Experimental Fiction Now

The Materiality of the Medium 

(This essay originally appeared in Kenyon Review Online.)

In many ways Steve Tomasula’s Once Human (FC2) is a very good introduction to the work of this conspicuously unconventional writer for those who are either unfamiliar with his previous work or have shied away from it because it promised to depart too radically from the conventions of “normal” fiction. Venturesome readers with find that this book indeed exhibits Tomasula’s trademark assimilation of visual elements—photos, illustrations, graphs and charts, drawings— into the verbal “text,” as well as the inveterate manipulation of typography and page design. However, encountering these devices through a selection of stories allows the reader to contemplate Tomasula’s strategies in shorter samples, while the selection also provides some variety, perhaps encouraging readers to appreciate that these strategies are both purposeful and ultimately accessible.

Tomasula’s approach is evident in the book’s first story, “The Color of Flesh.” The story of protagonist Yumi’s discovery that her boyfriend may be attracted to her not despite the fact she has a prosthetic limb but because of it and his pornographic obsession with disfigured female bodies is enhanced by drawings that give the story most immediately the look of a graphic novel. But the story actually contains plenty of text, and the drawings are not themselves the medium through which the narrative is presented.  Neither are they merely decorative, although they are certainly well-rendered. So striking are they, in fact, that it soon enough becomes clear we are meant to do more than just glance at the drawings as a kind of accompaniment to the written text but to consider them a constituent part of a reconceived “text” that integrates writing and visual devices, with each contributing its own effect to the new, hybrid text. Thus, in “The Color of Flesh” the illustrations impress as more than ornamental, a drawing of prosthetic limbs “dangling from the ceiling” of a “shop that sold such things” in particular adding a spooky (if stylized) palpability that isn’t quite achieved by the prose description alone, not even the comparison to “Gepetto’s workshop.” 

It might be tempting to call Tomasula’s approach “multi-media,” especially since he has produced one “book,” TOC, that can only really be described as multi-media, as it is not published as a book at all but on DVD and predominantly takes visual form, but the goal does not seem to be to blend prose fiction and visual media as much as to extend our conception of what prose fiction might be. Is it the case, a story like “The Color of Flesh” asks us, that when visual art is added to literary art a work of fiction becomes something else, no longer fiction but precisely a hybrid, something separate that should be judged by standards other than those traditionally applied to fiction, or does it remain within the boundaries of that form as historically established, albeit questioning where those boundaries should lie? Readers could come to different conclusions about this, but arguably Tomasula’s fiction is most consequential if we think of it as still belonging to literature, as an attempt to reckon with the status of fiction at a time when visual representations are more pervasive than ever.

Tomasula has cited the influence on his work of such writers as Raymond Federman, Gilbert Sorrentino, and William Gass, all of whom similarly unsettle our usual way of reading— on pages with blocks of text, read sequentially from top to bottom—although none of these writers (aside from Gass in his novella Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife) really included pictorial elements. Tomasula’s own work is thus perhaps best understood as extending their experiments, proceeding under the fundamental assumption that the page (and all of his books aside from TOC do take the printed page as fiction’s native medium) is infinitely pliable, a site where the literary artist might create aesthetic effects not confined to the usual felicities of prose style, and might also contribute to a reconception of form that includes but goes beyond sole reliance on traditional verbal narrative. If we judge much conventional fiction by the degree to which it encourages us to transcend the page, to give ourselves over to the illusion good writing is supposed to cast, Tomasula’s stories and novels keep us firmly rooted to the page, refusing to let us forget the materiality of the medium.

Although the drawings and photographs in Once Human—some of which are quite complex and detailed—are the most conspicuous illusion-suspending elements, Tomasula’s attention to the dynamics of the page is also manifest in typography and typeface. No two stories come in the same font size, and the page layouts follow no rules of prose composition other than those the author has invented. The pages of some of the stories often shift in appearance, in some cases multiple times. The text of “The Color of Flesh” begins in a single column, switches to double columns, and in the second half of the story kaleidoscopically changes fonts, page color (black on white to white on black), and page design (the text presented in something resembling thought balloons). “Self-Portrait” at first seems a more or less conventionally printed story, free of both visual aids and typographical oddities, except that a closer look reveals a column of words running down each of the inner margins, one column repeating the work “stroke,” the other “snap,” the two actions performed by the story’s protagonist, a lab technician responsible for euthanizing mice for testing.

If at first this might seem a random, even frivolous gesture, ultimately it does have the effect of continually reminding us of the “work” the technician carries out, which presumably we are to consider important to the story’s explication, even as the story appears to develop the situation in other, tangential directions (the protagonist’s romantic involvement with his coworker, for example). This sort of literalization of motif or image can perhaps be seen most clearly in stories such as “The Atlas of Man” and “The Risk-Taking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects.” The narrator of the first is a researcher who collects data on human body shape. He falls in love with a fellow researcher (unhappily). The text of this story includes several illustrations of bodies and body types, as well as various graphs representing the work the narrator has done in studying the human body. Together, these visual elements reinforce the contrast between the narrator’s usual impassive approach to the world as filtered through his work and his growing self-awareness of the implications of that work in relation to himself, a contrast that ultimately works to create some sympathy for the man’s emotional confusion.

“The Risk-Taking Gene” again focuses on a researcher, in this case studying the purported “risk-taking gene,” the “genetic propensity discovered by Cloninger, Adolfsson, and Svrakic for some people to put themselves at risk in order to feel the level of arousal most of us get from the petty concerns of our day.” The narrator in this story is conducting interviews in an Asian-American neighborhood (or trying to), and winds up being surprised by the identity of the “subject” who is indeed most willing to take risks. The story relies less on pictorial devices and more on page design and typography for its effects. Reflecting the narrator’s line of work, some of the pages are printed on a facsimile of a questionnaire, others on what appears to be a representation of a DNA gel. Both of these stories employ a non-conventional fusion of text and visuals, each playing off of the other, that typifies Tomasula’s literary method. Since finally his fiction does not at all abandon narrative—some of these stories have rather dramatic plots—it offers not an alternative to “story” but an alternative way of telling a story still anchored to the printed page.

Both “The Atlas of Man” and “The Risk-Taking Gene” are also obviously related in their focus on a character doing “research” on the human body. In this they share a dominant theme of Tomasula’s work, exemplified most notably in VAS, his best-known novel and probably greatest achievement to date. Subtitled “An Opera in Flatland,” the novel is first of all a kind of pastiche of a previous novel, Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, a geometry-based science fiction “romance” published in 1885. Tomasula takes over the premise of “people” living in a two-dimensional “flatland,” people who are themselves geometrical figures. Thus the main characters of VAS are “Square” and his wife, “Circle.” The plot of this novel is minimal but, narratively speaking, straightforward. After a series of failed pregnancies (resulting in miscarriage or abortion), Circle has asked Square to get a vasectomy, to which he has agreed, although as the novel begins he has not yet signed the consent form required. Most of the rest of the novel follows Square as he ponders the implications of his decision and the state of his relationships both with Circle and his daughter, Oval. 

VAS becomes “operatic” in the way it illustrates and embodies the story of Square reckoning with his situation by depicting it through very elaborate drawings, photographs, and other visual elements comprising a large portion of the text, these elements becoming something like the music that transforms a play into an opera. The novel is an “opera in Flatland,” of course, because it takes place not in the three-dimensional space of theatrical operas, or even the simulated space of film, video, or cyberspace, but on the page, through the “flat” surfaces of text and graphic image. Thus VAS is still dedicated to literary experiment, to testing the limits of the page as literature’s traditional medium. Online publication has obviously challenged the seemingly necessary connection between literary works and the printed page, but Tomasula continues to take the page as his focus, aside from TOC. Indeed, most of his published fiction depends on its realization on pages, and its effects would be almost totally lost on, say, a Kindle.

Tomasula employs his effects in part to fulfill one of the most traditional of literary goals, developing “theme.” If anything, Tomasula’s fiction is even more devoted to communicating theme than most mainstream literary fiction. The researchers and scientists in his fiction are engaged in work ultimately intended to help overcome the supposed limitations of human biology and genetics, to remake our physical existence. VAS is probably the work in which Tomasula most intensively explores the implications of the scientific intervention into nature as represented by the human body (one thinks of Hawthorne’s stories about human beings “playing God”) and the creation of a “postbiological” future. Square familiarizes himself with the history of eugenics, human experimentation, genetic engineering, and various other “advances” in medical science, his contemplation of these subjects accompanied by an almost dizzying variety of visual and typographical devices that make the motives behind and ultimate consequences of the rise of the “postbiological” even more disturbing.

Remaking reality is of course the ambition of fiction as well, and Tomasula’s work can also be taken as variant of metafiction, subjecting fiction to the same scrutiny as these other efforts to reshape and reorder the world. The representations of the body offered by the scientific methods of mapping and measuring it are themselves represented literally in Tomasula’s pictorial imagery, provoking us to reflect on the extent to which literature aspires to the pictorial even while doing so through the descriptive and figural powers of language. Similarly, his typographical variations insistently remind us that the arrangement of print on the page has also always reinforced a particular way of organizing literary representation, one that is assumed to be the “natural” form that reading takes but that Tomasula’s work proceeds to show can be altered. 

“Representation” is itself the subject of his 2006 novel The Book of Portraiture, the title of which is taken from the supposed journal of the painter Velasquez, which among other things chronicles the creation of Velasquez’s “The Maids of Honor,” a notoriously self-reflexive painting that depicts the painter himself among the other subjects of the painting, standing at his easel and apparently staring outside the painting at the viewer. The other sections of the book (including a reworked version of “Self-Portrait”) also invoke the human urge to re-present reality, to both productive and destructive effect, making The Book of Portraiture the most avowedly metafictional of Tomasula’s books, but one that doesn’t just expose the inherent artifice of narrative but reveals the transformative effects, potentially liberating but also potentially dangerous, of human beings’ capacity to reimagine themselves.

Once Human is not as intently focused either on the scientific and technological manipulation of nature as VAS or the implications of representation as The Book of Portraiture. The most explicitly metafictional story in the book is probably “Farewell to Kilimanjaro,” which is finally more conventional parody than metafictional self-reflection in its “what if” story of an elderly Ernest Hemingway (in the story simply called “E”) experiencing degradation in an old folks home. Among the remaining stories in the book, “Medieval Times” has a family resemblance to one of George Saunders’s theme-park stories (“CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”), although it ultimately satirizes current events through analogy more directly than Saunders does. “The Color of Pain and Suffering” is of a piece with “Self-Portrait” and “The Atlas of Man” in its focus on the romantic travails of a medical illustrator. If ultimately Once Human could be described as something of a miscellany collecting Tomasula’s shorter fiction, that very quality nevertheless gives readers a valuable sampling of the work of a compelling and genuinely experimental writer.

Steve Tomasula's work expands our awareness of the boundaries fiction might still challenge while remaining true to the form. It makes readers consider how rigidly they should adhere to inherited assumptions about these boundaries, at the same time continuing to provide a satisfying reading experience. Tomasula tells stories, but they are narratives with intrinsic interest in and of themselves, not rehearsals of familiar plots.

Giving Voice 

Although the term “postmodern” is still used often enough by critics as a convenient label for certain works of fiction that are considered out of the “mainstream” of current literary fiction, and descriptions of new books ladled with adjectives such as “unconventional,” “original,” or “innovative” are quite common, the era of “experimental” postmodern American fiction—when experimental fiction could be said to have any kind of real cultural salience—was in fact relatively short-lived: 10-15 years, from the mid-1960s to about 1980. This is not to say there were no formally or stylistically adventurous writers of fiction before this period, nor necessarily that no comparably adventurous writers at all have appeared in the years since. But writers willing to jettison all assumptions about the formal properties of novels and attempt building something entirely new in their place have been relatively few and far between in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first two of the twenty-first.

One such writer, however, is Evan Dara. (Or at least the writer presenting his work under that name, since so little is known about him beyond the work—he makes the elusiveness of Thomas Pynchon seem like a craving for celebrity in comparison—we can’t be sure this is other than a pseudonym.) Dara’s first novel, The Lost Scrapbook, was published in 1995, and has been followed by two other novels, The Easy Chain (2007) and Flee (2013), as well as a play, Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins (2018), all of them published by Aurora, a press apparently owned and administered by Dara himself. All three of the novels challenge the expectations of readers accustomed to fiction that observes the post-postmodern consensus that novels need not scrupulously follow entrenched conventions of linear narrative and the kind of expository prose associated with it, but should otherwise still offer readers some recognizable variant of the form historically tied to works of fiction: an invoked world in which created characters engage in observable human activities (even if they might be subject to various departures from strict realism), activities that follow some version of narrative logic. Dara’s novels, especially the first two, instead present us with disembodied voices in place of characters and events that seem to arise arbitrarily and to bleed into each other without warning—or any immediately apparent purpose.

If nothing else, it is obvious once one begins reading these novels that the author wants to subvert any presumptions we might have that the novel we are reading will bear enough family resemblance to those we have read before that it will be explicable according to the “rules” we believe we have learned about how novels should proceed. Clearly it intends to replace those rules with others applicable only to this work (although any one of Dara’s novels certainly does then provide direction in reading the others), rules that we will have to learn as we read. In this way, Dara’s novels work like all of their predecessors in the lineage of “experimental” fiction, presenting the reader with a heterodox formal arrangement the reader must learn to assimilate by attending closely to the new patterns the work establishes as alternatives to those patterns more conventional fiction has predisposed us to expect. Indeed, in the challenge they pose to the assumption that the conventional patterns define the novel as a form, Dara’s novels are arguably the most radically disruptive books in American fiction since, say, Gilbert Sorrentino in a work like Mulligan Stew (1979).

