first three novels of Rudolph Wurlitzer certainly express the sensibility of the 1960s—specifically the late 60s, when the more insouciant rebelliousness characterizing much of the initial cultural ferment of the period began to curdle, congealing into less equivocal forms of disaffection and alienation—it is not as clear that his fiction should be identified as "postmodern," along with the first wave of postmodernists that include Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and Robert Coover. Surely Nog, Flats, and Quake are "experimental" by anyone's definition of the term as it applies to adventurous fiction, but where there is a kind of exuberance, and obvious delight in the sheer possibilities of the imagination in the work of these other writers, in Wurlitzer's books energy has been dissipated, the abundance and vitality of language we find in the earlier writers reduced to a kind of exhaustion even Barth, in his influential essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion, could not have anticipated, one that doesn't merely acknowledge the "used-upness" of fictional form but seems to question the capability of language itself to adequately communicate human experience.

Although human experience as depicted in these three novels has also been reduced to the point that there may not be much to communicate. The narrators struggle to account for their own inertia and diminished sense of identity—one could say that in both Nog and Flats we never quite know for sure who our protagonist, the "character" ostensibly attached to the first-person narrative voice, actually is (and finally neither does he)—ultimately offering us a narrative of their own psychological displacement in the guise of "events" they purport to relate. "Experience" consists of the immediate objects of the narrator's consciousness—or at least the verbal articulation of his nominal awareness—which the narrator presents to us as if attempting to stave off the complete dissolution of self, represented at least by a lingering stream of words. By the end of Nog, this is barely working:

I'm out of the bed. I put one foot in front of the other until I reached the door. I touched the knob. But I still have the bag. What I should have done was get rid of the black bag, what I am beginning to remember was that I did get rid of the black bag. I put it under the bunk. I remember something like that. There was a black bag, although I know too that nothing happened and I haven't traveled around with a black bag. I touched the knob again. There was a quickness, certainly, as if I were about to be sure of something. But it's out of my depth to know what has happened, to touch a doorknob and make a report. I'm not up to that. There have been events, of a sort, and they have occurred quickly, one after the other. . . .

The narrator's halting recital and damaged, near-catatonic condition invokes comparison to Beckett, and indeed Wurlitzer's novels, Nog and Flats especially, may be the most conspicuously influenced by Beckett in all of postwar American literature. Like Beckett, Wurlitzer places his characters in situations of extremity, both physical and metaphysical, and depicts their actions in a way that, from their perspective at least, could be regarded as "realistic," once we have conceded the incongruity of the circumstances. If we are less likely to consider the world Wurlitzer evokes as "absurd," it is because the setting, specifically the American West, retains some of its externally recognizable reality, giving Wurlitzer's fiction something of an allegorical overtone: Wurlitzer seems to be portraying not only the existential degradation of his protagonist but the historical and cultural legacy that has made this degradation not just possible but inevitable. The allegorical content is not dramatized explicitly (at least not until Wurlitzer's later novels Slow Fade and The Drop Edge of Yonder), but produced as a kind of background noise, of which the characters themselves are only faintly aware, if at all.

The wide-open spaces (and all they signal to us about the American mythos of freedom and opportunity) have for the characters in Wurlitzer's fiction become a debilitating obstacle, simply negotiating any space a source of pain and horror. The narrator of Flats makes his initial appearance by informing us of his journey ("I walked a fair piece") to the place we find him, at the end of the road, the last few miles of which he has crawled. "After this space has been crawled through," he tells us, "the fear of inhabiting an area massaged, the promise of an event removed or established. . .There is no telling. I have no intentions." Of course, in one sense, there is nothing but "telling," as this is only the first paragraph and the narrator occupies the rest of the novel relating his various attempts to "massage" his fear of venturing into unknown spaces. Nog is a more fully picaresque novel than Flats, and its protagonist therefore moves more freely from place to place (although pretty clearly prior to finding himself "in the flats, west of the city," the narrator of Flats too was mostly a wanderer), but there remains throughout his itinerant movements as well an undercurrent of menace in the landscapes he traverses, as if the promise of natural freedom implicit in the prospect of the pristine American wilderness has become a nightmare of depletion and degeneration.

This nightmarish quality is impressed more distinctly on the readers of Nog and Flats than on the characters themselves, however. Both narrators process and communicate their experiences with a radical lack of affect, even though the conditions in which they subsist are plainly aberrant and profoundly disturbing. Their response to the situation they confront is in this way analogous to Kafka, whose characters similarly act in the face of perilous and abnormal circumstances as if their strange predicament is quite normal after all, requiring the kind of earnestly rational actions those characters take. If the actions of Wurlitzer's protagonists couldn't exactly be called rational, they are nevertheless undertaken with the assumption such actions will be successful in getting them from point A to point B, at least. These characters have little sense of normal; they merely seek to survive, although they don't really stop to consider why that might be desirable to begin with. That they do survive—or at least persist—despite the apparent pointlessness of the effort, finally does confer on them a kind of admirable tenacity—perhaps they will simply outlast their trouble, for whatever that is worth.

If we can imagine both of them echoing the narrator of Beckett's The Unnamable in his declaration "I can't go on/I'll go on," the narrator of Flats is probably the most thoroughly estranged from his surroundings, most profoundly alienated from the recognition of "self" as a coherent concept. And precisely because of Wurlitzer's uncompromising evocation of the character's dissociation in the literal division of personality (the narrator claims multiple identities in the course of the narrative) and the almost complete absence of forward movement in the plot, Nog is likely instead to be the novel for which Wurlitzer will be most immediately remembered, even though it could hardly be said that this novel is a more obviously conventional reading experience, its protagonist more "likeable" (in fact, both characters might be considered "sympathetic," due to the extremity of their plights). But Nog does feature a more familiar kind of narrative structure, and the character engages in more recognizable sorts of human activities--even if the motivation for many of them often enough remain obscure (to himself especially).

Nog could be described as a picaresque road novel, although to the extent Kerouac's On the Road might be a touchstone for Wurlitzer's novel, it is as the earlier work's complete antithesis. If On the Road is spontaneous and ebullient, in Nog the travels undertaken are finally just chaotic and the character's attitude largely apathetic, as if being on the move is literally a matter of going through the motions. If the goal in On the Road is to seek enlightenment, in Nog, to the extent there is a goal it is for most of these characters one of simple self-preservation. And if we can regard Nog as a reflection of the souring of the 60s, in a larger view it could be taken as the final negation of the whole postwar countercultural ethos for which Kerouac's picaresque novel stands as the initiator and arguably most characteristic expression. Nog rejects the heady atmosphere of freedom accompanying Kerouac's loosely structured narrative, which continues to appeal to readers of On the Road, but finally there is something equally compelling in the relentless questioning of the assumptions about freedom and its possibilities in mid-twentieth century America implicit in Wurlitzer's revisionist alternative.

Yet there remains a certain kind of freedom intrinsic to Wurlitzer's use of the iconography of the road novel—and more particularly the literary/film genre of the American Western—although it is not the sort of freedom that commends itself to easy celebration. Wurlitzer has identified Louis L'Amour as a significant influence on his thinking about narrative, despite the actual quality of L'Amour's own stories (which are hackneyed and cliché-ridden). L'Amour prompted Wurlitzer to conceive of narrative as a kind of "space" that itself determines event or incident. Thus, like L'Amour's heroes, who in Wurlitzer's characterization, usually appear at the beginning of a story in a state of maximum freedom, traversing empty space, generally aimless and radically engrossed in their own immediacy, so too do the characters in Nog and Wurlitzer's other works attempt to negotiate the emptiness of their immediate space, except that, unlike in L'Amour's plots, there are no formulas or shopworn conventions to rescue the characters from the totality of that emptiness. They are instead subjected to an ineluctable contingency and the outbreak of random violence, those forces that define reality at the most fundamental level but from which we are usually able to shield ourselves with our illusions of continuity.

Certainly Wurlitzer's protagonists do not entirely welcome their freedom to confront existence at its most elemental. Nog's protagonist (who may or may not be named "Nog") simply drifts through the space into which his life has arrived, without much remaining volition, although he keeps moving, anyway. The narrator of Flats is more aware of the space he occupies as space, although he perceives it not as something through which to move but within which to place himself:

Halifax sits in an open space in an open land. He accepts neither what has come before nor what will come next. This must be my voice. The voice of Halifax. Behind me there are probably two men. We'll form a company or group and go from there. Halifax is not stagnating. He will keep the chill from his bones. He will gather together an occasion. I want to keep it open. Something always happens even if nothing happens. . . .

The narrative of Flats thus consists of the repetition of such motion through multiple episodes themselves representing the narrator's progressive detachment from a distinct sense of "self" that in other circumstances might actually indicate an attainment of something like enlightenment. At the novel's conclusion the narrator has shed his last identity ("Mobile") but does not assume a new one: "I want to say the same words over and over. I want just the sound. I want to fill up what space I am with one note. I want to follow the note beyond my own conclusion. I want a sound that is not involved with beginning or ending. I want to release my own attention to let in the light." The narrator has reached an awareness of "space" as the ground of being and the possibility of its own transcendence, but unfortunately it is likely his last conscious moment, his literal enlightenment coming only after being impelled to it by the direst circumstances imaginable.

