The description on the back cover of Lee Klein's Neutral Evil))) (Sagging Meniscus) explicitly labels it an "autofiction." Whether the publisher intends by this to directly associate this novel (or perhaps, more accurately, novella) with the mode of fiction most prominently represented by, say, Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgard, or simply to signal that the book loosely originates in autobiographical experience (but in the process capitalizing on the current fascination with autofiction) is not altogether certain, but presumably the author consented to this characterization of his work, so inevitably our response to Neutral Evil ))) will be influenced by what we think this relatively new, (some might say trendy) conception of the relationship between art and life has to offer in reckoning with works of fiction.
Presumably the term is not just a reformulated label for what used to be called simply autobiographical fiction but is meant to signify a different kind of interaction between the writer's work and life circumstances: rather than merely drawing on personal experiences in creating ostensibly fictional characters, in autofiction the protagonist is identified directly with the author, inviting us, at least, to consider the protagonist's actions to be those the author has performed, the protagonist's words representing the author's unmediated report of those actions. If this seems to erase the difference between memoir and fiction, that seems to be the point, as autofiction is said to expose the extent to which the real is always conditioned by the fictional and the fictional a pathway to the real. As Rebecca Van Laer puts it, "By using the author’s name and some real details while spinning fictional webs, [autofictions] intentionally blur the line between truth and fiction and encourage readers to look at all literature—even what we might usually call nonfiction—as fiction" (Ploughshares, 2018).
Neutral Evil))), however, doesn't seem all that eager to explore this supposed aporia blurring the fictional and the nonfictional. It is a more or less straightforward account of an evening its protagonist (not identified explicitly as Lee Klein, in fact) spends at a concert by the drone metal band, Sunn O))), an evening vouchsafed by the protagonist's wife as she is about to go on a business trip that will leave the protagonist to assume all household duties, including child care. The "action" is largely nonexistent. The protagonist travels to the concert (ingesting some recreational drugs in preparation), waits around for it to begin, and returns home after it is over. Most of the novel is occupied with the narrator's reflections on the current state of the world and of his life, but especially his own interest in music, reflected in his obsession with guitars and guitar equipment. After a fairly lengthy buildup, the attention given to the actual concert once it begins is actually rather attenuated, suggesting that Neutral Evil))) is less interested in the somewhat extreme music that ostensibly attracts the narrator's attention than in the increasing extremity of mind he is experiencing--caused by both political (the election of Donald Trump) and personal uncertainty.
And yet finally this extremity doesn't seem all that extreme. While the narrator's account could certainly be called meandering, it doesn't really deviate that much from the kind of digressiveness that would naturally accompany extended observation and rumination. Indeed, the novel has both a psychological and an experiential realism, related in a transparent and lucid way that, far from prompting us to regard "what we might usually call nonfiction" as fictional, mostly muddies the distinction between fiction and nonfiction by leaving the former almost entirely notional, merely a designation useful in placing the book in the right section of the bookstore. This is not to say that Neutral Evil))) is a flawed piece of writing, merely that it seems content enough with its status as a novel that could just as easily be called a kind of slice-of-life memoir (or even a narrative essay), without really challenging our pre-established assumptions about any of these forms. After reading the book, I am not much compelled to ponder whether its narrator-protagonist is in fact the authorial Lee Klein or a fictional creation, because it doesn't really seem to matter that much.
Perhaps it does matter in considering the book's thematic implications. Neutral Evil))) is surely not just a primer on guitar technology or a guide to the finer points of a particular genre of heavy metal music. We might take it as a meditation on the anxieties of life in the time of Trump, but Sunn O)))'s performance of its rather ominous music is finally depicted cursorily enough that it can't entirely bear the burden of symbolically representing those anxieties. Ultimately, the narrator's chronicle of his autumnal evening out seems a story about growing up, about finally accepting the prerogatives of adulthood and, if not renouncing, beginning to let go of childish things. This narrative mode is of course one of the principal devices of literary fiction (here becoming a delayed coming-of-age story, perhaps), and Neutral Evil))) renders the story mostly without the suffocating, self-distancing irony found in much autofiction. It's a quality of the book that most clearly marks it as fiction, the "auto" merely a means to an end.
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