The most formally radical of the novels is The Lost Scrapbook. The initial readers of this book might understandably have thought it is in fact essentially formless, although eventually the formal logic of the novel does become more discernible. The first half or so of what is a very long book (a little under 500 pages) seems to consist of a series of disconnected episodes (some longer than others) leaning heavily on interior monologue and introducing “characters” whose relationships to each other are not immediately apparent. Moreover, these self-standing scenes don’t merely succeed each other but at times appear to merge, one dissolving into the other, as if the novel’s discourse represents a radio set whose dial is being tuned, bringing in one station before moving on to another. Ultimately we reach a program to which presumably the search has been dedicated: most of the remaining part of the novel focuses on the plight of Isaura, a town in Missouri on which an ecological catastrophe has been inflicted by a chemical company that has exploited the forbearance of the community for many years (as the narrative reveals).

This relatively extended narrative focusing on the depredations of the Ozark Chemical Company and their effect on the citizens of Isaura—by no means related in straightforward expository prose but narratively coherent nevertheless—of course inevitably prompts the reader to ponder the structural connections between it and the concatenation of voices and episodes preceding it. In the only contemporaneous review of The Lost Scrapbook (really the only review of Dara’s work to appear in a “major” American publication—the Washington Post—at all), Tom LeClair suggests that all of the prior voices are displaced victims, “literal and figurative,” from the calamity at Isaura. Perhaps this is a fruitful way of considering the structural integrity of The Lost Scrapbook, although too much emphasis on the “literal” connections among the characters and events threatens to impute a more seamless structure to the novel than it actually contains: to an extent, its most radically adventurous quality is the absence of an ultimate integration of its parts, the possibility that a novel might still achieve authentic thematic and aesthetic coherence even when connections are left unmade and conventional unity disregarded, even deliberately undermined.

This sort of comprehensive fragmentation makes The Lost Scrapbook more audacious than most of the other works over the past twenty-five years received as “experimental, which in comparison still seem more faithful to the norms of current literary culture. (Perhaps books like David Markson’s Readers Block and This is Not a Novel might rival Dara’s novel in its claim to be “something new”—certainly the more flamboyantly experimental novels of a writer such as Mark Danielewski are just gimmicky when judged next to either The Lost Scrapbook or The Easy Chain.) Dara appears to trust the reader’s ability to infer connections and notice implicit patterns of situation and reference, to tolerate the ambiguities and uncertainties in which the novel persists without necessarily expecting the writer to remove them through any contrived devices. The rhetorical irresolution created by the novel’s extreme fragmentation is reinforced within the discrete narrative fragments (and most of them do relate a story or scene) by the emphasis on speech—both in monologue and dialogue—rather than expository prose, which further requires the reader to discern continuity in the various episodes by carefully registering what the voices are talking about absent direct description. Luckily Dara proves himself exceptionally adept at rendering contemporary American speech, making the task enjoyable in itself, and the enactment of this strategy in the rendition of Isaura’s ordeal is especially impressive.

Unfortunately, this concluding story also works to produce what is ultimately the most significant weakness of The Lost Scrapbook. It is not inaccurate to call this final section of the novel an expose of entities like the Ozark Chemical Company, companies that in carrying out the prescribed mission of American capitalism are in the process of degrading and despoiling the natural environment, apparently without compunction. When we recall the scenes that have come before, we can see that the depiction of the ruin of Isaura is the culmination of a portrayal of America in all its social, cultural, and economic dysfunction—an America in which the atomizing effects of capitalism have spread to all features of ordinary life. In this way, it seems to me, The Lost Scrapbook in effect neutralizes its own formal audacity by making it too easy for the reader to resolve (at least in retrospect) the interpretive dilemma posed by the seemingly dissociated episodes that have brought us to the Isaura narrative, to integrate all of the novel’s parts in what turns out to be an unorthodox but finally structurally harmonious story about the baneful influences of late twentieth century American capitalism, its elevation of profit to preeminent value and disregard for the common good determining the shape of human interaction and inhibiting even our ability to communicate (a motif to which Dara returns in his most recent work). However accurate this vision of the degeneracy of current reality might be (and I for one accept its accuracy), ultimately it comes close to undercutting the novel’s integrity as experimental fiction, arguably converting it to a work of realism by other means.

Although The Lost Scrapbook is often quite funny, it would not really be appropriate to call it satire. The humor is not of the regenerative kind that implies the offenses portrayed might be ameliorated. It does indeed provoke the more corrosive kind of laughter associated with postmodern writers such as DeLillo, Pynchon, and Gaddis, or even the “black humor” of Vonnegut or Heller. But finally the humor seems part of the larger effort to critique, to “say something” about the dismal state of American culture and the dangers of unchecked capitalism. Dara’s critique is perhaps more vehement than most, and offers no false hope that the conditions imposed by advanced capitalism will be overcome any time soon, but in its substance it hardly differs much from similar critiques increasingly to be found in mainstream literary fiction. What makes The Lost Scrapbook distinctive, of course, is its formal innovation, the quality that presumably has also caused readers to balk at the “difficulty” such a work is presumed to pose. While these readers would find The Lost Scrapbook in fact to be an invigorating reading experience that rewards the effort to meet its challenge, they might also finally be disappointed that the ingenuity the novel exhibits seems to be employed in support of a conventionally polemical purpose.

Still, if a writer’s commitment to a theme or idea (political or otherwise) inspires a genuinely adventurous approach to form or style—that is, serves the ultimate purpose of experimental fiction to revitalize the form itself—probably we ought to grant that writer his subject. Some might say that the novel’s length does not justify the thematic payoff, but I would contend that such length is required for the formal effect to be adequately felt: if The Lost Scrapbook could be regarded as a version of a picaresque narrative, the journey taken is by the reader in the experience of reading, and as with all picaresque narratives, much of the interest lies in the journey itself, not the destination. However, both Dara’s aesthetic approach and his political critique are more effectively realized in his second novel, The Easy Chain. In some ways it is surprising that this novel did not win Dara a somewhat larger audience and more attention from critics (again only one review, again by LeClair, in Bookforum), since, while it is hardly a conventional narrative, something like a recognizable story “arc” can be perceived behind the multiple registers of talk and shifts of setting. It even has a kind of mystery plot (actually several mysteries), even if those mysteries never quite get resolved.

Perhaps the most significant departure in The Easy Chain from the strategies employed  in The Lost Scrapbook is that it features a protagonist—albeit one who is present only fleetingly (most directly at the novel’s beginning) and is depicted in a mosaic-like fashion, from a multitude of perspectives, so that we cannot really say we have a very firm grasp on his personal qualities or his motivations. In this novel, Dara takes the method introduced in The Lost Scrapbook, its emphasis on speech and soliloquy, and applies it to the development of the main character. We know Lincoln Selwyn mostly from what others say about him—although we often don’t know who these others are beyond their disembodied voices. The outline, if not all the details, of Lincoln’s story is clear enough: The son of English parents but raised in the Netherlands, Lincoln emigrates to the United States to attend college (the University of Chicago), but instead finds himself, through mechanisms that often remain shrouded from our direct observation, a wildly successful entrepreneur and man about town, steadily accruing admirers and gaining influence. Then, apparently Selwyn disappears. (Later we learn he probably gained much of his success through shady means, although the investigators from whom we get this information are themselves not altogether reliable.) After a break in the narrative (represented in the text by a series of blank pages), we encounter Lincoln back in Holland, where he seems to be trying to fill in lacunae in his own knowledge about his family, including his mother and an aunt who had emigrated to the United States before him and whose whereabouts he has unsuccessfully tried to uncover. Next we discover that Lincoln has returned to the U.S., where at the novel’s conclusion we are shocked to find him preparing to blow up the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and, when the attempt fails, to shoot the private investigator he had tasked with finding the aunt.

The story, of course, does not come as an uninterrupted linear narrative. Not only are we sometimes not aware of Lincoln’s specific activities, but the interruptions in the story of Lincoln Selwyn are often filled with other, seemingly unrelated stories featuring independent characters, such as the story about a Boulder, Colorado restaurant forced out of business when the rent on their building is arbitrarily raised. As with The Lost Scrapbook, these set-pieces are thematically related to Lincoln’s story: the restaurant’s plight turns into an apocalyptic narrative about the collapse of civilization itself and the reversion of the land to nature. The Easy Chain is ultimately centered around the same concern animating the previous novel, the ravages of advanced capitalism, but Lincoln Selwyn’s life provides a more consistent, and more compelling, unity in the novel’s aesthetic design. Indeed, it seems more fitting to speak about “design” in The Easy Chain than in The Lost Scrapbook (which does not mean the latter is simply chaotic). We see in The Easy Chain similar disruptions of narrative continuity and conventional prose (variations in textual arrangement, graphical effects such as those in the novel’s final section, with its seemingly random divergences in capitalization, punctuation, and spelling), yet here they more readily seem part of the novel’s unified portrayal of Lincoln Selwy, his elusiveness, his contradictory impulses, his lack of a core identity we can easily recognize.

This does not mean that The Easy Chain abandons experiment for convention or too comfortably courts facile accessibility. Readers not familiar with The Lost Scrapbook are unlikely to think it too conspicuously conforms to expectations of conventional literary fiction. Its achievement consists not simply of the application of “craft,” but from a successful attempt to bring artistic coherence to a work that doesn’t settle for familiar means of character development or rely on a stable point of view. “Experimental” is not synonymous with “anarchic” when applied to formal innovations in fiction, and The Easy Chain adeptly achieves a totality of vision in a way that is perhaps more acutely visible than in The Lost Scrapbook. The balance between invention and design in The Easy Chain is the most finely measured among Dara’s novels.

If that balance skews somewhat to the former in The Lost Scrapbook, it skews more decidedly to the latter in Dara’s third novel, Flee. Certainly to readers for whom it might be their introduction to Dara (especially because it is the briefest of the three), this novel again would hardly seem a mainstream literary novel, but its more unconventional strategies—which are largely the same ones introduced in the first two novels—are employed to limited enough effect that it is more apparent they are designed to support the novel’s quasi-absurdist story. In Flee it is the story that is emphasized through the novel’s strategies of indirection and omission much as the character of Lincoln Selwyn is evoked in The Easy Chain. However, a story about the gradual abandonment of a good-sized city (most likely based on Burlington, Vermont) after its university shuts down due to it its own malfeasance is inherently improbable and incongruous, and these qualities are only heightened through Dara’s by now signature methods—sudden discontinuities, multiple voices, etc. So compatible are form and content in Flee, in fact, that this novel can indeed be accurately described as satire, allowing Dara’s recurrent focus on capitalist values acting to impede human flourishing to be rendered more distinctly as satirical judgment.

In its more compact form, Flee demonstrates that Dara’s invocation of multiple voices and perspectives can operate to relate a story that doesn’t flash the usual narrative signals and create characters that are shorn of information beyond the clues offered in their talk—a local couple attempting to profit from the emptying out of their town are tracked throughout the novel and act, if not as protagonists, as narrative anchors, individual representatives of the broader dilemma facing the town whose particular experiences the reader can follow for continuity—but for the first time in Dara’s fiction the strategy seems overly familiar, too derivative of the work of William Gaddis, whose voice- and dialogue-centered novels provide the primary touchstone for Dara’s fiction. Ironically, Flee seems a bit too much like Gaddis’s JR in miniature, even though it is The Easy Chain that is more reminiscent of Gaddis’s novel in its subject and featured protagonist.

Perhaps it is a realization that this method has become somewhat perfunctory that led Dara to offer as his most recent work not a novel, but a play, the Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins, available as a download on the Aurora website. Here, of course, human speech is the form’s natural medium, and the play is stripped down to just characters and talk, the stage “As bare as you can stand it.” (It has something of the feel of a Greek drama, individual characters set off against a chorus-like group called “the Swirl.”) Mose Eakins is (as described by one of the Swirl) “an American field-risk analyst working for Concord Oil.” He is introduced to us speaking to various co-workers—none of them actually present on stage—in a briskly efficient  but largely supercilious manner. Not long afterward, Mose begins to notice that people are beginning to react strangely in his presence: they seem not to hear what he is saying and instead speak about themselves in ways that strike Mose as wholly inappropriate, as if he is overhearing them reveal their unguarded thoughts. Eventually, Mose is informed he suffers from “imparlance,” a disorder that causes people to “lose the capacity to infuse their words with intelligible significance.” As a side effect, those to whom the sufferer speaks “often give voice to thoughts they usually keep hidden.” Mose’s life steadily deteriorates, and even though he comes to recognize that he himself has participated in the degradation of language, its reduction to utilitarian exchange and self-advancement, his ultimate fate is not a happy one.

Although Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins focuses on a theme central to much postmodern fiction, the failures of language to “communicate” reliably, that failure is tied to the debasement of language inflicted by society under capitalism, situating the play squarely among the three novels as cultural critique. (There may also be a sly dig at the incomprehension with which the literary establishment has greeted Dara’s novels, as many readers and critics profess that such works lack “the capacity to infuse their words with intelligible significance.”) The novels as well concern themselves, both implicitly and explicitly, with the obstacles language must overcome in order to be intelligible, but they do achieve their own kind of cogency. As does Mose Eakins, suggesting that finally Evan Dara belongs with the original generation of postmodernists in the audacity of his invention but doesn’t really seem to share the postmodernist skepticism about language as a representational medium. In Mose Eakins, he memorably represents the corruption of language by forces that have emptied it of all but the most crudely functional signifying potential, the destruction of literary power it would otherwise possess. Ultimately Dara is a moralist, not an aesthete.

Reckoning With the Dead 

(This essay originally appeared in Full Stop.)

For all of her experiments with divergent media that are ultimately impalpable (her e-lit hypertext, Patchwork Girl, which is also essentially inaccessible unless you have the equipment to play a CD-ROM, on which the novel is now exclusively available), hypothetical (Skin, a “story” inscribed on human skin a letter at a time and that ultimately can never be read), or ephemeral (“Snow,” a story written on fallen snow — although it is being presented more permanently through photography), Shelley Jackson's  conventionally printed novels are quite corporeal and amply realized. Half Life (2006) and her most recent novel, Riddance, are both long and comprehensively developed novels that allow the reader to settle in for a comfortable enough read, although in each case the story must be pieced together, and is not merely offered to us from a unified narrative perspective.