Both Nog and Flats evoke a vaguely post-apocalyptic setting, although what makes each of them eerily powerful is that the source of the catastrophic conditions portrayed is finally not divulged. Quake, on the other hand, is an unambiguously post-apocalyptic novel, although even here the novel's effect depends to an extent on our finding the actions and characters on which it focuses to be unexplained and motiveless. Certainly the central action, which initiates the narrative—“I was thrown out of bed," the narrator announces—is comprehensible enough: a massive earthquake strikes Los Angeles, causing near-total destruction and sending most people into the streets. What issues is not so much chaos but an outbreak of ruthlessness and indifference to human suffering in attempts by armed and organized marauders to seize on catastrophe as an opportunity to assert control. Almost immediately, or so it seems, these militias begin to appear and to terrorize the quake victims, who are themselves quickly reduced to their impulses for survival.

The victims include the narrator, another of Wurlitzer's drifters, who at the novel's opening is the resident of a shabby motel and who introduces himself as someone who "had fallen in three months ago from New York and was waiting for my money to run out. Then I would either borrow more or cop some and take a ride somewhere else." Although this narrator is not as separated from the vestiges of civilization as the narrators of Nog and Flats (at least not at first), he nevertheless subsists on its margins, but in this case his wandering in the novel is involuntary, and he is joined by many others becoming aware of just how thin is the veneer of that civilization: "Thank god I no longer dream no more," he overhears someone say near the end of the novel. "I'm afraid to think on the kinks I seen today." So quickly do the streets of Los Angeles devolve into a war of all against all (with momentary alliances formed for immediate self-defense) that it would seem only a sufficiently serious disruption of fixed routine is required for the social inhibitions we are accustomed to observing to break down entirely.

The sheer abandon with which so many people shed these inhibitions and exchange them for acts of barbarism is rendered quite powerfully in Quake, but eventually the point gets overextended through its repetition, the narrative's unsparing assessment of human nature too overtly communicating an apparent polemical intent. In fact, the novel could be regarded as even more narrowly satirical, the duly elaborated illustration of the declaration a woman makes to the narrator near the beginning of the story (the scale of the devastation not yet fully clear): "This is the worst goddamn shithole place I've ever seen. You don't see it at first because of all the palm trees and orange juice bars but let something happen and then see what they do." See what they do indeed. The narrator of Quake ultimately finds himself in the same condition as the protagonists of the first two novels--reduced nearly to catatonia, barely able to crawl--but here the cause of his distress is all too obvious and loses in productive allusion and intimation what it perhaps gains in dramatic immediacy.

While both Nog and Flats clearly enough reflect an interest in the Western landscape—at least in its more primal features—Quake signals a more specific preoccupation with California, both in its geographical and its cultural character. Undoubtedly, this is partly attributable to Wurlitzer's work as a Hollywood screenwriter (most notably on the independent production Two-Lane Blacktop and on Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), an influence which manifests itself directly in Wurlitzer's next novel, Slow Fade, which did not appear until more than a decade after Quake. If Quake is somewhat disappointing in that finally it is too close to being a conventional post-apocalyptic narrative (although when Wurlitzer wrote the novel, the prevailing tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction had certainly not become as familiar as they have now become, and to a significant degree Quake might be seen as one of the works that gave these stories of civilization's demise an imprimatur of experimentalism), Slow Fade, centered around an aging film director (who bears much resemblance to Peckinpah) disappoints because it is entirely recognizable as an entry in the "Hollywood novel" genre, which presents a disabused account of Hollywood as a place where human nature is displayed at its most obnoxious, unleashed by the very forces of ambition and success that make Hollywood's "dream factory" such a potent symbol of American aspiration.

Thus if Quake verges on satire (albeit of a particularly savage sort), Slow Fade certainly is satire, and while it reveals Wurlitzer's jaundiced view of his experience working in a fairly removed corner of the dream factory, it doesn't much tell us anything new or even that shocking about the movie business or the people who maneuver their way through it, nor does it expand the art of satire to any discernible degree. Anyone who reads Slow Fade without having read the earlier trilogy would no doubt judge Wurlitzer a trenchant observer of Hollywood moviemaking culture, which he treats in an episodic but not especially discontinuous narrative form that ultimately serves as the functional vehicle for the novel's caustic chronicle of Hollywood degradation and excess. The novel's portrayal of the likely end of filmmaker Wesley Hardin's career is not without a grudging respect for Hardin's stubborn commitment to his artistic vision, but his final retreat to his native Newfoundland at the novel's conclusion seems a less persuasive, if more explicit, representation of this character's release from self-deception than we find in the earlier protagonists' less voluntary self-renunciations in Nog, Flats, and Quake.

One might have given up, following Slow Fade, on Rudy Wurlitzer returning to fiction as a preferred mode of writing, as almost 25 years elapsed between Slow Fade and the publication of The Drop Edge of Yonder (2007). Moreover, since this novel is described as a "novelization" of sorts of an unpublished screenplay, readers might have expected it to be essentially a continuation of Wurlitzer's screenwriting career by other means, as was Slow Fade in its own way. But while Drop Edge of Yonder might have originated as a script (in which form it apparently acquired a semi-legendary status even in its unproduced state), the novel Wurlitzer fashioned from it shows no signs of being reassembled from another, visually-oriented, medium but firmly claims its own integrity as a work of fiction. A third-person narrative, it is perhaps the most fully rendered in setting, character, and "authentic" dialogue of Wurlitzer's novels, yet the story it tells reaffirms the episodic picaresque strategy of Nog as the most suitable representation of American experience, and, indeed, The Drop Edge of Yonder might be regarded as Wurlitzer's ultimate synthesis (although we could hope this is not necessarily his final novel) both of the literary/aesthetic assumptions he has brought to his fiction and of his depictions of the American landscape and the human behaviors it has inspired (or impaired).

The story concerns the adventures of Zebulon Shook, born in the Western mountains but in the novel wandering through most of the American West (with side trips to Mexico and Central America as well). His trek is foretold by a Shoshone Indian woman, who places a curse on him: "From now on, you will drift like a blind man between the worlds, not knowing if you're dead or alive, or if the unseen world exists, or if you're dreaming." Thus the "in-between" world Zebulon traverses is both hallucinatory and intensely corporeal (especially in its seediness and frequent mayhem). The Drop Edge of Yonder is to an extent an inverted Western in the mode of Thomas Berger's Little Big Man (or Robert Coover's more recent Huck Out West), but most of all it is a compelling illustration of Wurlitzer's conception of "space" as on the one hand inescapably physical, but on the other inherently metaphysical in its implications. Zebulon Shook encounters quite tangible obstacles to his freedom to roam (at one point being incarcerated on a prison ship for his efforts), ultimately declared an outlaw and pursued through material spaces often hostile to his presence; at the same time, Zebulon comes to even more acutely undergo a kind of disembodied expansion of presence, perhaps indeed extending to the "drop edge of yonder," over which Zebulon himself may disappear at the novel's conclusion, when he seems simply to vanish.

In considering Wurlitzer's novels collectively, it is tempting to think of them not as "postmodern" but "posthuman." They depict a world in which conventional human values seem no longer to apply, although also question the extent to which such values, originating in a belief in rationality, coherence, and ultimate purpose, ever applied in the first place. But perhaps it is more accurate to describe the sensibility at work in Wurlitzer's fiction as "postillusory," manifesting in a depiction of human society undone by its own indifference to these values, set in a boundless material environment that barely registers its presence (except to literally destroy it in Quake). The Drop Edge of Yonder contributes to this larger vision of disenchantment by adding specificity to the act of dispelling illusion in its invocation of the mythos and imagery of the American frontier. America's historical reality, as well as the inherited representations of that reality, are themselves rooted in contingency and aimless fluctuation, which Zebulon Shook experiences in the novel's authoritatively rendered particulars. As Zebulon learns (as all of Wurlitzer's protagonists learn), these conditions abide; any effort to acknowledge their dominion requires first of all facing down the terror they bring.

The Landscape of Bitterness and Recrimination 

Readers mostly unfamiliar with the work of Jonathan Baumbach (perhaps aware that he is vaguely identified as an “experimental” writer and that his son is a film director whose most famous film portrays a character loosely based on him) would find his latest selection of stories, The Pavilion of Former Wives, to be on the whole usefully representative of Baumbach’s work in its prevailing subject, but not so revealing of the more adventurous formal strategies Baumbach has employed in his best fiction. As with most of Baumbach’s work in the second half of his career—a career that overall has now spanned more than 50 years—the stories in The Pavilion of Former Wives track the erratic course of love and marriage (the latter often interfering with the former), usually from the perspective of a relationship-battered male protagonist. Two of the most frequent versions of this protagonist figure are the writers “B” and “Josh,” both of whom do indeed make appearances in Pavilion, along with other, similar characters named “Jay” or “Jacob,” whose often fumbling attempts to adequately comport themselves in the company of women are featured in the book.

