Guillermo Stitch is not the sort of writer who is going to get a lot of mainstream press coverage--the very title of his novel Lake of Urine (Sagging Meniscus Press) seems an immediate thumb to the nose where the mainstream is concerned--but such discussions of his work that can be found (mostly on blogs) use such terms as "bizarro," "new weird," and "absurdist" to characterize his fiction. It is easy enough to see why such terms would suggest themselves as appropriate to a novel like Lake of Urine, but while they might apply up to a point, this novel finally doesn't very comfortably fit into any of these categories.
"Weird" and "bizarre" would each certainly apply to Lake of Urine as simply a general description of the novel's setting and various plot turns (although it can't really be said to have a straightforward plot), yet to the extent each is also more specifically identified with the kind of fiction that such adjectives have come to designate--"bizarro fiction," "the new weird"--the novel falls short of (or exceeds) the definitions given to these modes. While Lake of Urine has its disgusting moments--particularly in regard to the lake in question--it really lacks the full punkish grotesquerie associated with bizarro fiction, and its weirdness doesn't quite take it into the realm of science fiction but is just, well, weird (often rather amiably so).
"Absurdist" doesn't quite capture the quality of the novel's humor, either. Historically speaking, an absurdist novel distorts reality in order to unsettle our notions of the "reality" of the real, or even to sharpen our perception of the real. The comedy in Lake of Urine, however, which follows on directly from its weirdness, serves Stitch in his effort at what is called world-building, even if it is an out of phase and peculiar world. Indeed, this seems to be the primary aesthetic ambition of the novel: to get us to accept its peculiar world as itself "real," at least as far as language and the tools of fiction can work to create this illusion.
As if to underscore the urgency of this task, Lake of Urine offers numerous passages like this, especially at the beginning of chapters:
Two pairs of heavy brocade curtains emit two razor-sharp slits of hard light into the cool, quiet gloom. One of these lines dissects the plum and bamboo motif of the upholstery on a cabriole sofa that sits in the middle of the room--laser-like as it cuts across the floorboards and splits the oriental design from floor to high, curved back.
A reading table is tucked behind the sofa and on it stands a lamp. From the lamp, a gas tube winds upward like a charmed cobra to a ceiling fixture overhead. . . .
The descriptions of the particulars of this world are, as here, almost minutely exact ("the plum and bamboo motif"), not unlike what we might expect to find in a straightforwardly realist novel. In fact, one could say that this is a realist novel, except that the writer's realism presumes a world in which a man wishes to measure the depth of a lake so attaches first a dog and then a woman to the end of his very long rope and plunges them to the bottom (neither return), another woman (the dead one's sister) escapes her home town to the city and almost immediately becomes the CEO of a very large corporation (admittedly she seems at least as competent and well-informed as the other members of the company's board), and, at the novel's conclusion, the dead woman (her name is Urine, hence the novel's title) is herself resurrected from the lake as something like a zombie. The novel's task is to convince us this world makes its own kind of sense, not to suggest that our own reality lacks it.
There are elements of satire in Lake of Urine, but it tends to be of the rather mild and somewhat obvious sort, as in the scenes depicting Norambole (the surviving sister) interacting with her colleagues in the boardroom, an amusing enough send-up of the shallowness and cupidity of corporate values but really more just a part of the comic eccentricity of the characters' behavior in the novel than biting satire of the world outside it. This eccentricity almost necessarily makes most of the characters in the novel two-dimensional, but this does not really affect our ability to accept both them and their world as provisionally convincing fictional creations.
Perhaps the least caricatured character in the book is Emma Wakeling, mother of Urine and Norambole. About half of the novel is in fact narrated by Emma, as she tells, in reverse chronological order, the stories of her eight marriages. (Urine and Norambole were the product of the first.) These chapters are enjoyably outrageous, Emma's pride in being a master at masturbating the men in her life ("He would squeal and cry like a girl while I did it") providing especially hilarious moments. Her manual dexterity aside, Emma is not exactly a man-pleaser; she uses her skills to control them, although this does not prevent her from making some pretty bad choices in husbands. We are also offered scenes from Emma's childhood, which among other things, gives the novel some historical grounding, enhancing the overall exercise in world-building.
Lake of Urine as a whole is enjoyable. Its "bizarre" elements--including the potentially unsavory ones--do not make it a less agreeable work but help it rise above whimsy or "quirk." But, in succeeding at building its off-kilter world, paradoxically by using the strategies of realism, does this novel also enhance our appreciation of the ways in which the evocation of the irreal extends the aesthetic horizon of the novel? Should we be content with the world that is built, or should the way of building hold its own interest, so that such worlds do not come prefabricated? Do these things matter? Perhaps not, not always. Lake of Urine is unlike most other novels, which makes it admirable enough.
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