It might be most appropriate to describe both books as epistolary novels, albeit of the modern sort that extends beyond simply the exchange of letters as a narrative device to include other kinds of interpolated documents as well (additionally integrating visual effects, especially in Riddance), resulting in a form of collage as presumably Jackson’s preferred method of composing traditional prose fiction. (Likewise, her 2002 book, The Melancholy of Anatomy, is ostensibly a collection of short stories, but the stories are associated in a collage-like fashion, a series of vignettes organized by grouping them into sections representing the four humors and their respective origins in parts of the human body.) Thus these books are by no means regressively conventional in either form or subject — their subjects are in fact distinctly unusual — but they do adapt a formal strategy frequently enough employed previously by modern writers, in various permutations, that its use in both Half Life and Riddance is not disruptive of an “immersive” reading experience but really only adds a kind of mystery element to the novels’ quasi-horror plots: in addition to questions about how the extraordinary circumstances portrayed will develop and be resolved, questions pertaining to the exposition of those circumstances — how do the pieces fit together, how are they working to conceal as much as reveal? — become central to the narratives as well.

To describe these narratives as horror plots is not to classify them as genre fiction nor to denigrate horror elements as somehow unworthy in a properly experimental fiction. Jackson uses the tropes and trappings of horror lightly, adopting them not for atmosphere or specific plot devices but because the horror narrative prominently focuses attention on the human body, its traits and transformations, which has also proven to be Shelley Jackson’s most abiding preoccupation as a writer of fiction. Half Life borrows the imagery from a “mutation” film (“the incredible two-headed woman!”), but Jackson is not interested in exploiting this imagery for shock effects. Instead, she takes the potentially grotesque situation the novel depicts — an alternate reality in which atomic testing has created a substantial spike in the birthrate of conjoined twins — all essentially born with two heads on one body — as an opportunity to provoke reflection on our facile concepts of identity. In resolving to surgically remove the head of her sister, Blanche, who (she believes) has long been in a kind of coma, a prolonged state of uninterrupted slumber, is the novel’s protagonist, Nora, really proposing to murder another person, who, after all, shares one body with Nora, or is it merely the equivalent of amputation? Are Blanche and Nora actually two people? If so, which one gets to claim rights to their in-common body? For that matter, is it really “Nora” who speaks to us as the protagonist of Half Life, or is she at least as much Blanche, even before we learn that the latter has probably been more active all along than we realized?

Many readers of Half Life probably suspect all along that Blanche is likely not merely “dead weight.” Luckily, the novel doesn’t really depend on a surprise or trick ending. The narrative itself is insidiously humorous, despite the nature of the subject, and at times seems outright a satire of the rigid protocols of identity politics. (“Twofers” have become militant in defense of their rights, and demand observance of the proprieties in speech and behavior that uphold their status.) If it is relevant to the accomplishments of Half Life to call it an “experimental” novel, it is not because of its formal design but its creation of a “character” who complicates the very notion of unitary character in fiction — although its formal strategies certainly work effectively to help produce this effect. If printed fiction cannot attain the same degree of contingency and nonlinearity as hypertext, in Half Life Jackson nevertheless creates a character whose “true” identity may be whatever we decide it to be, and ultimately turns the narrative back on itself, encouraging us to perhaps reconsider everything we have read.

Riddance has its share of slippages and ambiguities, but while the story it tells is even more gothic than Half Life — set in a school for stuttering children in the early part of the 20^th century, the school, we are told by the initial narrator, the “editor” of a scholarly compendium about it (the book we are about to read), “may have appeared on county maps in the vicinity of Cheesehill, Massachusetts, [but] its real address was in the crepuscular zone” — it is also more recognizable in its formal structure, a novel masquerading as another kind of text (Nabokov’s Pale Fire being just one example of this sort of fabrication, although the use of supposedly pre-existing documents as a formal device is a common enough strategy in horror fiction more generally). The editor, who at least fancies himself a scholar, offers us a collection of documents related to the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost-Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children, located in Cheesehill, the hometown of Sybil Joines, the founder and proprietor (although later directors of the school apparently also assume the founder’s name). It is called a school for “ghost-speakers” because Sybil Joines, herself a stutterer, believes that the dead make their presence known to the living in the speech — or non-speech — of those who stutter.

Although numerous kinds of found texts (as well as many photos and other graphic illustrations) are included in the editor’s collection, the two most important are undoubtedly the series entitled “The Final Dispatch,” which purports to be Sybil Joines’s own last communique, sent from the land of the dead, and “The Stenographer’s Story,” which tells us of the experiences of Sybil Joines’s assistant, an African-American student at the school named Jane Grandison, who transcribes the dispatch. (Jane Grandison eventually becomes the second Sybil Joines, although her status as an African-American at first leads her to express some skepticism about some of the assumptions at the school — how thoroughly white “the dead” seem to be, for example.) The circumstances surrounding Sybil Joines’s journey to the “land of the dead” eventually emerge — she claims in the dispatch to be pursuing a recalcitrant student she wants to bring back to the school — but the central interest of the novel surely lies in the exposition of Sybil Joines’s final encounter with this nebulous realm of paranormal existence she has spent her life — which the other entries in the collection work to elaborate — seeking to understand. The editor remarks in his introduction that through its layered organization, “this book can be entered at any point” (marking the printed text’s closest potential resemblance to a hypertext, although “The Final Dispatch” itself evokes hypertext in Sybil Joines’s descriptions of the fluidity of her surroundings), but this possibility is itself mostly virtual, since to approach Riddance in this way would really rob it of a forward momentum that clearly seems to be intentional.

Sybil Joines’s dispatch is the main attraction in Riddance as well because it features much of the novel’s best and most imaginative writing. “White everywhere,” she writes (or speaks, while Jane Grandison writes it down), in describing what she sees while pursuing Eve Finster, the errant student,

complicating into color, into form, fading again to white. White sky. White plains onto which white cataracts thunder down from an impossible height: souls pouring without surcease into death and roaring as they fall. The cataracts — the one stable landmark, the one feature on which all travelers report — one in such incessant motion that they seem immobile: one immense hoary figure, frozen in place, head bowed. Sometimes a bridge travels down the length of it: a fire in a shirtwaist factory, great ship sinking in icy waters. . . .

For all the apparent predisposition for the visual evidenced in her hypertext and alternative-media works (as well as the visual orientation of the passage above), both Half Life and Riddance show Shelley Jackson to be a poised and evocative stylist, one of the reasons both of these quite long books remain pleasurable to read.

A little later Sybil Joines tells us:

Now I shall have to start all over again, trumping up a world to catch her in! Only a moment ago, as it seems, I was hurrying down a familiar road. For all its spectral dogs and rabbits, it was, as near as I could make it, the way home. The girl was in my sights! And then my heart flared up white inside me, and road and ravine and crowding hills all blanched and raveled into filaments like the thread-thin hyphae of a fungus. The girl is gone. I am alone on a blank page.

The “white” that confronts Sybil Joines so implacably, we discover, is the white of the page on which she is composing the reality of the land of the dead as she speaks. Riddance, it turns out, is not simply (or even primarily) a gothic fantasy about communing with the dead but an allegory about writing, or, more precisely about language. Indeed, making a metaphorical connection between the human body and writing has been a preoccupation of Jackson’s in all of her work. (The Melancholy of Anatomy, she has said, was conceived as “a kind of body” to be “read.”) However, Riddance arguably works out the metafictional implications of this trope most abundantly. It is Sybil Joines’s belief that the presence of the dead is a manifestation of language — specifically human speech — but they are most sensitive to the silences and hesitations of stutterers, through which the dead might speak and into which the stutterer might be able to enter and encounter the dead (thus some students actually disappear into their own mouths).

Many of the students at the Joines Vocational School also produce “mouth objects,” ectoplasmic emanations in various shapes that are then intensively studied for their possible meaning. An illustrated collection of these objects is offered in the book’s appendices where, lined up side-by-side, they look conspicuously like letters in an alphabet. To be alive, it would seem, means having access to language, and thus the ghostly presences of the dead make themselves known not through apparitions but through the palpable medium of language. If Riddance is truly a book about the paranormal (“necrophysics,” as Sybil Joines would have it), we could say it implicitly portrays the way language is haunted by its own ghostly origins and the now-spectral uses to which it has been put in the past. The same is true, of course, of literature itself, which continues to embody a living force only after the writer’s reckoning with all of the dead forms it has assumed in the past.

However much Jackson has experimented with hypertext and other unorthodox media, both Half Life and Riddance show that her work is firmly situated in established literary history— perhaps we could say it, too, emerges from the silences and gaps lurking in that history.

Neural Networks 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

Michael Joyce is not only the author of what many consider the foundational work of hypertext fiction, afternoon, a love story (1987), but also probably the most important theoretician of hypertext as a literary medium (especially in the essays collected in Of Two Minds: Hypertext, Pedagogy, and Poetics, published in 1995). So it is of course tempting to approach his print novels — and most of his fiction in the last 20 years has been conventionally published in print — as somehow continuous with, or at least strongly influenced by, the hypertext works. But while it is certainly possible to seek parallels between the influential hypertext fiction and a novel such as Remedia, his most recent, perhaps it is more useful to see all of the work, hypertext and print-only, as part of a continuum, united not necessarily by the multiplicity and contingency of hypertext per se, but by the attention to craft in the most precise sense: the adroit shaping and ordering of “story” so that the reader’s interest is not solely directed at the particulars of the narrative but also toward the means of its unfolding.

It is not inapt to say that Joyce’s fiction is concerned with “ordering,” even though it would seem to be the case that hypertext subverts formal order in leaving it up to the reader to determine the way in which the story will develop (at least according to the options provided by the author). But in making these choices available to the reader, of course, the hypertext author is unavoidably confronting the role of order and form in fiction, and this acute awareness of form is inevitably communicated to the reader. Joyce’s 2007 novel, was (FC2), manifests this structural reflexivity perhaps most radically of the print works through its extreme fragmentation and decentered narrative content: presented in a prose that more closely resembles lines of verse (some as short as a word or two), the novel has no real characters, no setting (or, rather, the setting is the entire world), and no story beyond the perpetual circulation of information and human activity. was is probably the print novel that most strongly evokes Joyce’s hypertext works in that it is essentially a network of connected if shifting episodes in which ultimately the principle of connection itself, its comprehensive achievement, is more to the point than the simple forward movement of plot. (Joyce underscores the importance of connection in his novel by subtitling it “a novel of internet.”)

It might also seem that Remedia belies the notion of “shaping,” given that its subtitle identifies it as “a picaresque.” Of the various permutations of narrative, the picaresque would seem to be the loosest, the most deliberately unshaped. It could be said that a picaresque narrative even refuses the shape imposed by a conventional plot (of the sort outlined in Freytag’s Triangle), instead focusing on mere succession, one point in a narrative progression after another. But of course the impression of one thing following another in a picaresque narrative (at least a good one) is a constructed illusion, as much shaped by the writer’s sense of the effect to be produced as any “well-made” story. The requirements of a picaresque story is even more subject to a self-conscious act of shaping when the picaresque is strategically used as a kind of deliberately anachronistic formal device, as surely Michael Joyce is doing in Remedia. Joyce doesn’t just set his narrator-protagonist on a journey he chronicles as a serial account of his “adventures,” but asks us to consider how the notion of “picaresque” itself affects our perception of the narrator’s state of mind as he is reciting adventures that are indeed unpredictable and uncommon.

Remedia’s protagonist remains nameless throughout the novel, although he is far from an Everyman figure. We are introduced to him as he is recalling the first time he had the visionary experience — destined to reoccur over the course of his life — in which reality seems out of phase, intruded upon by a phantasmal door:

. . .What I remember is not the door itself but the man who emerged, smiling as he touched a long index finger to his lips as if to signal that our encounter was a secret between us, his face inexpressibly kind, long as a horse’s, his ice blue eyes gleaming.

These visions, featuring a door or portal or some other kind of opening (including “random appearances of vertiginous geometric space”) would seem to mark the protagonist as an unreliable narrator, at the very least one susceptible to a slippage in his hold on reality. It’s not that we might doubt the veracity of the account he gives us, but the incidents and experiences he relates, as well as the other characters he encounters, are surely out of the ordinary, making it possible to wonder whether Remedia scrupulously recounts the odd, frequently extreme, but ultimately “real” events the narrator witnesses, or whether these events are partly the product of his mind-altered perception.

The story essentially takes us through the narrator’s relationships with two women, Magika, with whom the narrator is involved as the novel begins, and Medb, an Irish woman he meets quite randomly on a bus when he has ventured to Ireland after his relationship with Magika goes on hiatus (she is touring Europe with an experimental theater company). The narrator and Medb relocate to the United States, and eventually make their way to Utah, where they meet up with a Mormon woman, Sariah, and her Native American consort, Tokoa. The narrator’s initial encounter with Tokoa, when the car he and Medb are driving breaks down, at first seems like one of the narrator’s portal visions: “a figure brown as a twist of tobacco stood in loincloth leggings, his long hair held back by a headband, neck garlanded with three necklaces, leather bands around the wrist of his beckoning upright arm as he stood before the oblong entrance of what looked to be a shaded cave.” When his attention is drawn to Tokoa himself approaching from behind and offering assistance (wearing “a broad-brimmed camo Aussie hat that someone had spray-painted neon orange”), the narrator is apparently brought back to reality — while the brown figure “lowered his arm and was descending into the cave” — but thus we have only more reason to suspect that a radically subjective perspective may be distorting the account he gives of his sojourn in the desert that (with a side trip to Iowa) will occupy much of the subsequent narrative related in Remedia.