Since the stories unfold from the protagonist’s point of view (although not always in the first person), we are usually influenced to, if not exactly wish him well in his efforts to cope with the consequences of his romantic follies, at least then to view him as somewhat less than completely clueless in his dealings with women. Still, most of Baumbach’s “heroes” (it is hard not to take them as partially stand-ins for the author) seem both deeply wounded by their failures in love and marriage and unable to really alter the attitudes and actions that clearly contribute to these failures. Collectively, these fictions depict a pattern of male behavior that ultimately exhausts the patience of wives and lovers, causing them to rebel in both implicit and explicit ways (most obviously, divorce), although the culpability of Baumbach’s male characters is most often a function of befuddlement and incomprehension rather than deliberate insensitivity—however little the difference ultimately matters.

B is featured in the book’s first story, the title story, a quasi-fantasy narrative in which B is able to revisit former relationships at a kind of carnival sideshow attraction, while the second story, “Acting Out,” features Jay, whose sessions in marriage counseling the story relates. “Seattle” concerns Josh Quartz and his wife, Genevieve, who have appeared in Baumbach’s books periodically since his 1979 novel, Chez Charlotte and Emily. These three stories immediately situate us in familiar Baumbach fictional space, inhabited by characters preoccupied with their domestic and romantic travails (the women as well as the men), sometimes choosing to relive them in their seeming inability to “move on.” This is dramatized most forcefully in “The Pavilion of Former Wives,” in which B literally cannot resist the invitation, discovered through a personal ad in an “intellectual journal,” to “revisit past relationships and, by rediscovering where they had hit the skids, possibly make right what had once gone terribly wrong.” B risks even more “going wrong” when he asks the woman portraying his wives in the pavilion’s reenactments out on a date, and at the story’s conclusion, already “filled with intimations of regret,” he clearly intends to pursue the relationship even farther.

This story actually gets the book off to an auspicious start, as its lightly surreal qualities introduce a compelling variation on Baumbach’s typical sort of domestic farce, while also evoking the dream-like atmosphere he sought to produce in much of his earlier work. “Seattle” enhances the portrayal of his dysfunctional relationships by providing a glimpse of such a relationship additionally navigating the onset of old age and the failures of memory that accompany it, as both Josh and Genevieve struggle to maintain their bearings in the present and their recall of the past—particularly their past grievances with one another. But most of the remaining stories are formally unadventurous, relating more of the same sort of tale of love and conflict on which Baumbach has almost obsessively focused since at least his novel Separate Hours (1990). “The Story” and “The Night Writer” are brief metafictional vignettes that remind us that Baumbach has since the 1970s been identified as a postmodernist interested in interrogating the representational and storytelling assumptions of fiction, and “The New York Review of Love” is related through the exchange of letters between a man and a woman that are prompted by the latter’s placement of a personal ad in, presumably, another “intellectual journal,” but each of these stories is rather slight and would hardly impress new readers as the work of an intrepid innovator of literary form or a keen observer of the interactions between the sexes.

Baumbach has never exactly been the most resolute exponent of formal experiment in fiction (although he has in reviews, essays, and interviews frequently enough spoken up on behalf of unconventional, “difficult” fiction, and he served as the founding editor of the Fiction Collective (now FC2), arguably the first important American independent literary press devoted exclusively to experimental fiction), but in the 1970s (and intermittently thereafter) he did produce some noteworthy, unconventional books that still hold up as inventive works of literary art. The first of these books, Reruns, was published in 1974, following on his first two novels of mostly conventional postwar realism. Reruns draws inspiration from Baumbach’s lifelong fascination with movies, as well as his interest in dreaming and dream states (the two perhaps in fact closely related), an interest clearly announced in the title of his first book, the 1965 critical study, The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the American Novel. In this book, Baumbach the critic discusses the ways in which selected American writers in the immediate postwar period metaphorically invoke an imagery of “nightmare,” creating a nightmarish atmosphere to capture the terrifying qualities of American life that confront the characters in their novels and stories. But where the narratives in this fiction otherwise remain within the recognizable boundaries of realism, Reruns literalizes the nightmare, depending not on cumulative imagery or atmosphere to work figuratively, but substituting for the discreet effects of language a narrative structure that mimics dreams.

Since all fiction is ultimately an illusion conjured by words, Baumbach’s dream narratives, like all narratives, are of course unavoidably metaphorical. But beginning with Reruns, Baumbach employs the device as a conceit in the same sense that a story is itself a conceit, an extended structural trope that lends to the work of fiction its manifestation of form. These books dispense both with “plot” as the source of narrative coherence, as well as with “coherence” itself understood as the expectation that image and episodic action will make immediate “sense” of the sort we assume will prevail in our normal waking moments. Thus Reruns depicts a man’s life as literally a series of dreamed reenactments. The “reruns” freely indulge in the kind of distortion and incongruous juxtapositions we associate with dreams, often incorporating the narrative devices and the iconography of movies (as well as actual movie stars: “One day (it was raining as I recall), Walter Brennan dropped in,” one dream chapter begins.) If the novel provides an intelligible account of its protagonist’s life after all, its failures and follies, it’s not because it sets out to present one but because the integrity of the dream vision (or series of visions) inevitably distills the essential moments, the indelible impressions, that continue to linger with the character’s putatively dreaming self.

While the degree of calamity the narrator of Reruns seems to have experienced is nightmarish enough, the overarching tone of the novel is broadly comic, a characteristic shared with Baumbach’s subsequent fiction as well and one that clearly indicates how he adapted the bleak outlook examined in his critical study, and to an extent embodied in his own first two novels, into a blackly comic view of men and women struggling to understand each other in a landscape of bitterness and recrimination. Such a shift does indeed align Baumbach’s work more closely with the predominant spirit of American postmodern fiction of the 1960s and 1970s (and shows him to be a naturally funny writer as well), although his next novel, Babble (1976), while obviously retaining the surrealism of its predecessor, is lighter in tone, its humor less discernibly an alternative expression of terror and dread of the kind postmodern comedy so often represents. The hero of Babble is a baby who has the power of articulate (at times very articulate) speech and is very thoughtful about the various dilemmas he faces as a human infant. Once we have accepted this fanciful premise, the book is essentially a collection of picaresque adventures, as the baby takes on the role of superhero, detective, and soldier, and in one episode he “is admitted with what his parents consider unseemly haste to a private California university”—where he is immediately asked, “Do you want to teach a section of composition?”

Chez Charlotte and Emily (1979) is the culmination of Baumbach’s efforts to situate his work as part of the efflorescence of experimental fiction in postwar American literature. It is his best book, and the one most likely to attract future readers and to possibly influence more adventurous writers. In it Baumbach applies the episodic dreamscape strategy employed in Reruns even more rigorously and more vigorously, opening up the “story” to a larger cast of characters from whose alternating perspective Baumbach evokes an array of hallucinatory scenes, ostensibly originating in a novel being written by Joshua Quartz, who relates these scenes to his wife Genevieve, although Joshua tells us at the beginning that the main characters are—Joshua Quartz and his wife Genevieve. Joshua and Genevieve, however, cohabit the novel (both Joshua’s novel and the novel we are reading) with Francis and his wife Nora. Francis initiates the novel’s enabling action when he is pulled away by the tide while swimming and washes up in an isolated cove, where he is discovered by two sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Francis chooses to leave his old life behind and stay with the sisters.

Francis’s rather ethereal experiences with Charlotte and Emily, and his eventual return, intermix with episodes focusing on Nora, who takes the opportunity of her husband’s disappearance and presumed death to assert her independence, and on Joshua and Genevieve, who have some pretty extreme experiences of their own. Ultimately, however, the various stories contribute to a kind of phantasmagoria, their more absurdly fanciful qualities (Genevieve’s affair with “Bobby Mitchum,” for example) presumably attributed to Joshua’s literary imagination, as is their ultimate refusal to consolidate into a recognizable, naturalistic depiction of the novel’s characters and their “true” circumstances. Finally the truest subject of Chez Charlotte and Emily is the marriage of Joshua and Genevieve, but unlike Baumbach’s other, later examinations of marital discord and romantic incompetence, this novel is able to realize the subject with the kind of formal ingenuity that fully confirms Baumbach’s reputation as an experimental writer whose efforts contributed to an enlargement of the conceptual possibilities available to adventurous writers.

Regrettably, Baumbach failed to really follow up on the achievement of Chez Charlotte and Emily, first of all in the most literal way possible: over the next decade he would publish only one novel, My Father More or Less (1982), and one thin volume of short fiction, The Life and Times of Major Fiction (1987). The former is perhaps Baumbach’s weakest novel (although potentially of interest to fans of Baumbach’s son, film director Noah Baumbach, presumably the model for the young son portrayed in the novel), and while the latter contains stories of interest (particularly the title story), it is altogether a rather modest volume. Since Separate Hours in 1990, Baumbach has published more or less regularly, although mostly with small, independent presses (including one that ceased operation shortly after publishing Baumbach’s novel You, forcing Baumbach to buy the remaining copies and attempt to have the book republished). Readers coming to Baumbach’s work for the first time through these books would certainly find them a departure from the practices of mainstream “literary fiction,” but at best they employ the strategies originating in Reruns and Chez Charlotte and Emily—Dreams of Molly (2011) is in fact a direct sequel to Reruns—without advancing beyond the attainments of those earlier novels.

