Postmodern Confusions

Misunderstanding Postmodernism

The term “postmodern” in American fiction was initially prompted by the work of self-reflexive writers such as John Barth, William Gass, and Gilbert Sorrentino. The term has persisted as a catch-all way of designating works of fiction that seem anti-realist or don’t conform to generally accepted storytelling norms. However, the vague way in which “postmodern” is used to distinguish apparently unconventional from “normal” fiction has obscured the more literal sense of the term as these earlier writers might have understood it. Postmodern fiction was written to both validate and extend the experimental impulse behind modernism, implicitly suggesting this is an impulse that can always be renewed. “Postmodern” has now become a semi-permanent category in which we can place unconventional work (or what is perceived as such), but ultimately the experimental fiction of the 1960s and 70s can provide a model only by demonstrating that the model fiction writers should follow is the absence of a model.

While this category remains, arguably so that critics might keep the occasional fiction assigned to it appropriately marginalized, the past forty yerars or so, at least in English language fiction, has seen a retreat to conventional practices, a widespread return to narrative business as usual. Perhaps the earliest and most prominent manifestation of this was to be found in the rise of “minimalism” in such writers as Raymond Carver and Mary Robison. However, in quite obviously signaling a break from the formal experiments and self-reflexivity of postmodern American fiction, the work of these two writers in particular did not merely return to old-fashioned storytelling. The severely pared-back minimalism of their stories seemed to accept the postmodern critique of representation if not its alternative strategies. Character and plot are stripped to the bone, the former presented to us entirely through mundane actions, with no attempt at "psychological realism" (thus we never really get to "know" Carver's characters, we just watch them wandering through their lives), the latter flattening out Freytag's triangle to an unemphatic succession of events. One could plausibly say that Carver and Robison were actually engaged in their own kind of experimentation--how bare and uninflected can realism become while maintaining the reader’s interest in fiction otherwise still committed to narrative illusion?

Some writers have continued to show the influence of postmodern experimentation, their work bearing signs of an attempt to engage with the legacy of postmodernism, but that legacy is more likely to be understood as matter of content, of adopting a certain attitude toward the world, not of formal innovation. In this way the most important postmodernist, whose work looms the largest in its influence, is Don DeLillo rather than Barth or Robert Coover. Probably the writer who most clearly represents this more vexed relationship with postmodernism is David Foster Wallace, whose work is marked as least as much by its resistance to what he considered the defining features of postmodernism as an unambiguous affinity with the goals of a writer such as DeLillo. Wallace perhaps expressed his unease with the attitude he associated with postmodernism in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.”

This essay is presented as a reflection on the influence of television, but in the long run it is more important as Wallace’s analysis of the state of fiction at this time (1992) and, perhaps most significantly, as an implicit statement of Wallace’s own preferred practice as a writer of fiction. Here Wallace identifies “postmodern irony” as the characteristic approach of cutting-edge American writers and explicitly identifies DeLillo, as well as Thomas Pynchon, as the older writers identified with such irony. He believes that irony in their fiction “started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive—a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind this early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure; that revelation of imprisonment yielded freedom.”

One could certainly quarrel with Wallace’s characterization of 1960s postmodernism. Although it is true that what we now call postmodernism emerged from the same cultural milieu that produced the era’s “youthful rebellion,” it doesn’t seem faithful to the dynamic and largely comic spirit of 60s fiction to describe its effect as “grim,” however much it might be responding to grim social and cultural conditions. It is also inaccurate to describe the comedy of this fiction as being of the sort that involves “diagnosis” and “cure.” The comedy in Pynchon and DeLillo (as well as Coover, Stanley Elkin, or Donald Barthelme) is not conventionally satirical, proposing solutions to the social dysfunctions and existential dilemmas it portrays. It offers only sustained laughter, although this laughter does promise a liberation into freedom, a “revelation of imprisonment.” Still, by calling the postmodern irony of such writers “idealistic,” Wallace clearly wants to exempt them from the criticisms he makes of writers following in their wake, who no longer have the idealism he finds in Pynchon and DeLillo. At worst Wallace wants to call into question the way their example has been assimilated, not the literary value of their books.

The bulk of Wallace’s essay is taken up with an extended critique of television, focusing on a similar “ironic” stance Wallace finds there, which he further believes is traceable to the early postmodern writers but robbed of its “idealistic” intentions. Describing the relationship to tv of a fictional everyman, “Joe Briefcase,” Wallace observes:

For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about “seeing through” the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it’s taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters’ unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naivete. . . .

 Again there is much here that is debatable, however accurate the general account of television “cool” might be. Wallace’s definition of “television” seems very broad, seems indeed to encompass the medium as a whole, but in his discussion he seems primarily concerned with sitcoms and commercials. Perhaps it is the case that those responsible for creating this kind of television are also most likely to have read and felt the influence of avant-garde and experimental fiction, but if so, Wallace does little to show that this sort of direct influence was likely. Instead, he suggests that tv and postmodern fiction “share roots,” but his assertions about these “roots” only create confusion about what he counts as “postmodern” after all:

In fact, by offering young, overeducated fiction writers a comprehensive view of how hypocritically the U.S.A. saw itself circa 1960, early television helped legitimize absurdism and irony as not just literary devices but sensible responses to an unrealistic world. For irony. . .is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy. And the television of lone-gunman Westerns, paternalistic sitcoms and jut-jawed law enforcement circa 1960 celebrated a deeply hypocritical American self-image.