While in Utah, the narrator is visited by Magika, and soon she, Medb, and Sariah have banded together to create a feminist monastery of sorts (although apparently most directly devoted to seeking out “silence”), but the exact nature of this desert compound continues to be rather murky throughout the novel, as the women allow no men to enter, which, to say the least, pleases neither the narrator nor Tokoa. Equally mysterious are the circumstances through which the narrator finds himself in Iowa. Here the narrator refers directly to a “door” he entered — although his fugue might also be the consequence of “a sacred herb thought to be a hallucinogen” he has ingested — and subsequently “emerged from that door six days later on a Beachy Amish farm just outside of Kalona, Iowa, and with little sense how I had gotten there or what I had done in the interim.” The patriarch of the Amish family with whom he finds himself, Jacob, then accompanies the narrator and Tokoa on their trip back west, ostensibly to visit the gravesite of his great-grandmother in Colorado but also, it would seem, in flight from his family and his Amish identity. When the three men reach the “Skull Valley” monastery, the women decide to admit Jacob among their number, just before the compound is itself laid siege by the U.S. military, during the course of which operation many of the members are killed (including Jacob). Both Magika and Medb survive.

The narrative thus ultimately culminates in a dramatic, large-scale event, toward which a conventional picaresque novel might be expected to “build.” But Joyce mutes even this means of providing “drama” in a picaresque story by in fact deviating from a strictly successive rendering of events. The narrator skips ahead and moves back in his narration of his experience, and his blackouts and general habits of thought provide substantial narrative lacunae that never really fully get filled. We can’t really be sure exactly what happened between the narrator’s sip of Moon Lily tea and his arrival in Kalone, Iowa; the creation of the Skull Valley monastery, as well as its subsequent activities, are never described in any detail, leaving the creator’s motives and intentions hazy at best; the siege is not related as a continuous episode but instead is alluded to by the narrator at various points (including as the subject of a play that Magika writes in its aftermath). Although the narrative does proceed more or less chronologically, starting in 1987 and ending in 1998 (with entries in the final two chapters that skip ahead to 2001, presumably the date of the entire retrospective narrative’s composition), its status as “picaresque” finally seems more the product of the narrator’s wandering recall than it does the intrepid observations of a nomadic hero.

Indeed, for a picaro, the protagonist of Remedia seems remarkably passive. Even though he is closely involved in all of the situations depicted in the novel, things mostly happen to him, not through deliberate agency, and most of the other characters emerge from the novel as both more dynamic and more self-possessed. For all the doorways and entrances the narrator believes are beckoning him forward, he doesn’t seem a very adventurous man, a strange enough state of affairs for a picaresque hero. The novel’s conclusion only reinforces the impression of impassivity: Sariah visits the narrator several years after the siege and urges him to seek out Medb, with whom he has lost contact. “I’ll think about it,” he says. “Thinking’s not doing,” Sariah replies. It might be going too far to say that Remedia is more a novel about thinking than doing. But finally Joyce, in deemphasizing the ostensible hero’s deeds, uses the character’s processing of his often random experiences to create a picaresque narrative that reflects the protagonist’s peripatetic life, but at the same time proceeds forward by following along the narrator’s channel of thought — almost as if the portals he so frequently glimpses are the hyperlinks of consciousness.

Graphical Variations 

In a career that now includes 14 novels and 4 collections of short fiction (as well as 7 works of nonfiction), Lance Olsen has produced an admirable variety of experimental fictions, no one of which seems merely a repetition of any of the others. There are identifiable tendencies and gestures in his work, to be sure, all of which are designed to redirect the reader’s attention to the page itself, to the graphic embodiment of language, rather to the “story” or “content” to which language is presumed to be pointing by many (if not most) readers of fiction, even so-called literary fiction. But the strategies by which Olsen accomplishes this larger goal are multifarious, especially in the context of such an abundant and still-accumulating body of work.

Of course, such variety is almost certain to result in some books that are less successful than others, a phenomenon unsurprising in what is after all “experimental” fiction. If not all experiments succeed, books as resolutely unconventional as Olsen’s, dedicated to sounding out alternatives to those practices that presume “form” in fiction to be synonymous with narrative, should be valued simply for their efforts to provide such alternatives to “exhausted” presumptions, as John Barth might put it. Still, the reading experiences afforded by Olsen’s novels and story collections themselves vary in the degree to which they manage to both effect an inventive formal strategy and to make that strategy an engrossing substitute for conventional narrative. Achieving this sort of synthesis of sheer technique and aesthetic gratification (not an easy task, to be sure) seems to me the fundamental accomplishment of the best experimental fiction, since a work that merely signals a break with traditional practices but doesn’t use such a rupture as an opportunity to then offer the reader a fulfilling reading experience, one that renews the aesthetic possibilities of fiction as more than “a story,” will surely not survive as much more than a literary curiosity. An honorable effort, perhaps, but ultimately indeed a failure.

Olsen actually began his career as an academic critic, most prominently, perhaps, as the author of Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision, but also books on “postmodern fantasy” and the science fiction writer William Gibson. His earliest novels are themselves most categorizable as fantasy and science fiction, although they could also be described simply as punkish provocation (with titles like Tonguing the Zeitgeist and Freaknest). These books rely more on extreme situations than on formal experiment per se, and, given the genre, are also more dependent on narrative than Olsen’s later novels would be. They are not without a certain kind of cheeky interest, but they aren’t likely to retain much future interest apart from their place in Lance Olsen’s development as a writer of unorthodox fiction.

With Girl Imagined by Chance (2002) and 10:01 (2005), Olsen began writing more straightforwardly experimental fiction, although each of these novels in their own way retain more connections to established narrative practices than will his subsequent even more adventurous work. Girl Imagined by Chance, while incorporating photographs as a structural device, tells an unusual story—a married couple pretend to have a baby in order to satisfy friends and family pressuring them to have children—but it relates the story in a relatively linear way, and the novel would probably remain accessible to readers not otherwise accustomed to experimental fiction. 10:01 is a highly fragmented novel that is held together by the conceit provided by its setting—a movie theater in the Mall of America. Thus we are given a montage of sorts tracing the passing thoughts of a large group of people waiting in line for the next show. The result is essentially an exercise in “psychological realism,” a shifting set of vignettes that evoke the Mall of America as a metaphorical container of consciousness.

Nietzsche’s Kisses (2006) really marks the emergence of motifs, situations, and procedures that together have now come to seem Lance Olsen’s signature approach. Here and in the following books, Olsen takes historical figures, primarily writers and artists, as subjects, thereby making writing (language more generally) and artistic creation a central focus of attention. By and large, the depiction of such figures—Nietzsche, Kafka, Vincent Van Gogh—is accurate to the historical reality in most particulars, but Olsen fills in gaps, speculates about states of mind, uses these figures as quasi-allegorical characters illustrating the precarious position of art and intellect in the world at large. He does not employ these characters merely as subjects of historical or biographical re-creation: they are in a sense the vehicle for Olsen’s formal transformations and typographical pyrotechnics, which almost unavoidably become the point of interest, although at their best in these later novels character and event are revealed through form, and vice versa. The primary structural device in most of these novels is collage, but this relatively familiar method is itself further disrupted by the frequent unfastening of the text’s language from its accustomed place in the linear flow of the printed page through spacing or the unusual placement of words.

While experiment in Olsen’s fiction is quite apparent in the liberties taken with the traditional protocols of reading, a significant element in his audacious challenge to narrative-as-usual is less conspicuous although just as important in its effect. Olsen’s attention to form goes beyond merely devising some altered species of narrative, but involves replacing narrative with formal arrangements that are often more spatial than chronological. Collage itself in Olsen’s novels work spatially through juxtaposition and suggestion, frequently moving freely back and forth in time, as in Nietzsche’ Kisses and 2009’s Head in Flames (the latter moving from passages about Van Gogh to episodes concerning Theo Van Gogh, great-grandson of Vincent’s brother, and the man who ultimately assassinates him). Calendar of Regrets (2010) seems to invoke a chronological structure, but it too moves both forward and backward—its separate strands, set in disparate times and places, moves first forward through the calendar year and then back again—and Olsen has said that at the most general level he was trying to closely echo the layout of an Hieronymus Bosch painting. (Bosch is the subject of one of the narrative strands.) Theories of Forgetting (2014) similarly echoes Robert Smithson’s earthwork sculpture Spiral Jetty, about which one of the novel’s characters is attempting (or was attempting, since we discover she is now dead) to make a film. Designs of Debris (2017), a surrealist retelling of the Minotaur myth, uses the monster’s labyrinth as its underlying architectural principle, again an attempt to bring form and subject into a kind of aesthetic equilibrium.

My Red Heaven is the most intricately formalist, and also most successful, of Olsen’s novels to date. A kind of panoramic tour of Berlin, Germany in 1927, its fixed time and place creates more unity among its episodes and perspectives than in, say, Calendar of Regrets, where the variety of narrative strands (and the novel’s length) can at times make the text seem overly diffuse. If the audacious manipulation of the printed page is somewhat less insistent than in Theories of Forgetting, My Red Heaven nevertheless displays the sort of verbal and discursive heterogeneity (including the use of photos) we would expect in a Lance Olsen novel. In this case, however, Olsen has fully enlisted his graphical variations as a kind of representational device as well, working to evoke the historical and cultural degeneration that this moment in the life of Belin (at least retrospectively) portends.

As we might expect from the previous novels, many (not all) of the characters in My Red Heaven are artists, writers, and other intellectual figures prominent in Germany in 1927 (as well as one deceased famous figure—Rosa Luxemburg—now reincarnated as a butterfly). The novel weaves portrayals of these characters and their actions throughout the 24-hour period it records, usually through transitional markers that put one character in the proximity of the next or that otherwise associate the two. The gallery of characters shows Berlin in the 1920s to be a culturally dynamic place (characters include the artist Otto Dix, émigré writers Robert Musil and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the physicist Werner Heisenberg), although the novel also features the underside of Berlin life, the drug addiction, violence, and poverty that made this “modern” German society so vulnerable to the predations of the Nazis, who also make their appearance, including Hitler himself.

While the primary structural device in My Red Heaven again appears to be collage, this surface feature is actually secondary to the novel’s controlling formal scheme. The novel’s title echoes that of the painting by the abstractionist painter Otto Freundlich. The painting is designed as irregular blocks of color (black, white, shades of gray, blue, green, and red), all of which are used as section names in Olsen’s novel, presumably linking in some way the episodes included to the color’s corresponding contribution to the painting’s overall aesthetic effect. Further, the painting’s colors are assembled in a grid-like assortment of rectilinear cells. The novel’s collage method, then, ultimately seems to be a progressive filling-in of these cells as rendered into literary form. This procedure is never intrusive, but it gives the novel an implicit shape that again governs “content.” The verbal mosaic that emerges in the depiction of 1927 Berlin is the product of form’s inherent artifice, but the depiction is no less vivid and no less faithful to the historical circumstances obtaining in Germany (and by extension European culture in general) during this between-wars interregnum.

In what is in part clearly an homage to 20^th century modernism (including brief interchapters very close to the “newsreel” sections of Dos Passos’s USA trilogy), My Red Heaven thus both provides an historical panorama capturing the tenor of the period, while also embodying in its own departures from convention an extension of the modernist exploration of alternative styles and strategies. Although it might be tempting to think of a text such as My Red Heaven as a pastiche of modernism, and thus arguably more appropriately categorized as postmodern, neither this novel nor most of Olsen’s previous work seem accurately described as postmodern, except in the sense that Olsen is now about a century removed from the era of high modernism. Indeed, in Circus of the Mind in Motion, Olsen himself posits that postmodernism—which Olsen closely associates with a type of iconoclastic humor—was relatively short-lived and began to be replaced with a less radical kind of fiction after 1980. The radicalism of Olsen’s fiction might then be seen less as an attempt to revive postmodernism and more to validate the original experimental impulse animating modernism, which was also the inspiration, after all, for the postmodernists themselves.

Regardless of the label we might want to assign it, My Red Heaven fulfills the promise of experimental fiction: it challenges complacent reading habits at the same time it also offers to renew the conceptual resources upon which fiction might draw to engage the reader in new and myriad ways. Although Nietzsche’s Kisses and Head in Flames also employ an unorthodox approach to effectively integrate method and matter, My Red Heaven might be the sort of book that convinces skeptical readers experimental fiction can be compelling reading even if it does not complacently fall back on the most comfortable modes of storytelling.

Unlocked 

(This essay originally appeared in Full Stop.)

Carole Maso has never tried to avoid the label, “experimental writer.” Indeed, in interviews and essays she has often advocated on behalf of experimental fiction, lamenting the lack of critical attention it receives and excoriating big publishers for their commercial fixations at the expense of the literary. In her essay, “Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose,” she critiques the conditions that prevail in contemporary writing:

Together, many novelists, now commodity makers, have agreed on a recognizable reality, which they are all too happy to impart as if it were true. Filled with hackneyed ways of perceiving, cliched, old sensibilities, they and the publishing houses create traditions which have gradually been locked into place. They take for granted: the line, the paragraph, the chapter, the story, the storyteller, character.

Here, Maso presumably gives us not only a general description of the ambitions to which experimental fiction ought to aspire (or, more precisely, of those it ought to reject), but also an explicit signal of what we might expect to find in her own work. And indeed, we do find in Maso’s novels and stories an exploration of the possibilities of unorthodox structural and stylistic devices beyond those associated with conventional narratives. Still, it can’t really be said that Maso’s fiction ultimately abandons either “story” or “character.” While her novels are sufficiently different from each other that their formal qualities can be described only in reference to their specific effect in the work at hand, each of them could be said to elicit these effects as an alternative means — alternative to the “traditions” that most literary fiction continues to unreflectively reproduce — of presenting characters, specifically the narrator-protagonists whose efforts to relate their experiences (and sometimes to imagine the experiences of others) serve as a substitute for “narrative” in the conventional sense, but each certainly does finally offer a story encompassing, in most cases, the character’s whole life.