Of the later books, perhaps B (2004) offers the greatest interest as an exemplar of Baumbach’s most persistent preoccupations. Again conflict between the sexes provides the thematic focus, manifested in diverse ways through a series of miscellaneous episodes involving the title figure, a writer who begins the book by telling us he had decided upon turning 50 “it was time to tell my own story unmediated by metaphorical disguise.” B is the Baumbach protagonist most transparently a stand-in for the author, so we should of course respect the metafictional distance B’s lowering of the “metaphorical disguise” paradoxically imposes, but B is finally such a familiar figure in Baumbach’s work, resembling so many of the other apparent surrogates in behavior and attitude, while the circumstances and events recounted in B so often echo the particulars found across Baumbach’s fiction, that the self-reflexive references to the protagonist’s vocation become more the essentially realistic details underpinning a work that itself never strays too far from its own kind of episodic realism.

Still, the book’s form, not quite a novel, certainly not a set of slickly polished stories, gives it an aesthetic edge and an agreeably ragged unity that make B a better introduction to Jonathan Baumbach’s work than The Pavilion of Lost Wives. Unfortunately, neither of them reveal Baumbach to be an important if unjustly neglected experimental writer but rather a minor participant in the “classic” phase of American postmodernism who never quite managed to validate his initial (although nevertheless very real) accomplishments challenging traditional practice.

Sad and Bad and Mad: The Fiction of Rosalyn Drexler 

Perhaps it is because her most lasting accomplishment may turn out to be her paintings that Rosalyn Drexler is now so very little known as a writer of fiction. Although she did attract attention with her novels in the 1970s, and her plays gained notice for their association with the "theater of the ridiculous," a kind of variation on theater of the absurd, it seems safe to say that for most current readers and critics Rosalyn Drexler has almost no name recognition. Perhaps the novels to an extent seem dated, their cultural references and lingo too stuck in the 60s and 70s (although ultimately they are not at all trying to "capture" their era in any direct way). Or perhaps Drexler has simply been overshadowed by the already established experimental writers of her time, most of whom are male, even at a time when efforts are regularly made, by academics and publishers, to maintain attention on neglected women writers.

Still, that little effort has been made to refocus our attention on the fiction of Rosalyn Drexler remains rather surprising, for her novels are indeed singular achievements, adventurous works that are entirely worthy of comparison with the other heterodox writing of the period that has persisted in the cultural memory. Moreover, while Drexler's work is not feminist in a directly political way, it most assuredly does provide a representation of women and their circumstances that feminist critics ought to find deeply resonant (something that could be said about Drexler's paintings as well). And if many of the novels do indeed reflect the social and cultural tendencies of their time, they also use those tendencies to render more broadly and enduringly relevant accounts of women freely expressing their own versions of their lived experience and in the process freeing themselves of the versions imposed by others.

Certainly those expressions are unconventional and often extreme. Drexler's narratives have been described as "grotesque," but they might simply be called "weird," which more appropriately evokes their antic, less terror-fraught character. Her first novel, I Am the Beautiful Stranger (1966), is perhaps the least strange but also most disturbing, at once both extreme and recognizable in the means by which it provokes an uneasy response. Upon the novel's publication, comparisons were made to Catcher in the Rye, but while it is not preposterous to regard the narrator of I Am the Beautiful Stranger, Selma, as analogous to Holden Caulfield, at least insofar as each of them is an impulsive adolescent encountering the corruptions of the adult world, it is misleading to the extent it suggests that Selma is mostly disgusted by this world, that her primary objective is to escape such corruption. What makes this novel disquieting--which its contemporaneous readers surely found it--is that its protagonist often seems as eager to cultivate the wickedness she recounts as evade it.

In this way I Am the Beautiful Stranger seems less an episodic coming-of-age story in the manner of Catcher in the Rye than a purposeful reconfiguration of the form into one that can accommodate an adolescent girls' emotional confusion, which, at least as depicted in this novel, is no less strong than the adolescent boy's (and vice versa) but also more capacious, more subject to conflicting impulses. If Selma is less quick than Holden Caulfield to pronounce adults to be "phony," perhaps this is because she is more ambivalent about her own relation to the adult world, not as unwilling as Holden to sully herself in its imperfections. At the same time she is fully aware of the debased behavior to which she is frequently subjected, she also affirms the authentic sexual and emotional needs that are awakened in her as well. Sharing a room with cousins on their wedding night, she hears them having sex: "Becoming another white nun of solitude. I crossed myself in mock Catholic, fingered my beads of sweat, confessed confusion, and tried to sleep by practicing a sin that is not a sin in my religion. It isn't even mentioned except about men, and they're not supposed to spill their seed upon the ground. I'm safe, I don't spill, and if I did I wouldn't cry."

Selma's progress toward self-awareness is not without its psychological toll, however:

Wow, was I sad and bad and mad! I slashed the outside of my hands with a razor. I made deep criss-crosses in the flesh. A rehearsal of self-destruction? There wasn't much blood because the lines were so fine. I scarred my hands. It was easy to do because it didn't hurt. Even my brain was numb. Afterwards I bought pancake makeup to cover the cuts.

Although many of Selma's relationships with other people--specifically men—are purely exploitive--with Uncle Mort, for example, who, while dancing with her at the cousin's wedding, inserts his tongue in Selma's mouth and "slid it around"—and clearly enough might send her on a course of self-destruction, she does manage to achieve healthier connections with some. At the novel's conclusion, Selma has a boyfriend, Paul, and they are contemplating living together (even at Selma's young age). It seems to be a "normal" relationship, yet it is finally difficult to tell whether Selma's final words signal she is emerging into self-possessed maturity or is still captive to the damaging influences precipitating neediness her narrative reveals: "What if I have to stay appealing every day? When my panic is over I know just what I'll do: go south and make myself a beauty. I'll return wrapped in tan like a carmallow. Then, when Paul peels my wrapper off, the sweet taste of fresh Selma should make him crave me forever."

Selma has an abundant fantasy life, to the point that the reader must be cautious in assuming that events she appears to be recounting are indeed drawn from her actual experiences rather than the product of Selma's imagining. Finally, however, it as "true" to Selma's circumstances as an adolescent American girl growing up in the environment she evokes to say her fantasies reflect the generally abusive examples set by the adults around her as that she in fact encountered a specific instance of such abuse. Something similar is true of Drexler's second novel, One or Another (1970), although here the circumstances of the protagonist have been reversed: Melissa, a 39-year-old woman who has become disillusioned with her marriage is having an affair (or imagines having an affair) with a 17-year-old high school student (her husband's student), himself a troubled boy having difficulty facing the prospect of encroaching adulthood.

If Selma is groping for her place in the adult world, at least as that place is defined for young women of her time, Melissa has her place but, to say the least, finds it wanting. One or Another was published as the women's movement was just beginning to assert its own place in the American cultural consciousness, so perhaps it is not surprising that in Drexler's novel her protagonist rebels against her circumstances by envisioning her independence as betrayal—taking his student as lover and later forming a relationship with a black student her husband has racially harassed—rather than literally leaving the marriage to pursue her own course. Indeed, Melissa lives even more resolutely inside her own head, condition she seems to affirm in the novel's final lines, than did Selma, and the novel for which she serves as narrator is even more firmly than Selma's a possibly imagined construction, not an account of her literal actions.

It would not be entirely accurate to call novels like I Am the Beautiful Stranger and One or Another metafictional, since their effect depends on the possibility we might take their actions as literal after all, that they are fictions soliciting our suspension of disbelief, a disbelief that is stretched but not ultimately broken. Even if we start asking ourselves whether these two main characters might be unreliable narrators freely engaging in fantasy and invention, that they are doing so itself provides insight about them as autonomous characters whose stories still have coherence, however discontinuous or fragmentary. Certainly Drexler's novels are formally adventurous, incorporating not just diary-like sections of direct exposition and narration (most of the novels are primarily first-person narratives), but also letters and notes, brief play-like passages of dialogue, graphic illustrations, purported newspaper articles, and, in the later novels, emails. (Art Does (Not) Exist (1996) also presents transcripts of its protagonist's experimental videos.) Still, their unorthodox methods seem intended as the appropriate artistic strategies for conveying Drexler's eccentric, if unsettling, comic vision of American life.

"Eccentric" is an admittedly vague term to use in describing the prevailingly comic tone and manner of Drexler's fiction, but its humor is not exactly easy to classify. As a playwright, Drexler was sometimes vaguely grouped with the "theater of the ridiculous" movement of the 1960s associated with the director John Vaccaro, and while her fiction may also have some affinities with the anarchic qualities of this style of theatrical comedy, it is again more singularly weird than recognizably campy. This weirdness does have a lighter touch to it that also makes Drexler's work accord uneasily with absurdism, as well as the Freudian underpinnings of surrealism, and while this apparent lightness often enough partly conceals a darker view of human behavior, Drexler's novels don't really depend on the kind of jokiness or exploded logic characteristic of black humor fiction. In her weaker books (Starburn, for example) the humor can seem too calculated, overly mannered, but as a whole her novels feature a kind of comedy that on the surface may seem blithely tongue-in-cheek but upon further contemplation begins to take on a more consequential gravity.

