The Reading Experience

On David Ohle

My essay on the fiction of David Ohle is now available at 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. Continue

New Review

My review of Dennis Cooper's I Wished is now available at Full Stop:

    Cooper is no doubt one of the most prominent (or notorious) and influential writers of “transgressive” fiction, fiction that deliberately repudiates decorum and restraint in the treatment of subject in fiction. Much transgressive fiction seems to delight in flaunting good taste (or perceived good taste) in its depictions of extreme sexual situations and incipient or actual violence (frequently brutal). In many cases, the transgressions in this fiction are entirely transgressions of content, challenges to reigning assumptions about the acceptable boundaries of a properly “literary” representation of subject. Cooper is somewhat atypical among the current contingent of transgressive writers (putting aside such figures as William Burroughs and Kathy Acker as precursors rather than certified participants in the genre) in that his defiance of the norms of propriety are often accompanied by deviations from conventional form as well.

Calling All Cars

I have most recently been writing reviews and essays focusing on less well-known or neglected experimental writers--Gil Orlovitz, Alta Ifland, Elisabeth Sheffield, Thalia Field. I also have an essay on the African-American experimental writer, William Melvin Kelley, about to appear and am wrapping up a piece on David Ohle. Suffice it to say, not many review/criticism venues are much interested in such writers. If there are any editors out there who would be interested in reviews and critical pieces on worthy (and too often ignored) experimental writing, I would certainly welcome offers to consider my efforts at bringing it more attention. (My Ohle piece could use a home.) Of course, there is this blog, but it doesn't get the traffic it once did. DM or email if willing to talk.