Some of the novels, such as The Art Lover (1990), employ a collage-like method, in this case exemplified by a dual-stranded sequence of events (the narrator’s own past and the version of it presented in the novel she is writing) and supplemented by a variety of graphic and pictorial elements. Defiance (1998), perhaps Maso’s most well-known novel, also uses the collage method, except here the fragmentation arises from the narrator’s fragmented consciousness, as she records her experiences in a journal (while awaiting execution for double murder, no less). Of the two, The Art Lover seems the most purely motivated simply by a desire to experiment with form, while the extremity of form in Defiance seems determined by the extremity of the subject and situation, all working not really to solve a mystery — why did the narrator murder her young students? — but to depict a woman exploring the peripheries of her own psychic trauma. Something like this is also featured in Ava (1993), although in this novel the situation is even more extreme: literally from her deathbed, suffering the final stage of cancer and in a coma, the protagonist cycles through her life experiences in a series of mostly brief images and recalled moments.

These novels admirably maintain an alternative practice outside the conventions “locked into place” that have turned writers into “commodity makers,” but that is not to say they are inaccessible for readers open to unorthodox strategies that nevertheless lead to fulfilling familiar goals grounding fiction in character (as well as narrative in the broadest sense). Indeed, novels like The Art Lover and Defiance surely do at the least eventually cohere as stories of women’s lives of the sort feminist criticism especially helps us in reading, and Defiance in particular seems a deliberate attempt to shock through its content, its fragmented form actually serving to create a kind of traditional dramatic tension through ellipsis, understatement, and delay. Even Ava is not quite the radical experiment in discontinuous, even random, expression it might at first appear to be. Once we have adjusted to the situation and sampled enough of the at times near-musical flow of language as it cycles through Ava’s not-quite-consciousness, we can more readily accept the novel’s apparent formal and discursive disorder as a radical invocation of the stream-of-consciousness strategy, taken, perhaps, to its plausible limit, but surely a recognizable method with an established history.

Maso’s most thoroughly adventurous work may be the short story collection, Aureole (1996). In her preface to the book, Maso says she is attempting to discover “ways in language to express the extreme, the fleeting, the fugitive states that hover at the outermost boundaries of speech.” In this case, the “fugitive” state explored is sexual desire, the ineffability of which is represented in the “sexual energy” Maso has attempted to infuse into her sentences. Few of the stories are explicit (at least in their language, which instead is metaphorical and suggestive), and in fact description of the particulars of a sexual encounter is not at all the Aureole’s, ambition but rather the invocation of the exigencies of desire in both the stylistic and formal features of the stories. Thus they are shaped less by concerns of narrative than of tracking the unpredictable, shifting movements of desire as might be registered in language.

If Aureole most directly forwards an approach attempting to fuse style and form (in a way that again most approximates music), this sort of motive seems to inform most of Maso’s fiction, including the novels, which, if not so removed from conventional practices as to be forbidding, nevertheless succeed in exploring “ways of perceiving” — both experience and fiction itself as literary art — that are not hackneyed and that resist being themselves perceived as commodities. That Maso was a writer likely to be engaged in such a project was clear enough in her debut novel, Ghost Dance (1986), now offered in a reprint edition by Counterpoint Press. Perhaps the first challenge posed to the reader in this novel is to appropriately perceive its protagonist: We are initially presented with the image of a woman “standing under the great clock in Grand Central Station,” who is, the narrator tells us, “waiting for me.” The woman is revealed as the narrator’s mother, and the first scene introduces us to this character whose enigmatic absence  (except in the narrator’s memories of her) paradoxically makes her the novel’s most vivid presence. Even so, she retains the element of mystery established by the narrator’s account in this first, extended memory of a woman on the edge of madness — although, as we discover throughout the novel, whether her madness is the source of her gift — she is a renowned poet, as it turns out — or whether the gift itself impels her disordered habits is never made definitively clear.

The narrator, Vanessa, does not seem quite sure about this herself, although what follows our first acquaintance with her mother, Christine is essentially Vanessa’s attempt to reckon with the loss of the mother, as well as the overwhelming effect Christine has had on her, which arises as much from the mother’s persistent absences as her direct acts of parenting. This Vanessa does obliquely, however, through a kaleidoscope of memories (of her father, brother, and grandparents as well as Christine) and fragmented narratives about her own experiences separate from her mother. But Vanessa appears to be in a state of mental displacement, and so we cannot be entirely confident in her reliability as narrator. She seems unable to accept the fact of her mother’s death, suggesting to us that Christine has simply disappeared (as has Vanessa’s father). If Ghost Dance portrays Vanessa finally as capable of coming to terms with her family history, this novel could be taken as Vanessa’s progress toward acceptance of reality, but this means that much of what she tells us, her rendering of events and characters, must be subject to doubt. Thus the more startling episodes from her own past and present, from her affair with a mentally disturbed fellow college student who ultimately commits suicide, to a sexual encounter with Christine’s lesbian lover, Sabine, to a relationship with a giant man (“an enormous man, a man so large he might blot out the sun”) named Jack each must be doubted as a literal representation of “real” events.

Perhaps the same is true of Vanessa’s account of her grandparents, one of whom becomes deeply immersed in Native American spirituality, while another exiles himself to Armenia, although we might think her hold on family history would be more secure than on her own present experiences. None of this makes such interludes less effective in evoking Vanessa’s troubled state of mind, however. And to the extent that we might read Ghost Dance as the revelation of her confused consciousness, we would probably conclude that it is Vanessa’s story that is the novel’s primary focus of concern. In a sense this evocation of a consciousness in extremis governs the novel’s formal structure: fragmented, prone to repetition and revision, scattered in time and place, but ultimately holding together in its task of suggesting a more nebulous reality beneath the “recognizable reality” that form in conventional fiction reliably summons. We could say that latter reality does finally come into more apparent view by the end of the novel, when the actual circumstances of Christine’s death are revealed. Vanessa relates Christine’s death in an automobile accident, as well as its immediate aftermath, straightforwardly enough at this point, but the accident would seem to be the central trauma animating the novel, to which Vanessa’s fractured narrative figuratively bears witness, circling around it but finally not able to evade its heavy gravity.

Still, if Vanessa’s internal conflict motivates the novel’s formal structure, her hesitations and evasions inevitably work to make Christine an even more enigmatic figure, and thus arguably make her character its most memorable feature. Although Christine is a dynamic character in her own way — part free-spirited artist, part incipient madwoman, the two halves perhaps indivisible — she is also the first of what will become a recognizable kind of character in Maso’s fiction, an unruly woman of sorts, a trait she shares with Ava Klein and Defiance’s Bernadette O’Brien. The title of Defiance, of course, captures the spirit both of these women characters, whose behavior defies the constrictions of what is considered to be proper behavior for women, and of the work of Carole Maso herself. Maso’s fiction does consistently defy those “hackneyed” conventions that in most contemporary fiction are assumed to be “locked into place.” In employing non-hackneyed stylistic and formal strategies, Maso creates distinctive characters not usually to be found in other fiction, even other fiction written by women. Neither Maso nor her characters are afraid to transgress presumed boundaries.

Maso’s most recent novel was Mother and Child, an atypical exercise in surreal whimsy, published in 2012. By then, it had been 14 years since Defiance, although Maso had published three works of nonfiction in the interim. Presumably through much of this time (and since) she was working on the reportedly mammoth Bay of Angels, excerpts of which have appeared in various journals. These excerpts, as well as Maso’s own descriptions, suggest the novel will draw on the sort of collage and juxtaposition we find in the previous work (and it appears to involve Ava Klein), so it will indeed be interesting to see how Maso is able to realize her iconoclastic ambitions in meeting the large-scale demands of the meganovel.

An Unruly Woman 

Elisabeth Sheffield's novels feature women who are "difficult" "unruly," at times resolutely unpleasant--at least to readers who expect a fictional protagonist (especially if it is a woman) to be at heart "likable." They are otherwise dynamic characters who just don't observe the rules of propriety or decorum. Stella, one of the protagonists of Sheffield's first novel, Gone (2003), is a disaffected and dissolute adjunct community college English instructor who goes on a fruitless quest, accompanied by her ex-student lover, to track down what she believes is her inheritance, a valuable Winslow Homer painting. Along the way we read from letters written by Stella's deceased aunt, Juju, who in her own, different way, is as incorrigible as Stella. The protagonist of Fort Da (2009), a 38 year-old neurologist, relates (in a dissociated and displaced way) an account of her reverse-Lolita obsession with an 11 year-old boy. One of the dual protagonists of 2014's Helen Keller Really Lived (the other protagonist is a ghost) is a quasi-grifter (she dispenses "healing") who ultimately becomes involved in a theft of embryos from a fertility clinic.

It is likely that these portrayals against the grain of conventional assumptions about appropriately feminine behavior help account for the dearth of critical attention given to Sheffield's work in the mainstream literary press (or even what was once called the blogosphere), although the adventurous formal structures of the novels also no doubt bother less adventurous readers and critics as well: it would seem that difficult women require more unorthodox, more ostensibly difficult methods of aesthetic representation to adequately render their experiences. If in Fort Da the main character offers her version of events through a misleading, pseudo-scientific "report" and much of Helen Keller Really Lived comes to us as a ghost's communications to the protagonist (his ex-wife) through her computer, in Sheffield's 2021 novel, Ire Land (a Faery Tale), the narrative consists of a sequence of emails written by the protagonist, Sandra Dorn--although they actually come packaged as an edited and annotated manuscript sent to the now deceased Sandra's daughter.

The status of the text has--or should have--an immediate effect on our perception of the narrative it relates, making it, of course, an inherently unreliable source of truth or accuracy, especially since the story that emerges from Sandra Dorn's email chronicles (sent as responses to the unknown recipient "madmaeve17") involves the intercession of Gaelic faeries and Sandra's transformation into a hare. That story is essentially a picaresque recital of Sandra's fortunes after losing her home in Denver, where she is a professor of gender studies whose disorderly behavior has left her an older woman without friends or defenders among her colleagues, a wretched outcast. She first finds refuge with a younger sister, and when that ends up badly, she lives for a time with a brother and his girlfriend, but that too comes a cropper. Finally she is granted a reprieve of sorts with an offer of a temporary teaching position in Belfast (where she had lived previously in a relationship that ended badly), and the novel concludes--after a bizarre interlude in the classroom--with the intimation that Sandra has been taken away by the faeries ("[we can] fix ye up and kit you out" the mysterious editor--or some other shadowy figure usurping his role--declares in one of the editorial insertions).

While it is somewhat hard to know how seriously to take all of the particulars of Sandra Dorn's account (or at least the version we are presented), finally the plot details are less pivotal for an appreciation of the novel than our response to Sandra Dorn and her recital of her life experiences. It would be very easy to recoil from her, given some of the bad behavior to which she confesses (abandoning her first-born son) or we witness her perform (hurling invective at a child), but it's also hard to not admire the unapologetic candor of her admissions, her acceptance (not without an implicit sneer) of her dismal circumstances after a lifetime spent insisting on personal autonomy and disregarding convention. If Sandra Dorn were the male protagonist (Sandy Dorn, say) of a male-authored novel, he would surely be considered a "rogue," defiant of norms but to a degree laudable for that. Perhaps such a roguish personality is still regarded as objectionable in a female character, but at this stage in her life, while it might be salubrious for Sandra to be with the faeries in their mounds, that Sheffield affirms as her protagonist such a morally unkempt character as Sandra Dorn in the first place is arguably the novel's most praiseworthy achievement.

Sheffield would be high on my list of unjustly overlooked writers in current American fiction, but fortunately she is still able to attract publishers to her work. Ire Land would certainly be a good place to start with that work for the uninitiated, but really all of her books are equally worthwhile.

Reading the Past and the Future 

(This review originally appeared in Kenyon Review Online)

John Keene’s Counternarratives is neither a collection of short stories, nor the sort of linked novel-by-proxy series that has become increasingly common in the past decade or so. This extraordinary book is instead unified by the conceit invoked in its title: its stories all counter, challenge, or subvert established narratives about race and slavery in the history of the Americas. Together their effect is to disrupt and disorient our settled notions about the agency of the enslaved and exploited, and about the intelligibility of history itself.

The first story in the book, “Manhatta,” briefly tells of the original landing on Manhattan Island of Juan Rodriguez, the first non-indigenous inhabitant of what is now New York City, establishing the iconoclastic spirit of Counternarratives by reminding us that the first “settler” in what became the largest city in the United States was in fact a man of African descent. “Manhatta” is followed by “On Brazil, or Dénouement: The Londônias-Figueriras,” which moves the setting to Brazil, whose development as a slaveholding Portuguese colony is traced alongside that of the US through the book’s first section. This story reminds us that slavery was a phenomenon endemic to the European colonization of the Western hemisphere (as does “Gloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of Sorrows”), while “An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” makes us remember that in the American colonies slavery was accepted in the North as well as the South.

But these stories do not simply represent enslaved Africans as the oppressed victims of European colonial cupidity. The black protagonists in stories such as “Gloss,” “An Outtake,” and “A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon” are strong-willed and dauntless in their desire for freedom, and they possess a distinctive power of their own. In “Gloss” and “Lisbon,” this power is expressed in the characters’ moral stature and palpable accomplishments, but also through a spiritual force that at times manifests as essentially supernatural. The latter story is narrated (as we discover at its conclusion) by a slave known to the whites as Joao Baptista, but who informs the ostensible protagonist, the provost of a Catholic mission, that he wants to be called by his African name, Burunbara. Burunbara, it turns out, “can read the past and the future. I can speak to the living, as now, and to the dead. I can feel the weather before it turns and the night before it falls. Every creature that walks this earth converses with me.” “Gloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of Sorrow” features an enslaved woman named Carmel, who, after the family she serves is killed during the Haitian revolution, accompanies the only surviving daughter to a convent in Kentucky. Carmel’s powers of divination allow her to speak with the dead and give her access to a world beyond sensory experience that she renders in visionary works of art.