The same thing might be said about Drexler's visual art, arguably about pop art in general, to which Drexler's painting is most often referred. At first glance, her paintings are colorful and cartoonish, created by using pre-existing photographs—often from ads and graphic illustrations—on and around which she applied paint. And indeed any one of these paintings has an immediate sensory impact, the best ones almost mesmerizing in their ostensible simplicity. But put it among other of Drexler's canvases and the tacit, unobtrusive critique of American predispositions and attitudes (especially toward women) becomes, through implicit though indirect mockery, quite evident. Neither Drexler's paintings nor her fiction could properly be called satirical, since the impulse behind them is much more equivocal—at the same time her images and narratives highlight the tackiness of American culture, they also manage to give that tackiness an aesthetically pleasing form—than directly critical and prescriptive. The fiction, however, is more direct in presenting a broadly comic perspective that at times is deliberately outrageous.

Certainly in her fiction Drexler is just as likely to seize on images and motifs from popular culture as subjects. The best illustration of this perhaps is her third novel, To Smithereens (1972), which features a lady wrestler as protagonist and is perhaps her best known work of fiction, largely it draws on Drexler's own experience as a wrestler before she became established as an artist. As in many of the paintings, here Drexler uses the iconography associated with this figure from popular culture to evoke attitudes and beliefs about the pervasive violence of American culture and the confused state of relations between men and women. The latter is signaled in the novel's first scene, narrated by Rosa (later to be proclaimed "Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire"), who in a movie theater encounters a "creep" in the next seat rubbing his hand on her thigh. Rosa is duly annoyed, expressing her annoyance by lashing out at him, yet after the movie agrees to have coffee with him and then goes to his apartment, where soon she waits for him in the bedroom: "I took off my clothes and lay on top of the blanket, still as death, one arm dangling off the side of the mattress; I knew I looked beautiful that way; soft, receptive, passively offering my body. . . ."

The creep is (once again) named Paul, in this case an art critic, and he and Rosa are soon a couple. But while in this scene Rosa chooses to be sexually passive, throughout the novel she continues to exhibit both the aggressiveness she displayed in the movie theater (and which presumably she channels in her short career as a wrestler) and a more conventional acceptance of gendered sexual roles. (When she decides to try wrestling Rosa discovers a lesbian subculture among the women wrestlers, but she does not take part.) Still, while Paul in a sense is trying to exploit Rosa for his own enjoyment when he encourages her to try wrestling, his efforts to control her cannot succeed, as he himself acknowledges:

    Rosa did not conform to any idea I had conceived of her in advance. She related to me with the same sense of immediacy and beauty that the artist experiences in relation to her material. She was molding me on behalf of the vast world of being she existed in; while I had foolishly believed it was I who was shaping her.

The point of view in To Smithereens alternates between Paul and Rosa (with the usual additional interpolated documents), and this provides overall a somewhat more detached perspective from which the reader can contemplate the comic verbal collage Drexler has assembled, although undoubtedly Rosa emerges from the novel a character as forceful as Paul himself finds her. The novel does not really dwell much on Rosa's actual time in the wrestling ring (only one match is recounted at any length), preferring just to introduce us to the colorful characters with whom Rosa interacts and to create a female character who embodies in her life the "sense of immediacy and beauty that the artist experiences in relation to her material" but has perhaps not yet quite found the best "material" in which to express it.

 The Cosmopolitan Girl (1974) is the last of the original series of novels that made Drexler known as a writer as well as an artist. (It is available. along with I Am The Beautiful Stranger and One or Another, in a volume simply called Three Novels, published by Verbivoracious Press, the only fiction by Drexler officially in print.) This might be called Drexler's weirdest novel (an accomplishment in itself). Certainly it is the most openly surreal, featuring a protagonist with a talking dog, a dog she winds up marrying to boot. While this blending of Kafka and Helen Gurley Brown is alternately kooky and spooky, perhaps it also represents Drexler's most faithful translation of the Pop sensibility characteristic of her paintings to fiction, provoking equal parts disquiet, amusement, and something like annoyance. It can be difficult to decide whether we should find Helen Jones a sympathetic character just attempting to find happiness in the big wide world, or an appalling freak. Perhaps she is both. The media image of the Cosmo Girl becomes not exactly the object of satire, nor is it celebrated as a fabulous icon of popular culture, although certainly Drexler does occasionally have fun with it:

    At home I walk around with no clothes on at all (depending on whether the steam is up). I do not bother to pull down the shade. If someone in the building opposite wants to look, he's welcome. If someone doesn't like it, that's his problem. I do what makes me feel good. . .but not always. It's a hard rule to follow because sometimes I'm not sure what does please me.

The Cosmopolitan Girl can be regarded as the completion of an initial quartet of singular but aesthetically consistent novels that introduce both a thematically and formally complex literary practice Drexler continues to pursue in her later fiction but that probably is carried out most successfully in these four novels. Unquestionably it would be warranted to claim Drexler's project as part of post-60s feminism, but the women characters in these novels are neither unequivocal champions of equality nor emblematic figures exemplifying the inherent virtues of their gender. Ultimately each of these characters is emblematic only of herself, although together they do have enough similarities that they collectively comprise a kind of Drexlerian prototype: autonomous, but not without a lingering dependency, self-aware but also at times willfully capricious.

These qualities can certainly be seen in the protagonists of Starburn (1979), Drexler's next novel written under her own name (following on a series of "novelizations" of screenplays—most notably, Rocky—using the pen name "Julia Sorel"), as well as Art Does (Not) Exist. The first concerns the travails of Jenni Love, punk rock singer, who stands accused of murdering a music critic (she is innocent of the charge), while the second focuses on Julia Maraini, a video artist trying to revive her career. Both characters are assertive, self-directed artists who nevertheless make poor decisions and find themselves in predicaments they must scramble to overcome. Both novels as well follow The Cosmopolitan Girl in assimilating the surreal, in the case of Starburn through a sci-fi subplot involving alien abduction, and in Art Does (Not) Exist through scenes featuring talking skeletons. Of these two novels, Art Does (Not) Exist is the most successful, the closest to equaling the early novels, perhaps because the subject more strongly engages Drexler's own experiences, while Starburn seems somewhat awkwardly sensationalized.

Bad Guy (1982) and Vulgar Lives (2007) may be Drexler's least characteristic novels, although ultimately they are not necessarily less revealing of her intentions or her lasting achievements as a writer of fiction. Both novels seem more austere in subject (although not without their moments of absurdity), less formally frenetic (although by no means straightforwardly conventional). While the ostensible protagonist of each is its female narrator, the real protagonist in both might be the male figure on which the narrator's account focuses, although perhaps it is most accurate to describe both books as explorations of these women's capacity to sustain themselves in a male-centered world without losing either their dignity or literally their sanity. Bad Guy especially seems an almost sobering account of its main character—an experimental therapist—and her ultimately failed effort both to help a delinquent boy and to have her professional reputation affirmed, while Vulgar Lives addresses a more charged subject—incest—but in applying Drexler's signature fragmented collage method to its protagonist's dissociating mental state the novel actually produces a formal structure that more nearly functions as a recognizably unified objective correlative.

Nevertheless, all of Rosalyn Drexler's fiction is readily identifiable as the work of a distinctive sensibility, one that in her early fiction revealed itself as unabashed in its iconoclasm and that Drexler has maintained throughout her work as a novelist with a truly remarkable constancy, despite the fact that most of her books have been indefensibly ignored by critics (among whom I am myself until now obviously included). This neglect can't be rectified until more of her work is again in print, of course, and this would be a worthy project for any independent press willing to perform such a service for American fiction. Then the effort to properly assess Rosalyn Drexler's place in the efflorescence of innovative fiction in post-WWII American literature could begin.

All the World’s a Docufiction 

(This review originally appeared in Kenyon Review Online.)

If any writer deliberately proceeded throughout his career to almost ensure his work would be ignored by critics and publishers, it would have to be Harold Jaffe. Jaffe has steadfastly continued to write fiction that is formally and conceptually adventurous while at the same time advancing a radical sociopolitical critique that portrays U.S. culture in the most starkly unfavorable light. From his first novel, Mole’s Pity (1979), to his collection of “docufictions,” Induced Coma, Jaffe has challenged assumptions about fiction as a literary form and enlisted his work in the effort to resist the maleficent influences of America’s “official culture,” a culture that undermines human well-being and despises real human freedom. Since inevitably many readers are uncertain how to respond to these objections, at worst confused about, if not actively hostile toward, the purposes behind them, it is not surprising that Jaffe’s books are seldom reviewed and are usually published by small, even marginal, independent presses.

Even so, Jaffe has a dedicated if small following among proponents of experimental fiction, and his most recent works of fiction, Anti-Twitter (2010), OD (2012) and Induced Coma (a sequel of sorts to Anti-Twitter), are arguably among his most accessible, once the reader has accepted the motive that has produced these hybrid fictions and the principle by which they have been composed. These books present us with “docufictions,” stories that blend fact and fiction in such a way that the factual seems fictional and the fiction is related as if fact. Most of the pieces in these books originate in news reports from disparate sources that Jaffe “treats,” a technique he has described as “inserting a line or two, or rearranging the format, or simply setting the original text in a different context, not altering the figure but the ground.” While the subjects of the news stories vary widely, from the prurient and sensational to the alarming and ominous, they are all, through Jaffe’s treatment, made to reveal another instance of the narcoticization of American culture, a condition imposed not least by the very forms of communication meant to keep us informed. Jaffe’s docufictions show how, through 24-hour news coverage and the ubiquity of social media, we have become inured to the grotesquerie our culture is becoming.