Burunbara and Carmel share this oracular insight with James Alton Rivers, formerly known as Huckleberry Finn’s raft companion Jim Watson in Mark Twain’s novel. In “Rivers,” Jim has attained his freedom, and the story begins with an encounter Jim has with both Huck and Tom Sawyer in St. Louis. Tom has predictably enough become a garden-variety white supremacist:

You’d better watch yourself, Jim, you hear me? Good thing we know you but walking these streets like they belong to you, and they don’t to no nigger, no matter what some of you might think these days, so watch it, cause the time’ll come when even the good people like me and Huck here have had enough.

Nobody who has read either Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer carefully can really be surprised that the adult Tom holds these views, nor that Huck, in contrast, shows signs of retaining his respect for Jim. Tom Sawyer’s “adventures” are possible because he is a young white boy whose freedom is predicated on the unfreedom of others, and his “mischief” is more often callous and self-involved than innocent. Huck’s adventures, on the other hand, force him to confront the realities of the culture that has shaped him, and in the process, he also must acknowledge his common humanity with the “runaway slave” who has shared his journey. If in “Rivers” Huck doesn’t exactly sound like the dissenting voice that, at the conclusion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, announces the intent to “light out for the territory,” he does try to restrain Tom in his racist taunting. Keene doesn’t counter Twain’s portrayal of Huck and Tom so much as extend that portrayal to its probable outcome in their maturity.

What Keene does counter is the popular perception of Tom Sawyer as the prototypical American boy, offering instead a glimpse at what American “innocence” can seamlessly become. Certainly Keene also contests the perception of Jim as simply Huck’s amiable and superstitious companion, assisting in Huck’s education in the ways of the world and acting as the catalyst in his possible moral enlightenment. Here Jim tells us his own story, and his superstition has become an ability to read “omens” that is valuable when he joins the First Missouri Colored Troops during the Civil War. The most unsettling moment in “Rivers” is undoubtedly the conclusion, in which Jim’s company is confronted by a Confederate brigade:

. . . I usually kept to the reader as I was ordered to, but Anderson urged several of us to crawl out to the edge of the field, near the river, where there was a stand of Montezuma cypresses, which I did and when I rounded them flat on my stomach, creeping forward like a panther I saw it, that face I could have identified if blind in both eyes, him, in profile, the agate eyes in a squint, that sandy ring of beard collaring the gaunt cheeks the soiled gray jacket half open and hanging around the sun-reddened throat, him crouching reloading his gun, quickly glancing up and around him so as not to miss anything.

This scene disturbs not because it undercuts a plausible narrative about the likely fates of Huck and Jim, but because it is that narrative. If we are to take these fictional characters and imagine them real, with subsequent life stories true to historical circumstances, the scenario Keene presents is entirely believable. The influence of the slave culture in which Twain depicts both Huck and Tom being raised is not easily eluded; the vow to “go to hell” rather than betray a friend cannot easily negate the overwhelming social pressure to show solidarity with one’s own and help defeat the Union invaders. The final encounter between Jim and Huck that Keene provides prompts us to reconsider any notion we might have that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, however much its protagonist might experience individual moral progression, tells us much about the social progression necessary to make Huck’s story more than a pleasing fiction.

If the myth of Huckleberry Finn cannot be sustained in the light of historical reality, Jim endures with his dignity and self-respect intact, at least through the compelling reimagining undertaken by Keene. “The Aeronauts” shares with “Rivers” a Civil War–era setting and concerns the narrator’s experience as an employee of the “Balloon Corps” near the beginning of the war. “The Aeronauts” is perhaps the lightest, most humorous story in the book, although it also provides a vivid sense of black life in Philadelphia, as well as a portrait of wartime Washington. The bleakest story is no doubt the last, “The Lions” (given a separate final section, identified simply as a “Counternarrative”). Where most of the other stories are very specific in details of setting and historical period, this story is generalized and abstract, existing in “un-time,” as one of the two characters puts it, presented as an extended dialogue between a deposed ruler and his successor, who has presumably staged a coup, but who is also a longtime comrade in arms. Their conversation reveals a violent and ruthless past of the kind we unfortunately associate with many postcolonial regimes: “All those car crashes, overdoses, bodies found at the bottom of drained swimming pools, riverbeds, earthen dams, sudden bathroom electrocutions, sharp, heavy projectiles flying through windows while people were eating their morning meals. . . .” Keene depicts these two characters as quite obviously unscrupulous and brutal, but they did not become so in a moral or historical vacuum:

Did you not learn anything from the brazen creatures who seized our mothers and fathers, who bought and sold them here and across the sea, who fought them here and over there and did not back down? The ones to whom you signed over so much of our matrimony and patrimony? Their puny bodies that melt in the sun, all their sicknesses of the flesh and mind and soul, yet they keep arriving. Their words, their ideas, their abstractions, the ones you love so much, gave them an armor of fearlessness. . . .

If “The Lions” is a “counternarrative,” we might interpret it first of all as counter to the previous stories that have portrayed their protagonists exercising special powers in productive and responsible ways to resist their oppressive circumstances. The two dictators in “The Lions” abuse power, wield it in a way that degrades rather than transforms. At the same time, a sense of disillusion and betrayal pervade the dialogue, suggesting that power was initially pursued with better intentions but those intentions were corrupted—as if the life the two men actually lived was the counternarrative to the life they sought. The story adds an element of tragic complexity to the book; the figures portrayed are free enough from the subjection of those “brazen creatures” with their “armor of fearlessness” to claim a kind of autonomy, but not so free that their autonomy can’t be undermined by the weaknesses of human nature.

The term “Counternarratives” takes on at least one more meaning if we consider Keene’s formal strategies. Keene’s Counternarratives is a heftier book than Keene’s 1995 novella Annotations, his only other published work of fiction. Annotations is a bildungsroman of sorts, although as the title suggests, it is closer to being a commentary on a possible coming-of-age story, notes toward such a work. The novella blends autobiographical narrative with terse allusions and abstract reflection, even literary criticism. If in Annotations Keene attempts to use his own life experience as the medium for a more detached exegesis and elaboration, in Counternarratives he does something similar with history itself, subjecting it to complication, revision, and reassessment. Although almost every story in the book offers a tangible narrative, few if any are related in a conventional narrative mode, which is, after all, precisely the kind of storytelling that for so long has failed to acknowledge a central role for the black experience. “A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon” is in the form of a letter. “Gloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of Sorrows” is literally a gloss, an extended footnote or commentary on what begins as a work of history of Catholicism in early America. “Persons and Places” is a double-columned story simultaneously describing a fleeting encounter between George Santayana and W.E.B. DuBois from the perspective of each man, while “Blues,” about a tryst between Langston Hughes and a visiting Mexican poet, is told through what seems a series of notations rather than narrative exposition. In its engaging, often exhilarating use of alternative or unorthodox forms, Counternarratives abundantly demonstrates what “innovative” fiction at its best can accomplish: sometimes narrative content that challenges longstanding presumptions can be adequately expressed only through equally challenging extensions of form.

Undreamt Daydreams 

Gabriel Blackwell's novels could be regarded as exercises in creative collaboration--collaboration with known works and writers, the latter generally dead. Shadow Man evokes the the tropes and the manner of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men appropriates both the work and the life of H.P. Lovecraft, while Madeleine E attempts a kind of synthesis of the criticism relating to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The stories included in Babel (Splice, 2020) are less exclusively devoted to this particular method of metafictional rewriting--although one of them does center around a nonexistent book by Borges that nevertheless shows up on Google Preview--more surreal or absurdist than metafictional, more focused on character and incident (however askew).

Perhaps this difference in tactics is itself a function of the book's thematic focus on family conflict and especially on the relationship between fathers and sons. Particularly in the first half of the book, the stories depict this relationship as fragile and a source of anguish for both fathers and sons. In the  story called "Fathers and Sons," as well as the one immediately preceding it, "The Invention of an Island," the situations are especially fraught, as the narrators' young sons appear to suffer from developmental afflictions with which the fathers clearly have trouble coping even if their distress is displaced, expressed through curious plot devices: In the  latter, the narrator's wife has taken the son and gone, but not before installing mirrors everywhere, leaving the narrator essentially immobilized. The narrator of the former investigates the disappearance of his grandfather, Rudolph Fentz, as related in a curious letter his own father has sent him. "How was I like Rudolph Fentz," the narrator asks at the story's conclusion, waiting outside his son's school. "Was there time to change? Was there really the will to?"

The incongruities in these two stories are only amplified in some of the other stories that are less focused on a father's anxieties, although images and tropes related to family still predominate. One of the more disturbing stories is "A Field in Winter," in which a young narrator worries about the status of his "brother," who appears to be some amalgam of vegetable, alcohol, and "pickled" human. His father is depicted growing (making? siring?) other brothers whom the narrator (otherwise an only child) once found buried in the field of the title. Additionally, the narrator may be a ghost, or his father may be, although at the story's conclusion they both may be, as they wait in "Mr. Strick's pavilion," where the narrator anticipates that "soon something dark will rise up out of Mr. Strick's pond." The temptation is to try and make this story make some kind of conventional sense, to interpret the grotesque images and strange goings-on as perhaps allegorical, but it is a surreal sort of symbolism that subverts its own figuration, implying meaning that remains just beyond our grasp.

This impression is left as well in stories such as "Leson" and "The Before Unapprehended," In the former, the title character, an ex-soldier now living in a "colony," is feeling "stuck," stagnant. When doctors are unable to help him (aside from being told that "what is wrong must be inside") he begins to take a regimen of pills and other "medicaments" that soon start to work: he literally begins to grow from the inside out, his bodily fluids breaking through the skin, depositing  "bits that had once been Leson, leavings, outpourings of his slow flood." Eventually he empties out completely, reduced to the flow of his bodily substances. The story teases us with unexplained details--what is this colony? what are these "passage wo/rms" the characters keep seeing?--but again seem to promise more meaning than they deliver. The same is true of the latter story, narrated by a man marching and reciting verses with a procession of other men (their destination and purpose unexplained), who has noticed that one of their "brothers" has disappeared (although he doesn't actually know which brother it might be). Thus an element of mystery is set up at the very beginning of the story, but the narrator doesn't so much solve it as dissolve it in quasi-metaphysical speculation, surmising that the missing brother escaped through a hole in language:

There must be a reality that does not obtain, but does exist, and it seems to me that brother must have found it. What if he found a way to follow the steps given by these subverses instead of the steps the rest of us were taking, the steps given by the verses being recited? Where would such a path lead? Wouldn't it take him into regions that exist in the same way undreamt daydreams exist?

Blackwell's stories are elusive enough that perhaps it is unwise to extrapolate from any specific passage to a broader generalization about his assumptions, but perhaps this narrator's speculation concerning the whereabouts of his missing companion does provide a perspective that can help orient us to the particular (but satisfying) kind of strangeness we find in Babel. Reading these stories, the world they invoke does start to seem like "a reality that does not obtain, but does exist"--at least here, in this reading experience of them. And it is as if the stories as a whole have indeed exited, if not language itself, then through a hole in the conventional representation of "reality" in literary language, emerging into "undreamt daydreams" (or nightmares) that Blackwell has obligingly gone ahead and dreamt for us.

    Enacting the Problems of Language 

Since the mid-1990s, after the waning of postmodernism, as well as the minimalist neo-realism that succeeded it, no comparable practice has really emerged that aims to revise and reconfigure wholesale the formal and stylistic moves with which writers have been working. There has certainly been increasing emphasis on diversity and inclusion in recent American fiction, but generally this is a diversity of themes or perspective that does not privilege formal or stylistic variation, at least not for their own sake.

Still, there continue to be writers who challenge expectations and deviate from established norms, writers who risk confounding readers by seeking out less familiar methods and unaccustomed arrangements, whether of language or form. If there has been an approach that more than any other identifies such writers, without quite acquiring a particular nomenclature to unite a fairly disparate group of writers, it is a broad tendency to fantasia or surrealism, although in some cases the writer indeed favors outright fantasy through something close to fairy tales, as in, say, some of the stories of Aimee Bender, while in others the ultimate effect might more accurately called surrealist, or perhaps absurdist, more reminiscent of the fiction of George Saunders.

These two writers might in fact be cited as the most recent progenitors of this mode of non-realist fiction, presaged in their early books The Girl in The Flammable Skirt (Bender) and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (Saunders), although they were of course not the first modern writers to depart from the canons of realism, nor are they necessarily the primary influences on all of the later writers who have worked in this mode. Some of these writers seem to be influenced by fantasy and science fiction, producing work that is more a hybrid of genre fiction and literary fiction, with some of the tropes and imagery of the former but the attention to language and broader thematic focus of the latter.  But while the work of both Saunders and Bender signaled a shift among non-genre writers to something like fantasy, and even if their fiction as well as the subsequent fiction they influenced clearly enough has something "surreal" about it, finally neither of these terms quite adequately names the practice that has come to characterize much of the more adventurous American fiction in the first part of the 21st century.

This problem of fully accounting, at least in critical terms, for the strategies at work in certain works of otherwise indisputably unconventional fiction seems to me particularly acute when considering the work of Christian TeBordo, a writer well enough known to dedicated followers of small presses, but whose name is probably less familiar to readers who tend more strictly to the mainstream. Since 2005, he has published four novels and two collections, the latter of which includes his newest book, Ghost Engine (Bridge Eight Press). A survey of his published books would suggest an evolution of sorts from the first three (The Conviction and Subsequent Life of Savior Neck [2005], Better Ways of Being Dead [2007], and We Go Liquid [2007]), all novels), to the most recent (in addition to Ghost Engine, the novel Toughlahoma, published in 2015, and the collection The Awful Possibilities, from 2010). The early novels conjoin elements of black humor and a kind of farcical absurdism: much about the actions, behaviors, and situations in these novels is strange and at times disturbing, but there is also in all three of them an underlying spirit of slapstick comedy that in a sense still grounds the characters and events in a recognizable reality--the reality encompassed by the act of comic exaggeration.

The most disturbing of these might be We Go Liquid, and the strangest Better Ways of Being Dead (which finally seems like a puzzle without an obvious solution), but it may be Savior Neck that enacts this non-realist realism most deftly. Resembling a portrait of a decayed town in upstate New York akin, perhaps, to an early Richard Russo or Russell Banks novel but as if written by Terry Southern or Thomas Pynchon, the novel depicts the inhabitants of Discord, New York, specifically the denizens of the Thirteenth Step tavern, which includes Savior Neck, who also lives in a room above the tavern. Savior Neck is introduced to us first as a young boy, as he wakes up one morning to "the smell of his own death," and when we flash forward to the much older Savior with his "wrinkled gray face and thin white hair," he does indeed look "except for the puddle of drool that had slipped from his mouth, like a dead man." In fact, he's "been a dead man for years." 

Soon after, Savior Neck has a run-in with the local policeman, "Officer Longarm," with whom Savior continues to clash throughout the novel, leading to various encounters with characters such as Harold Esquire, Esq., Penny Dreadful, Richie Repetition, and Grace X. Machina. The plot, such as it is, is as preposterous as the character names, involving mistaken identities, a murder for hire gone wrong, and a search for the owner of a pair of pumps, culminating in the demise of the Thirteenth Step in a conflagration. We are always seemingly on the verge of a revelation that will conjure sense out of the contorted narrative, but it never arrives. This is of course deliberate, as the novel is essentially an extended exercise in controlled absurdity. Inevitably we do feel some sympathy for the sad sack Savior Neck, but his misadventures are not of the sort to be resolved into a final retrospective concordance. They are to be appreciated for their very absurdity, acknowledged as misadventures with their own kind of outlandish integrity.

Something similar can be seen in Better Ways of Being Dead, although if anything the incongruities here are even more emphatic, even more directly enlisted as a structural principle. The novel begins conventionally enough as the story of a college student taking a class he knows little about in order to maintain eligibility for insurance (he suffers from severe dermatitis that makes him break out in terrible skin lesions). But it doesn't take long for him (and the reader) to discover that both the students in the class and the professor behave oddly indeed, and the story itself soon becomes just as odd. However, again it is an oddness that, perhaps because it is allied with a mystery plot of sorts, seems to promise the telling details that will provide the key to the characters' puzzling behavior and the story's contradictions and discrepancies, yet even when the contents of a mysterious box (which must surely hold the key) are revealed, they really only intensify the confusion--unless of course the solution to the mystery is simply that there is no mystery.

We Go Liquid is a more accessible story that like Better Ways of Being Dead begins with a recognizable situation: a boy coping with the death of his mother, as well as his father's own inability to cope with it. But the situation only deteriorates after the boy receives a spam email appropriating his mother's name as the sender and responds to it as if he is communicating with his dead mother. Further emails arrive offering various products which the boy purchases, in particular a penis enhancer called Cocksure. Meanwhile he also develops a crush on a girl who lives across the street, whose later departure from town seems to finally take the boy across a line into outright delusion--as opposed to the almost willed naivete with which he has previously warded off the latent desperation of his circumstances. This novel leans less on the absurdist or the surreal than the first two (although it is surely strange enough), but while this perhaps makes We Go Liquid the least "weird" of TeBordo's books--it actually winds up being a rather poignant account of adolescent trauma--it doesn't really presage the direction his subsequent writing would take.

The only novel TeBordo has published since We Go Liquid has been 2015's Toughlahoma, and if the former is among the writer's books the most explicable as a work of fiction enlisting the traditional elements of fiction in a more or less customary way (although we may conclude that the protagonist is somewhat of an unreliable narrator), the latter might be the most wholly subversive of traditional practice. There are characters in Toughlahoma, but they are mostly deliberately cartoonish figures whose actions work to fulfill the book's primary ambition, which is to imagine the land of Toughlahoma itself, a primordial realm situated among its rival states, Roughlahoma and Ughlahoma (Toughlahoma is the land-locked of the three). The story of Toughlahoma begins with its origins in the "Time of Truth," when "a man could kill a man and that man be killed, and the killer be a killer in truth, in Truth" and loosely (very loosely) chronicles the attempt by Jesus Cristal (later also called Jesus Crystal and Jesus Chrysler) to fulfill the prophecy of the Toughlahoman holy book, Toughlahoma: You Are There!. The quest mostly fails, although Jesus Cristal manages to liberate himself after a fashion, while the Toughlahomans are more or less left to their primitive ways (which they mostly enjoy, anyway).

Such a synopsis hardly captures the demented spirit of the novel, however, which combines mythological fable and anachronistic social satire: While the guardians of the lair of the Great Teen Spirits, monstrous teenagers to whom unlucky Toughlahomans are fed, are busy at the local community center, Jesus Cristal enters their lair and slays a Spirit. A consultant (named Nicky) lays out an elaborate plan to conquer Toughlahoma, not through military action but through "I. Capitol Expansion (CE) II. Horizontal Exegration (HE) III. Strategic Disinformation (SD)." (Nicky advises against building more condominiums, since they won't help procure "exponentially more cheddar biscuits and crabcakes.") Near the end of the novel, the Toughlahomans win a decisive battle against the Ughlahomans by burning down a brand new Applebees. ("We didn't know much about Applebees, but we knew it was an Ugly thing").

Among the incongruities characteristic of this novel are the frequent references to "the problem of language," especially as formulated by the philosopher Mediocrates. Dispensing wisdom at the community center, he declares that "The problem of language. . .cannot be expressed, much less solved, in language, any more than a broken bone can be mended by the breaking of more bones." Asked how it can be expressed, Mediocrates takes the questioner to the roof of the community center "and shoved him over the edge. I have splattered your brains on the pavement. . .My saying this is an enactment of the problem of language." Language inherently distorts the reality it is meant to be representing, so that a project to enlist language for the purposes of "realism" is a hopeless task (although Mediocrates concedes that the expression of the problem perhaps "could be hinted at with language"). With Toughlahoma, TeBordo presumably is in part affirming an aesthetic philosophy in which material reality remains a necessary predicate that nevertheless cannot be delineated in itself, making reality instead a source for imaginative transformations enacted in language.

Such transformations are arguably most impressively achieved in TeBordo's two collections of short fiction, The Awful Possibilities and his most recent book, Ghost Engine. These stories are in general just as committed to imagination and invention as responses to the "problem of language," but they are also more sober in subject than the burlesque myth and legend of Toughlahoma allows. "SS Attacks," the very first story in the book, depicts a frustrated teenager (from Brooklyn, Iowa) fighting the impulse to carry out a school shooting, while "The Champion of Forgetting" is the young narrator's account of his kidnapping and coerced participation in an organ harvesting operation. Other stories involve car accidents, the fashioning of a pair of gloves out of human skin, and various forms of anomie and social isolation. Many of the stories hover in an uncomfortable zone somewhere between absurdity and pathos so that, although none of them depart from ordinary reality as arrantly as Toughlahoma, the dominant tone throughout the book is one of lurking menace, disorder and chaos barely held at bay.

This effect arises less from what the characters do or say, from what explicitly happens, than from what remains latent but unknown: the awful possibilities. The situation described by the narrator of "The Champion of Forgetting" seems almost inexplicable until we suddenly realize the horror that is occurring as if in slow motion, a horror the narrator cannot directly articulate. Something similar is achieved by "Moldering," in which the narrator's account of his trip (at midnight) to the tanner's for a new pair of gloves seems weirdly genteel until he finally encounters the tanner and ultimately commits a casually savage act. In this story the narrative manner acts as a distancing device that reinforces the shock value, and the adventurous formal variety in many of the other stories (e.g., the second-person narration of "SS Attacks") also create distance--or at least a kind of dynamic uncertainty--that heightens the unease they gradually induce. 

Ghost Engine more closely resembles Toughlahoma in its use of non-realist strategies, but it does seem like a more miscellaneous collection than The Awful Possibilities, not as unified in theme and approach. On the other hand, the balance between consequential subject and humorous treatment lends more to the latter in this book, even if the humor can be bleak. In "Hard Times at Galt's Gulch," the humor is in part ostensibly at the author's own expense, the story being in the form of an email sent by an old girlfriend to "TeBordo." Before taking up the real subject of her email, the girlfriend observes: "You were going to go to college, move to the city, become the voice of your generation. How'd that work out, TeBordo? I've seen the Amazon rankings, read the reviews." The email relates the story of the girlfriend's brother and his unfortunate infatuation with Ayn Rand, which leads to serial failure and eventual residency in the sister's basement. Conceding her brother is a loser, she nevertheless exhorts Tebordo to draw attention to his fate: "Copy and paste this motherfucker into one of your books, a mediocrity within a mediocrity." A brief epilogue from Tebordo explaining why he has done so extends the story into something like autofiction (most likely pseudo-autofiction).

A darker, finally almost maniacal story is "Bear Country," in which a chronically depressed father determines he will not teach his young son a children's book version of reality but will illustrate the truth about life early, before he can disillusioned about it. The effort--the father puts on a panda suit and menaces the child--traumatizes his son, but the father is only further resolved: "I love my son with such a deep, dark, ghastly love, that when I die, hopefully when he is much older than I am now, for his sake, not mine, I will haunt him like some specimen from the deepest, most gorgeous pit of hell." A more purely comic story is "Whose Bridesmaid?," a mock scholarly article examining the place of a band called Bridesmaid in the annals of black metal. Ostensibly a Christian rock band, Bridesmaid becomes an icon of black metal when a famous metal musician, "Gaahl" of the band "Gorgoroth," is sent into a frenzy by a Bridesmaid song, viciously attacks a man, then "drained his blood into a chalice and sipped it contemplatively." The story seems both a fan's tribute to black metal as a youthful enthusiasm and a send-up of the genre's ultimate silliness.

This story as well shares with several of the other stories in the book, and in TeBordo's fiction as a whole, an immersion in American popular culture, frequently satirical (and caustically so) although not just in mockery of its shallowness or absurdity but in recognition of the way it accurately gauges the shallowness and absurdity of American life. Such attention to popular culture now perhaps seems a commonplace in contemporary fiction, but as recently as the 1970s writers such as Ann Beattie and Bobbie Ann Mason were still criticized for too blatantly referring to "brand names" and other supposedly trivial features of ordinary life, and a story such as Donald Barthelme's "The Joker's Greatest Triumph" could seem an audacious crossing of boundaries in its appropriation of comic book characters. Tebordo's invocation of pop culture iconography does not at all seem exploitative--the author's interest in black metal and the logistics of fame whoring as cultural barometers seems authentic enough--but one could still wonder whether the humor of recognition in stories about The Ultimate Warrior and characters from The Cosby Show will remain as compelling for future readers as it might be now.

Arguably the most interesting stories in Ghost Engine are those that continue to develop the irrealism employed in Toughlahoma. "The Wrong Mother" is narrated by a mother who watches her twin sons try to launch a flying machine, and when they succeed, rather calmly settles on a plan to get them back down (which she won't carry out until the next morning). This story could perhaps be called whimsical, although its humor comes from the annoyance the mother feels at having to deal with such recalcitrant children. But especially notable are the four connected stories (interspersed throughout the book) featuring two characters named Frag and Watt and their ongoing work on the titular ghost engine. Mostly the two (who may be robots) engage in abstract discussions about semantics or existentialism (at one point discussing Christian TeBordo), while periodically pausing to inflict violence on each other. Only occasionally do they refer to the ghost machine they are trying to build, so that it remains a mysterious entity the nature of which is left unclear. What is ghostly about it? (It seems quite material, its "bolts tightened" and its "surfaces sparkling.") By the end of the final story, Watt has been eviscerated (although he has no internal organs, it turns out), and Frag is dismembered and tossed into the ghost engine in an effort to see if that will animate it. Watt jumps in after, but apparently to no avail.

It is difficult to put a critical name to the strategy at work in these stories that would altogether capture the aesthetic effect created. Neither "surreal" nor "absurd" will suffice, since both of those terms more precisely identify previous literary movements with definitive assumptions and distinguishing features Christian TeBordo's work doesn't necessarily share. Simply to declare that this fiction uses "non-realist" devices leaves important underlying motives obscure. Is this an attempt to repudiate realism? To mock it? To achieve a kind of realism by other means? Perhaps it is a strength of TeBordo's fiction that it does all of these things, in different instances or simultaneously, but criticism still needs to catch up to the variety of non-realist practices found in adventurous fiction in the early 21st century, especially as offered by independent presses.

Since the mid-1990s, after the waning of postmodernism, as well as the minimalist neo-realism that succeeded it, no comparable practice has really emerged that aims to revise and reconfigure wholesale the formal and stylistic moves with which writers have been working. There has certainly been increasing emphasis on diversity and inclusion in recent American fiction, but generally this is a diversity of themes or perspective that does not privilege formal or stylistic variation, at least not for their own sake.

Still, there continue to be writers who challenge expectations and deviate from established norms, writers who risk confounding readers by seeking out less familiar methods and unaccustomed arrangements, whether of language or form. If there has been an approach that more than any other identifies such writers, without quite acquiring a particular nomenclature to unite a fairly disparate group of writers, it is a broad tendency to fantasia or surrealism, although in some cases the writer indeed favors outright fantasy through something close to fairy tales, as in, say, some of the stories of Aimee Bender, while in others the ultimate effect might more accurately called surrealist, or perhaps absurdist, more reminiscent of the fiction of George Saunders.