Despite its title, Anti-Twitter is not so much a critique of that particular form of social media as it is an appropriation of the rhetorical constraint inherent in that medium for Jaffe’s own structural purposes. He does not limit himself to 140 characters, but instead composes a series of “150 50-word stories,” as the book’s subtitle proclaims. By necessity, these 50-word stories relate their subjects in an especially blunt, pared-back style:

The Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at former US President Bush had his sentence reduced from three years to one.

His lawyer argued that the charge be changed from assault to insulting a foreign leader.

The magistrate concurred.

Shoe hurling is considered a grave insult in Iraqi culture.

Even if the compression of this “tale” is extreme, we might conclude we have after all been told everything we need to know about this episode, except that, of course, all the context is missing, especially the context that could help us better judge the significance of the information we are given in the final sentence. Is shoe hurling really a grave insult? (Apparently it is, and not something Jaffe has invented.) If so, is it an even graver insult to former President Bush that the magistrate reduced the journalist’s sentence? What does this tell us about the legacy of the US invasion of Iraq?

 Jaffe surely wants us to ask these questions. Indeed, such a story as this is likely to seem a mere trifle, a curious mimicry of robotic media conventions, unless we do pause to consider what might lie between (and around) the lines. Considered by itself, this piece might not seem to call for such close scrutiny, but collected with other, similarly deadpan but also oddly enigmatic “50-word stories,” the effect is cumulative, the underlying strategy more palpable. In the way these stories present some of the strangest and most disturbing “real-life” developments as bite-sized “reports,” they represent Jaffe’s attempt to take the severely reduced mode of discourse associated with Twitter and substitute for its usual vapidity a serious, if implicit, scrutiny of the dominant culture (American, but as the stories reveal, with an increasingly global reach) spawning those developments. This scrutiny requires participation on the reader’s part, who in the process becomes more aware both of the degradation of contemporary culture and the means by which that degradation is perpetuated and reinforced through our prevailing methods of communication. Or at least this is the ideal outcome for Jaffe, who has said in an interview that “I want my reader to walk away pent not purged” so that the reader “ruminates with interest and fretfulness about what he/she has read.” Thus, while the pieces in both Anti-Twitter and Induced Coma incorporate often grave and at times even grotesque subjects, they are designed not to “purge” by depicting these subjects as woeful or shocking but to quicken the reader’s attention through an essentially comic portrayal that leaves the reader dissatisfied with laughter as the primary response. In the first few pages of Induced Coma, we are given a report about a woman “detained after hitting a male in the face with raw steak” (as punishment for his preferring a bread roll over sliced bread), followed by a story of a man confronted with the choice of saving either his son or his wife as they are both drowning. If the contrast between these two pieces is jarring, the immediately following stories themselves yoke together the absurd and the appalling in a way that might indeed make us “fretful.” “Silicon” tells of a Korean couple whose real child starved to death while they were creating a virtual child in an online game. “Freeze-Dry” informs us that

Doctors are attempting to freeze-dry a severely disabled girl, 9-years old, to keep her child-size at her parent’s request.

Born with static encephalopathy, she cannot walk or talk and has the mental capacity of a month-old infant.

Watch the child twist her mouth grotesquely and emit animal noises.

[Video]

These slices of postbiological, techno-enthralled modern life might seem so bizarre and unsettling that we could wonder how thoroughly Jaffe has “treated” his sources, but finally they aren’t so implausible that we can’t imagine coming across them in an actual news report.

In Induced Coma, Jaffe expands his formal scope somewhat, as the book includes stories of up to 100 words, but otherwise still features docufictions drawn from a variety of media sources, including the BBC, Al Jazeera, The New York Daily News, and the Huffington Post. (Jaffe provides a list of his sources at the end of both Anti-Twitter and Induced Coma, although he does not identify the source of individual stories.) The effect of reading Induced Coma is less of receiving a series of twisted tweets than an episodic, highly variegated report on the discouraging state of the world we currently inhabit. Although these are stories that obviously exhibit few if any of the characteristics traditionally associated with narrative fiction, taken together they do provide a kind of realism, albeit a realism that exposes the corruption behind the increasingly digitalized façade of global culture, the inauthenticity of a thoroughly mediated “ordinary life.” While some of the “tales,” such as “Silicon” are more sickening than enjoyable, others could be called entertaining in their status as “found” silliness, whatever additional thematic force they might still potentially retain: “The Pope’s Cologne” mimics an ad for “this historically elite cologne” worn by Pope Pius IX (“we obtained the formula from descendants of Pius’s Papal Guard commander and lifelong companion General Didier Le Grande”), “Hitler’s Fart” informs us that an SS officer preserved some of the flatulent Adolph Hitler’s farts in bottles, one of which is now available on eBay, and in “Coke $$” we learn that “91 percent of dollar bills contain traces of cocaine,” which “points to the increasingly widespread use of cocaine in the US.” The highest number of such bills was found in Washington D.C., the lowest in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Perhaps the stories included in Anti-Twitter and Induced Coma could be classified as “flash fiction,” although the only thing they really have in common with most flash fiction—which usually features character, setting, or even a rudimentary version of plot, something that marks it as the product of “invention”—is their brevity. “Docufiction” is a term Jaffe has used since at least False Positive (2002), and encompasses such other collections of longer docufictions as 15 Serial Killers (2003) and OD. Jaffe’s 2009 novel Jesus Coyote, a very thinly disguised portrayal of the Manson Family (Charlie Manson becoming “Jesus Coyote”) also qualifies as a docufiction, so that a work like Induced Coma is best seen as a kind of ultimate refinement of the approach developed in these books, an approach incipient, perhaps, in Jaffe’s early work, but brought to its most salient focus in the more recent books’ representation of media itself as the site where the “real” is determined. Jaffe has been from the beginning of his career a formally adventurous writer, contributing belatedly to the rise of “experimental fiction” as something like an avant-garde in postwar American fiction, but his experiments with the concept of the docufiction arguably now constitute his most distinctive achievement.

Jaffe’s work from the beginning clearly enough has been politically motivated, an attempt to create an iconoclastic fiction that in disrupting conventional discourse (in this case the conventions associated with “normal” fiction) also disrupts the political assumptions and practices that discourse helps to support by implicitly suggesting that the currently “normal” is naturally so. But where the earliest fiction—in addition to Mole’s Pity, such books as Mourning Crazy Horse (1982), Dos Indios (1983), and Beasts (1986)—appears to take somewhat more interest in formal innovation for its own sake (Beasts, for example, comprises a set of stories that parallel the medieval bestiary), Induced Coma and its immediate predecessors are politically “engaged” in a more direct and purposeful way. The aesthetic interest in the 50 and 100 words stories of Anti-Twitter and Induced Coma is mostly conceptual, their success mostly dependent on the reader’s willingness to look “outside the text” to affirm the author’s intent. These stories challenge literary convention, but this is done less in the name of redirecting or refreshing literary practices than of calling attention to the cultural and political depredations of the world we live in, forcing our awareness that they are depredations, so that, presumably, we might do something about them.

This is not to say that the conceptualism of Induced Coma has no aesthetic interest, nor that Jaffe shows no additional concern for aesthetic effect or value. The very first piece in the book, the title story, introduces what will be the underlying metaphorical representation of the book’s portrayal of our wired and networked world as “Coma-land,” a “degraded version of Nirvana” that lulls us into its “sweet spice” of irreality. The pieces are not arranged in a random or a rigidly imposed order but in an effectively understated way, using sequential repetition of subjects and motifs and alternating the stories of outright horror with the stories of absurdity so that the book’s tone remains uneasily (but provocatively) suspended between the two. However, these signs of the writer taking the aesthetic demands of fiction seriously do not displace the overriding ambition of this book, as well as Harold Jaffe’s fiction more generally: to be politically effective, to encourage the reader’s recognition of the oppressive forces shaping (or misshaping) his/her experience of current “reality.”

This is a perfectly fine ambition if you think innovation in fiction is “subversive” only if it subverts not just literary convention but also existing political structures. To the extent that Jaffe himself seems to believe this, perhaps it is ungenerous to say that the ambition is likely to remain unfulfilled, the political structures in question to remain untouched by his literary iconoclasm, and not only because that very iconoclasm helps to account for his small audience and lack of critical attention. Still, it also accounts for the liveliness and originality of his dissident fiction, even if Jaffe himself might not consider his work wholly successful if the readers he does attract find this by itself sufficient reward.

Moldenke and His World 

(This essay originally appeared in Big Other.)