These two writers might in fact be cited as the most recent progenitors of this mode of non-realist fiction, presaged in their early books The Girl in The Flammable Skirt (Bender) and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (Saunders), although they were of course not the first modern writers to depart from the canons of realism, nor are they necessarily the primary influences on all of the later writers who have worked in this mode. Some of these writers seem to be influenced by fantasy and science fiction, producing work that is more a hybrid of genre fiction and literary fiction, with some of the tropes and imagery of the former but the attention to language and broader thematic focus of the latter.  But while the work of both Saunders and Bender signaled a shift among non-genre writers to something like fantasy, and even if their fiction as well as the subsequent fiction they influenced clearly enough has something "surreal" about it, finally neither of these terms quite adequately names the practice that has come to characterize much of the more adventurous American fiction in the first part of the 21st century.

This problem of fully accounting, at least in critical terms, for the strategies at work in certain works of otherwise indisputably unconventional fiction seems to me particularly acute when considering the work of Christian TeBordo, a writer well enough known to dedicated followers of small presses, but whose name is probably less familiar to readers who tend more strictly to the mainstream. Since 2005, he has published four novels and two collections, the latter of which includes his newest book, Ghost Engine (Bridge Eight Press). A survey of his published books would suggest an evolution of sorts from the first three (The Conviction and Subsequent Life of Savior Neck [2005], Better Ways of Being Dead [2007], and We Go Liquid [2007]), all novels), to the most recent (in addition to Ghost Engine, the novel Toughlahoma, published in 2015, and the collection The Awful Possibilities, from 2010). The early novels conjoin elements of black humor and a kind of farcical absurdism: much about the actions, behaviors, and situations in these novels is strange and at times disturbing, but there is also in all three of them an underlying spirit of slapstick comedy that in a sense still grounds the characters and events in a recognizable reality--the reality encompassed by the act of comic exaggeration.

The most disturbing of these might be We Go Liquid, and the strangest Better Ways of Being Dead (which finally seems like a puzzle without an obvious solution), but it may be Savior Neck that enacts this non-realist realism most deftly. Resembling a portrait of a decayed town in upstate New York akin, perhaps, to an early Richard Russo or Russell Banks novel but as if written by Terry Southern or Thomas Pynchon, the novel depicts the inhabitants of Discord, New York, specifically the denizens of the Thirteenth Step tavern, which includes Savior Neck, who also lives in a room above the tavern. Savior Neck is introduced to us first as a young boy, as he wakes up one morning to "the smell of his own death," and when we flash forward to the much older Savior with his "wrinkled gray face and thin white hair," he does indeed look "except for the puddle of drool that had slipped from his mouth, like a dead man." In fact, he's "been a dead man for years." 

Soon after, Savior Neck has a run-in with the local policeman, "Officer Longarm," with whom Savior continues to clash throughout the novel, leading to various encounters with characters such as Harold Esquire, Esq., Penny Dreadful, Richie Repetition, and Grace X. Machina. The plot, such as it is, is as preposterous as the character names, involving mistaken identities, a murder for hire gone wrong, and a search for the owner of a pair of pumps, culminating in the demise of the Thirteenth Step in a conflagration. We are always seemingly on the verge of a revelation that will conjure sense out of the contorted narrative, but it never arrives. This is of course deliberate, as the novel is essentially an extended exercise in controlled absurdity. Inevitably we do feel some sympathy for the sad sack Savior Neck, but his misadventures are not of the sort to be resolved into a final retrospective concordance. They are to be appreciated for their very absurdity, acknowledged as misadventures with their own kind of outlandish integrity.

Something similar can be seen in Better Ways of Being Dead, although if anything the incongruities here are even more emphatic, even more directly enlisted as a structural principle. The novel begins conventionally enough as the story of a college student taking a class he knows little about in order to maintain eligibility for insurance (he suffers from severe dermatitis that makes him break out in terrible skin lesions). But it doesn't take long for him (and the reader) to discover that both the students in the class and the professor behave oddly indeed, and the story itself soon becomes just as odd. However, again it is an oddness that, perhaps because it is allied with a mystery plot of sorts, seems to promise the telling details that will provide the key to the characters' puzzling behavior and the story's contradictions and discrepancies, yet even when the contents of a mysterious box (which must surely hold the key) are revealed, they really only intensify the confusion--unless of course the solution to the mystery is simply that there is no mystery.

We Go Liquid is a more accessible story that like Better Ways of Being Dead begins with a recognizable situation: a boy coping with the death of his mother, as well as his father's own inability to cope with it. But the situation only deteriorates after the boy receives a spam email appropriating his mother's name as the sender and responds to it as if he is communicating with his dead mother. Further emails arrive offering various products which the boy purchases, in particular a penis enhancer called Cocksure. Meanwhile he also develops a crush on a girl who lives across the street, whose later departure from town seems to finally take the boy across a line into outright delusion--as opposed to the almost willed naivete with which he has previously warded off the latent desperation of his circumstances. This novel leans less on the absurdist or the surreal than the first two (although it is surely strange enough), but while this perhaps makes We Go Liquid the least "weird" of TeBordo's books--it actually winds up being a rather poignant account of adolescent trauma--it doesn't really presage the direction his subsequent writing would take.

The only novel TeBordo has published since We Go Liquid has been 2015's Toughlahoma, and if the former is among the writer's books the most explicable as a work of fiction enlisting the traditional elements of fiction in a more or less customary way (although we may conclude that the protagonist is somewhat of an unreliable narrator), the latter might be the most wholly subversive of traditional practice. There are characters in Toughlahoma, but they are mostly deliberately cartoonish figures whose actions work to fulfill the book's primary ambition, which is to imagine the land of Toughlahoma itself, a primordial realm situated among its rival states, Roughlahoma and Ughlahoma (Toughlahoma is the land-locked of the three). The story of Toughlahoma begins with its origins in the "Time of Truth," when "a man could kill a man and that man be killed, and the killer be a killer in truth, in Truth" and loosely (very loosely) chronicles the attempt by Jesus Cristal (later also called Jesus Crystal and Jesus Chrysler) to fulfill the prophecy of the Toughlahoman holy book, Toughlahoma: You Are There!. The quest mostly fails, although Jesus Cristal manages to liberate himself after a fashion, while the Toughlahomans are more or less left to their primitive ways (which they mostly enjoy, anyway).

Such a synopsis hardly captures the demented spirit of the novel, however, which combines mythological fable and anachronistic social satire: While the guardians of the lair of the Great Teen Spirits, monstrous teenagers to whom unlucky Toughlahomans are fed, are busy at the local community center, Jesus Cristal enters their lair and slays a Spirit. A consultant (named Nicky) lays out an elaborate plan to conquer Toughlahoma, not through military action but through "I. Capitol Expansion (CE) II. Horizontal Exegration (HE) III. Strategic Disinformation (SD)." (Nicky advises against building more condominiums, since they won't help procure "exponentially more cheddar biscuits and crabcakes.") Near the end of the novel, the Toughlahomans win a decisive battle against the Ughlahomans by burning down a brand new Applebees. ("We didn't know much about Applebees, but we knew it was an Ugly thing").

Among the incongruities characteristic of this novel are the frequent references to "the problem of language," especially as formulated by the philosopher Mediocrates. Dispensing wisdom at the community center, he declares that "The problem of language. . .cannot be expressed, much less solved, in language, any more than a broken bone can be mended by the breaking of more bones." Asked how it can be expressed, Mediocrates takes the questioner to the roof of the community center "and shoved him over the edge. I have splattered your brains on the pavement. . .My saying this is an enactment of the problem of language." Language inherently distorts the reality it is meant to be representing, so that a project to enlist language for the purposes of "realism" is a hopeless task (although Mediocrates concedes that the expression of the problem perhaps "could be hinted at with language"). With Toughlahoma, TeBordo presumably is in part affirming an aesthetic philosophy in which material reality remains a necessary predicate that nevertheless cannot be delineated in itself, making reality instead a source for imaginative transformations enacted in language.

Such transformations are arguably most impressively achieved in TeBordo's two collections of short fiction, The Awful Possibilities and his most recent book, Ghost Engine. These stories are in general just as committed to imagination and invention as responses to the "problem of language," but they are also more sober in subject than the burlesque myth and legend of Toughlahoma allows. "SS Attacks," the very first story in the book, depicts a frustrated teenager (from Brooklyn, Iowa) fighting the impulse to carry out a school shooting, while "The Champion of Forgetting" is the young narrator's account of his kidnapping and coerced participation in an organ harvesting operation. Other stories involve car accidents, the fashioning of a pair of gloves out of human skin, and various forms of anomie and social isolation. Many of the stories hover in an uncomfortable zone somewhere between absurdity and pathos so that, although none of them depart from ordinary reality as arrantly as Toughlahoma, the dominant tone throughout the book is one of lurking menace, disorder and chaos barely held at bay.

This effect arises less from what the characters do or say, from what explicitly happens, than from what remains latent but unknown: the awful possibilities. The situation described by the narrator of "The Champion of Forgetting" seems almost inexplicable until we suddenly realize the horror that is occurring as if in slow motion, a horror the narrator cannot directly articulate. Something similar is achieved by "Moldering," in which the narrator's account of his trip (at midnight) to the tanner's for a new pair of gloves seems weirdly genteel until he finally encounters the tanner and ultimately commits a casually savage act. In this story the narrative manner acts as a distancing device that reinforces the shock value, and the adventurous formal variety in many of the other stories (e.g., the second-person narration of "SS Attacks") also create distance--or at least a kind of dynamic uncertainty--that heightens the unease they gradually induce. 

Ghost Engine more closely resembles Toughlahoma in its use of non-realist strategies, but it does seem like a more miscellaneous collection than The Awful Possibilities, not as unified in theme and approach. On the other hand, the balance between consequential subject and humorous treatment lends more to the latter in this book, even if the humor can be bleak. In "Hard Times at Galt's Gulch," the humor is in part ostensibly at the author's own expense, the story being in the form of an email sent by an old girlfriend to "TeBordo." Before taking up the real subject of her email, the girlfriend observes: "You were going to go to college, move to the city, become the voice of your generation. How'd that work out, TeBordo? I've seen the Amazon rankings, read the reviews." The email relates the story of the girlfriend's brother and his unfortunate infatuation with Ayn Rand, which leads to serial failure and eventual residency in the sister's basement. Conceding her brother is a loser, she nevertheless exhorts Tebordo to draw attention to his fate: "Copy and paste this motherfucker into one of your books, a mediocrity within a mediocrity." A brief epilogue from Tebordo explaining why he has done so extends the story into something like autofiction (most likely pseudo-autofiction).

A darker, finally almost maniacal story is "Bear Country," in which a chronically depressed father determines he will not teach his young son a children's book version of reality but will illustrate the truth about life early, before he can disillusioned about it. The effort--the father puts on a panda suit and menaces the child--traumatizes his son, but the father is only further resolved: "I love my son with such a deep, dark, ghastly love, that when I die, hopefully when he is much older than I am now, for his sake, not mine, I will haunt him like some specimen from the deepest, most gorgeous pit of hell." A more purely comic story is "Whose Bridesmaid?," a mock scholarly article examining the place of a band called Bridesmaid in the annals of black metal. Ostensibly a Christian rock band, Bridesmaid becomes an icon of black metal when a famous metal musician, "Gaahl" of the band "Gorgoroth," is sent into a frenzy by a Bridesmaid song, viciously attacks a man, then "drained his blood into a chalice and sipped it contemplatively." The story seems both a fan's tribute to black metal as a youthful enthusiasm and a send-up of the genre's ultimate silliness.

This story as well shares with several of the other stories in the book, and in TeBordo's fiction as a whole, an immersion in American popular culture, frequently satirical (and caustically so) although not just in mockery of its shallowness or absurdity but in recognition of the way it accurately gauges the shallowness and absurdity of American life. Such attention to popular culture now perhaps seems a commonplace in contemporary fiction, but as recently as the 1970s writers such as Ann Beattie and Bobbie Ann Mason were still criticized for too blatantly referring to "brand names" and other supposedly trivial features of ordinary life, and a story such as Donald Barthelme's "The Joker's Greatest Triumph" could seem an audacious crossing of boundaries in its appropriation of comic book characters. Tebordo's invocation of pop culture iconography does not at all seem exploitative--the author's interest in black metal and the logistics of fame whoring as cultural barometers seems authentic enough--but one could still wonder whether the humor of recognition in stories about The Ultimate Warrior and characters from The Cosby Show will remain as compelling for future readers as it might be now.

Arguably the most interesting stories in Ghost Engine are those that continue to develop the irrealism employed in Toughlahoma. "The Wrong Mother" is narrated by a mother who watches her twin sons try to launch a flying machine, and when they succeed, rather calmly settles on a plan to get them back down (which she won't carry out until the next morning). This story could perhaps be called whimsical, although its humor comes from the annoyance the mother feels at having to deal with such recalcitrant children. But especially notable are the four connected stories (interspersed throughout the book) featuring two characters named Frag and Watt and their ongoing work on the titular ghost engine. Mostly the two (who may be robots) engage in abstract discussions about semantics or existentialism (at one point discussing Christian TeBordo), while periodically pausing to inflict violence on each other. Only occasionally do they refer to the ghost machine they are trying to build, so that it remains a mysterious entity the nature of which is left unclear. What is ghostly about it? (It seems quite material, its "bolts tightened" and its "surfaces sparkling.") By the end of the final story, Watt has been eviscerated (although he has no internal organs, it turns out), and Frag is dismembered and tossed into the ghost engine in an effort to see if that will animate it. Watt jumps in after, but apparently to no avail.

It is difficult to put a critical name to the strategy at work in these stories that would altogether capture the aesthetic effect created. Neither "surreal" nor "absurd" will suffice, since both of those terms more precisely identify previous literary movements with definitive assumptions and distinguishing features Christian TeBordo's work doesn't necessarily share. Simply to declare that this fiction uses "non-realist" devices leaves important underlying motives obscure. Is this an attempt to repudiate realism? To mock it? To achieve a kind of realism by other means? Perhaps it is a strength of TeBordo's fiction that it does all of these things, in different instances or simultaneously, but criticism still needs to catch up to the variety of non-realist practices found in adventurous fiction in the early 21st century, especially as offered by independent presses.