Readers encountering David Ohle’s work for the first time through his most recent novel, The Death of a Character (2021), will indeed find the depiction promised in its title, but those familiar with Ohle’s previous books, especially his first and eventual cult favorite, Motorman (1972), will know that the character whose dying the narrative chronicles is the protagonist of that novel as well. Called simply Moldenke, he makes additional appearances in the long-delayed follow-up to Motorman, The Age of Sinatra (2004), as well as its successors, The Pisstown Chaos (2008) and The Old Reactor (2013). (In The Pisstown Chaos, Moldenke turns up as a minor character in a story focusing on others, but The Death of a Character marks the fourth time his picaresque existence has been the focus of an Ohle novel.) Moldenke has been the principal conduit to the singularly bizarre and often grotesque world Ohle invokes in his fiction, and thus his demise seems more a consummation of that world’s creation, its full achievement perhaps, than merely the portrayal of a fictional character’s death.

To some extent, however, Moldenke in this novel is not exactly the same Moldenke featured in Motorman (or each of the sequels, for that matter), which makes The Death of a Character comprehensible enough to the uninitiated reader, but also potentially conveys an incomplete impression not just of Moldenke as a character (or characters), but of the nature of what became a multi-book project expressing a vision of an alternative reality that incorporates enough fractured and rearranged pieces of our already wrecked world that it seems intelligible, if freakishly distorted. Like Moldenke himself, this reality is never quite the same from book to book, although its oddities are generally of a similar sort and the discontinuities seem part of the process of decay and instability its inhabitants experience: At some point in the future (how far or near is never quite specified), America has degenerated—perhaps with the help of an external catastrophe—into a conglomeration  of what people remain, concentrated in a few scattered places in what might be the Midwest (the names of these places vary) and reduced to a fairly primitive state of existence, although some vestiges of the old technology linger (a decrepit nuclear reactor, a barely functioning mechanical “pedway”). The novels centering on Moldenke generally portray him attempting simply to survive the circumstances in which he finds himself, to evade or elude the capricious forces arrayed against him. The Pisstown Chaos is a departure from this pattern only in that these same conditions afflict the Ball family rather than Moldenke.

These forces include, in addition to the entropy besetting the remnants of a degraded culture, the explicit dictates of what passes for authority in this ramshackle civilization. This authority is at times invested in a government of sorts (mostly dominated by a single autocratic figure), but essentially it is claimed by whoever can seize it and maintained through nonsensical and arbitrary edicts and directives that ensure obedience by keeping the people as confused and unsettled as possible. (Literally unsettled: often the population is compelled to relocate or individuals are consigned to detention facilities on the flimsiest, often quite absurd, pretenses—at one point in the The Old Reactor, Moldenke is shuffled off to a prison camp for defecating in a graveyard.) Control is further reinforced in The Age of Sinatra and The Pisstown Chaos (and now in The Death of a Character as well) by the imposition of a “great forgetting,” whereby history is erased, keeping everyone in a perpetual present haunted by vestiges of the past, which are vaguely known but about which most people ultimately know nothing. In The Blast (2014), a non-Moldenke novella, nevertheless quite clearly in the same fictional milieu, the protagonist, a boy named Wencel, a student at “the only school still open,” is taught the version of history that remains available, a scrambled-up construction anchored in figures from popular culture (“the age of Sinatra,” “the age of Nerds”) and fourth-hand distortions of events surrounding the Kennedy administration. (In another class, Wencel studies “Emoticonics,” an emoticon script underlying Emo, “the language of our ancestors.”)

The Blast also comes as close to an explanation of the source of the prevailing conditions in Ohle’s fictional world as we find in his published work, or at least the conditions specifically depicted in this short novel. As its title betokens, at some point in the recent past, a terrible explosion, referred to simply as “the blast,” occurred—recently enough that some people, including Wencel’s father, have some recollection of it. It is of course tempting to conclude that this was a nuclear blast, but Ohle merely leaves this as an implication. Neither The Blast nor any of the other books could really be adequately described as post-Apocalyptic narratives. They don’t seem to depict a future world to which our own present is possibly heading so much as create a facsimile of a future that figures elements of present reality into an absurdly sorry excuse for a social order. If they are science fiction, it is a reverse-image rendition of science fiction that inverts the standard association of SF with futuristic advanced knowledge and technologies into an entropic civilization reduced to crank radios and pedal cars. One of Wencel’s teachers presents the class with a drawing representing what she believes a motor may have looked like, prompting Wencel to inquire about “flying motors”: “Like the one you drew, except in the sky?”

Although it introduces us to Moldenke, as well as other characters who will appear in subsequent books, and establishes the signature impassive tone with which Ohle’s narratives are related, Motorman offers a different, while still profoundly aberrant, sort of invented world. Here the future has become more synthetic than dilapidated, although Moldenke still encounters plenty of ruination. This world has telephones, motorcars, and electricity—Moldenke throughout the first part of the novel is menaced over the phone by a man named Bunce, whose identity and authority remain nebulous but whom Moldenke fears, nonetheless—but when Moldenke decides to leave the apartment in which he has concealed himself and to meet up with Dr. Burnheart (a beneficent counterpart to Bunce, although just as shadowy), he and we have a more sustained encounter with the deformed environment he inhabits, as a picaresque journey ensues.

Soon after he begins his journey, Moldenke contemplates his surroundings:

He sat on the seawall, chewing stonepicks, and watched the first artificial sun break apart and burn out. A slow, dry rain of white ash persisted through summerfall. By winter, a second was up, blinding to look at and almost warm enough.

It turns out that in Moldenke’s world there are a number of additional suns and moons (perhaps up to seven of the latter), which appear at irregular intervals (a steady stream of weather reports attempts to keep track, although apparently Bunce is able to manufacture the weather he wants, instructing the “weatherman” to send out the appropriate forecast.) This augmentation of climate conditions is attributed to government scientists, although its purpose—for either the government or the scientists—is never made exactly clear, but then the purpose of the government itself is not at all evident, either. As in all of the subsequent novels as well, government is something effected through whim. In Motorman, it would seem, technology has not regressed to a derelict state, but it does seem to be deployed in an indiscriminate, uncontrolled way that seems as senseless as it does sinister.

The essential absurdity of Moldenke’s reality is further manifested in his own personal circumstances. Apparently the victim of heart disease (in other of the novels he is afflicted with various digestive problems), Moldenke is the recipient of a transplant, but he has been given not one heart but four, and they are animal hearts, not human, the operations performed by the same Dr. Burnheart. Again the motivation behind this procedure remains murky—Moldenke may just be the victim of human experimentation, although he is grateful enough to Dr. Burnheart for the service. Moldenke is also a veteran of a “Mock War,” a war in name only in which one might play one’s part by “volunteering for injury,” as Moldenke does,

writing his name down on a piece of paper and dropping it into a metal box outside the semi-Colonel’s office. At morning meal the day’s injury list was read. . .When they read his name he reported to Building D, stood in line at the door. Every minute or so the line shortened by one. The mock soldier in front of Moldenke turned and said, “I’m proud that I gave for my country. He opened the fly of his trench pants and showed Moldenke a headless crank.

Fortunately for Moldenke, he is able to do his part for the cause by enduring only a fractured kneecap.

Such madness is native to Ohle’s fictive world, conveyed through the sort of deadpan expository prose characterizing a passage such as this. Ohle’s fiction accentuates narrative—description is evocative and acute, but generally concise, without forced lyricism—although formally Motorman, as well as the subsequent novels, can also be fragmented and discursive. Motorman, for example, incorporates numerous letters, both from and to Moldenke (his interlocutors tend to refer to him as “Dink” or “Dinky”), but they work either to fill in gaps in the ongoing narrative of Moldenke’s adventures or to provide suitable context. What happens (or what has happened) remains the focus of attention, even if what happens is goofy or preposterous. Ohle’s narrative manner seems most influenced by Kafka, except that where Kafka’s impassive narrator leaves an impression of foreboding and inscrutability, Ohle’s produces something closer to farce. Moldenke seems finally a type of antihero: an almost hapless figure whose senseless circumstances make us want to sympathize with his plight, while those very circumstances make it virtually impossible to conceive he might be able to overcome them.

While in the following novels featuring him as protagonist Moldenke is still a comic character (made comic by the lunacy of his surroundings), he is less purely the victim of a system uniquely subjecting him to its insanity. In The Age of Sinatra, Moldenke must again negotiate the lunacies, but their source is somewhat more identifiable in the reigning political system, headed up by one Michael Ratt, the President of what remains of the U. S. Moldenke, in fact, rather involuntarily becomes involved in a plot to assassinate Ratt, for which Moldenke is assigned complete blame by the powers that be when the plan actually succeeds. (Moldenke almost avoids punishment but comes up one “waiver” short—waivers are granted arbitrarily by the government and exempt perpetrators of crime from responsibility for their actions—when he goes before the judge, who sentences him to a prison camp, after all.) This wider focus on the visible social and political structure in which Moldenke abides perhaps removes from the follow-ups to Motorman the mixture of hilarity and disquiet that emerges in the tone of the novel as an effect of the opacity of motive and causality, but it also makes the follow-ups more than simply sequels to the first novel, attempts to re-create a “cult classic” thirty years later.

The Age of Sinatra leaves Moldenke in essentially the same position in which he found himself in Motorman, however—that is, in ambiguous circumstances and still in a state of radical uncertainty about his future well-being. The same is true of The Old Reactor, which has Moldenke sent to a prison camp that inverts our customary conception of a prison. The facility is actually an entire town, Altobello, and the prisoners are sentenced to be “free”: There is no confinement, no oversight by prison authorities, no institutional structure at all. Prisoners are literally condemned to be free—a telling comment, perhaps, on the highly regulated society outside the prison, one that would conceive of life inside such a prison as its opposite and therefore punishment. Most of the inhabitants of Altobello seem better off then they would have back in Bunkerville, the locus of the social order outside, but they have been conditioned thoroughly enough by the irrationality of that order that they can’t quite appreciate it. (The slop they have for food seems delicious to them.) Moldenke, in fact, seems to appreciate it, more than the others, but even he is concerned to get back to the house in Bunkerville he has inherited from his aunt, where he finds, after Bunkerville itself has been “liberated,” that the situation is very far from liberating.

The Death of a Character literally brings Moldenke to the end of his journey, and, to the extent we are to perceive continuity in Moldenke’s portrayal across the Moldenke saga, clearly he has found neither reward nor enlightenment. The very first paragraph succinctly evokes Moldenke’s predicament as he approaches what will be the terminal phase of his life, as well as the sort of world he now faces:

On a scorching winter afternoon, Moldenke stopped at the Dew Drop Inn for a Chinese whiskey. He’d been limping along China Way, a newly named street, wondering what to do with the remainder of his life. The sound of distant riots rattled his half-deaf ears and the air smelled of sulfur. He’d been homeless now for months, sleeping in the park with other jobless, hungry souls, spending his days in the library reading and using the toilet when it was working.

The details here give us a vivid impression of the scene and situation Moldenke confronts, but they also reiterate for readers not as familiar with either the Moldenke novels or Davie Ohle’s work as a whole some of the more predominant motifs and conceits to be found in Ohle’s fiction. We are immediately made aware of the fundamentally absurd conditions that prevail in Moldenke’s world—“a scorching winter afternoon,” one of many manifestations of arbitrary weather phenomena that plague Ohle’s characters—and the sound of the distant riots further signals the ubiquitous threat of instability that seems always present and serves for the characters as a constant source of reference (the “Pisstown Chaos”). Food and drink (usually of some very bizarre and/or repulsive variety) are a special focus of attention in Ohles’s fiction—a dissertation could be written about Ohle’s use of food in these novels as an objective correlative of cultural devolution—and some such establishment as the “Dew Drop Inn” is a focal point of communal experience. The source of authority is usually undefined and precarious, so that now when Moldenke finds himself drinking “Chinese whiskey” and traveling on “China Way,” it would seem that a more determinate sort of regime has come to be in charge.

This is indeed the case, as we discover when Moldenke enters the Dew Drop, encountering a “Chinese official lost in her own thoughts, jotting notes in a daybook.” Moldenke’s zone in dystopic quasi-America has been occupied by the Chinese—who claim it has been ceded to them voluntarily—although very little that is culturally or politically “Chinese” (not even the food) is attributed to the representatives of the Chinese administration, mostly soldiers, who interact with Moldenke and his companions. They are mostly the latest representatives of preemptory and indiscriminate power that operates in Ohle’s fiction, ultimately working to inflict gratuitous hardship. Perhaps the domination by China in this latest rendering of Ohle’s fictional landscape is inevitably a commentary on the dynamics of current geopolitical arrangements, but as with Ohle’s larger fictional project as a whole, neither forecasting the future nor critiquing the present seem the likely motivation for the details of setting or the cast of characters. The Chinese play the same role as Bunce or President Ratt or the mad religious leader, and their presence contributes to the effort to defamiliarize the iconography of an America that has mutated into a funhouse world of the writer’s own invention.

The Death of a Character also resembles Ohle’s other books in that it is a variation on the road novel. Moldenke determines to avoid the local turmoil and travel “south,” to a cabin he believes he has inherited. The bartender in the Dew Drop suggests that Moldenke take with him a “neutrodyne” named Wheaton. Neutrodynes are humanoid beings (perhaps alien, although again Ohle retains a degree of ambiguity by leaving their origins murky) that alternate in their roles in Ohle’s fiction with other similarly quasi human creatures: jellyheads, Stinkers, and necronauts. All of these groups live among the human characters, generally looked on by humans as “other” and treated accordingly (although the necronauts are also considered somewhat spooky—dead people still alive). It, too, is tempting to take such creatures as the product of human manipulation (or at least as a way of representing human tampering), the exact disaster or technology gone awry long erased through a “forgetting,” but Ohle maintains a consistent weirdness in his work by withholding explanation, here leaving the neutrodynes and jellyheads to be just weird.

Wheaton is probably the most individuated neutrodyne in Ohle’s fiction, although paradoxically he becomes a persuasive character by devoting himself to Moldenke’s service: Wheaton is “programmed” to serve human beings (the source of the programming again mysterious), and he does indeed vigilantly attend to Moldenke’s needs, from providing food to assisting with Moldenke’s less than efficient toilet habits. Wheaton appears to be without emotions, although after he and Moldenke arrive at the family cabin Wheaton meets a female neutrodyne, Darleen, who shortly after moves in with them and, in the parlance most often used in Ohle’s world, they “mate.” However, their mating also has a utilitarian purpose: it seems that neut women give birth almost immediately after becoming pregnant, and she and Wheaton begin to make babies continually, Darleen selling them to the Chinese. They do this in part to raise the money they need to keep the household functioning, but they are able to carry out this rather mercenary task because they are less subject to emotional attachment than humans.

Nevertheless, Darleen and Wheaton do manage to keep the household functioning, although, being neutrodynes, they don’t require the gratitude of either Moldenke or Bertie (a woman Wheaton and Moldenke encounter on their trip south and invite to live with them), who, being human, don’t offer it. While it certainly could not be said that neutrodynes such as Wheaton or Darleen are exemplary moral beings (as defined by human standards to be sure, and perhaps Ohle’s depiction of neutrodynes and the other non-human beings in his fiction alongside human beings and the wreckage they have made of their world has the ultimate effect of travestying those standards), they surely do emerge from The Death of a Character as more resolute and self-possessed than the human characters. As the Chinese gradually become less and less tolerant of the household’s presence on the property—they do not acknowledge Moldenke’s claim on it, but for a while allow Moldenke and company to remain in the cabin—Wheaton and Darleen, with the help of a local hunter, Ernie, who has long sustained the property in the absence of other residents, continue to provide themselves, Moldenke, and Bertie with the means of subsistence.

Bertie is a character first introduced in Motorman, where she is known as “Cock Roberta” and is nominally Moldenke’s girlfriend, even though they are rarely in each other’s company. While in The Death of a Character she does help to maintain Moldenke’s spirits enough for him to persevere for a while, Bertie doesn’t really play a memorable role in the novel, although her abrupt and entirely coincidental encounter with Moldenke as he and Wheaton are on their pedal bus trip south is one of the more absurdly amusing moments in the story:

“It’s me. You haven’t forgotten, have you? We were sweethearts? So odd to run into you after all this time.”

Moldenke turned further despite the pain in his neck. “Roberta. I remember.”

“I go by Bertie now. You don’t look well, Moldenke.”

There are strong women characters in Ohle’s fiction (Moldenke’s mother, Agnes, Ophelia Balls), but Bertie/Roberta mostly just declines along with Moldenke.

That decline structures the novel’s episodic plot. Eventually, the Chinese decide that the four occupants must leave, the cabin itself to be demolished. What’s left of Moldenke’s health begins to ebb. (“I don’t feel good,” Moldenke tells Bertie. “You’ve never felt good,” she replies. “I feel bad, then.”) In accordance with Moldenke’s wishes, before he finally succumbs the others take him to a tree and leave him in its branches. There is little dignity in Moldenke’s death—on the way to the cart for the trip to the tree, Wheaton drops Moldenke into the mud—but being placed in the tree while alive does allow him to avoid the final indignity of Wheaton’s posthumous hatred: neuts despise the dead, and are known to assault dead bodies. “Goodbye, all,” Moldenke calls out weakly, as his own funeral procession walks back to the cabin.

If Moldenke’s death seems to be in some measure an ignominious one, we must remind ourselves that what is depicted in this novel is the death of a character, a character whose fictional life has indeed been extended now over multiple installments over a wide expanse of time, thus perhaps indeed bestowing on him (for both readers and the author) more “life” than a typical protagonist. Readers of all four of the Moldenke books likely would find his death especially meaningful—although that it verges on the farcical will likely not come as a shock or surprise. In this way, at least, The Death of a Character leaves an impression of Moldenke and his world entirely consistent with and representative of their importance in Ohle’s fiction as a whole. Still, the Moldenke books play their part in the formation of that larger work, and thus it would be worth readers’ time to read not only Motorman as well as its direct spin-offs featuring Moldenke, but all of Ohle’s published work—including City Moon (2018), ostensibly a compilation of the issues of a satirical newspaper published for a number of years in Lawrence, Kansas that Ohle co-edited, but that in its remodeled, collage-like form still integrates well with the more conventionally composed novels and novellas to help evoke his surpassingly strange fictional world. Fifty years after the appearance of Motorman, the strangeness only seems all the more believable.