Further:

It’s not one bit accidental that postmodern fiction aimed its ironic cross hairs at the banal, the naïve, the sentimental and simplistic and conservative, for these qualities were just what sixties seemed to celebrate as “American.”

From this one would conclude that for Wallace, “postmodern” writers are those writing what he calls “Image-Fiction,” writers such as William Vollmann, Jay Cantor, Stephen Dixon, A.M. Homes, and Michael Martone, most of whom could really be called second or third-wave postmodernists if Pynchon, DeLillo, and Coover are the original postmodern writers. (Dixon is of the same generation as Pynchon and DeLillo, although he came to fiction writing at a later age.) It is not really plausible to think that such first-wave postmodernists would have been inspired in their practice by television rather than the modernist writers of the previous generation (although ultimately some of them—Coover, for example—do take the pervasive presence of television as a subject, while Pynchon and DeLillo are certainly sensitive to the influence of television and mass media on American culture), and Wallace seems to be suggesting that tv was as important in the development of  “postmodernism” as any specific literary practices. Furthermore, he also seems to be suggesting that television writers may themselves have been led to their own version of postmodern irony primarily by television itself, not by postmodern fiction, after all.

It seems overwhelmingly likely that the irony expressed and the attitude of “canny superiority” encouraged by certain kinds of television shows are mostly a function of the history of television rather than of postwar American fiction. Television becomes just another of the features of American culture that causes both tv and fiction writers to hold that culture at a distance, even if in doing so the tv writers are contributing to the trivialization of that culture, which Wallace correctly enough points out. The ubiquity of the television version of reality as well could perhaps be the main source of tv’s influence on fiction writers, as they struggle to register that ubiquity and its distorting effect on actual reality. Wallace is describing what he calls a “cultural atmosphere” in which irony is a privileged aesthetic response to experience, but the irony of television is superficial and self-satisfied, while the irony of postmodern fiction simply is not. When Wallace refers to the “U.S. fictionist” who shares this atmosphere but also “sees himself heir to whatever was neat and valuable in postmodern lit,” he is surely writing primarily about himself. It was, in fact, clear enough even when this essay was published, but it now seems even more apparent that “E Unibas Pluram” is ultimately a kind of manifesto for Wallace’s own artistic practice, at least insofar as that practice is based on prolonged reflection on his own relationship both to the “cultural atmosphere” television helped create and to postmodern fiction. He is drawn to postmodern irony, but finds that the cheap irony of television (of contemporary culture generally) has to some extent usurped it.

Thus finally “E Unibas Pluram” works better as illumination of what David Foster Wallace was hoping to accomplish as a writer than it does as a critique of postmodern fiction. It doesn’t really make the case that “TV had absorbed from postmodern lit” any of its own unproductive irony. To conclude that the popularity of irony on television must be related to the prevalence of irony in postmodern fiction is to underestimate the ability of tv writers (and audiences) to understand the appeal of in-jokes and generalized mockery all on their own and, sadly, to overestimate the reach of American writers in the 1960s and 70s, however much in retrospect they seem to have presaged a significant cultural shift. Moreover, Wallace conflates the postmodernism of “postmodern irony” with the specific postmodern practice of metafiction, which he discusses briefly on the way to a much longer discussion of self-reflexivity in television. “Postmodern” irony becomes “self-conscious” irony, which is “the nexus where television and fiction converge and consort.”

But metafiction and postmodernism are not synonymous, although their appearance on the literary scene was more or less coterminous. Metafiction was not “deeply informed by the emergence of television” but has its roots in the fiction of Beckett and Borges or, if we want to trace it to its earliest manifestations in fiction, Cervantes and Laurence Sterne. It was not “self-conscious” in the superficial and trivial way in which television celebrates its own omnipresence, but called attention to its own artifice as part of an effort of self-renewal, shedding encrusted assumptions and expectations to make further invention possible, not settling for facile mockery.

However much it does create an ironic tone similar to that found in the work of DeLillo and Pynchon, postmodern exaggeration and incongruity in the fiction of David Foster Wallace is in the service of a very earnest, indeed “idealistic” vision of damaged characters and a sick society both badly in need of “cure.” Still, Wallace also evokes this vision through the signature postmodern focus on language and its effects. One could say, in fact, that Wallace’s real subject is language, although not just language as style, and not really emphasizing the limitations or uncertainties of language per se as in much postmodern fiction. Wallace’s stories and novels are typically an attempt to inhabit the consciousness of his characters, but consciousness as their discursive world, invoked by the language they habitually use in confronting experience and only through which can perceive it to be comprehensible at all. His fiction is composed of the stream of words his characters use to construct a manageable account of the reality they negotiate, although in most cases these characters do not literally speak in their own voice through first-person narration.

Thus the beginning of “The Depressed Person”:

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. 

Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utterness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain’s context, its—as it were—shape and texture. The depressed person’s parents, for example, who had divorced when she was a child, had used her as a pawn in the sick games they played.

This is, of course, the sort of language, used to create a distinctive discourse of jargon words, filler phrases, and practiced rhetorical moves, by which we might expect a “depressed person” to interact with the therapeutic world in which she lives. Something similar is done with characters like the Account Representative and the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production in “Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR,” from Wallace’s first collection of stories, Girl With Curious Hair:

There were between these last two executives to leave the Building the sorts of similarities enjoyed by parallel lines. Each man, leaving, balanced his weight against that of a heavily slender briefcase. Monograms and company logos flanked handles of leathered metal, which each man held. Each man, on his separate empty floor, moved down white-lit halls over whispering and mealy and monochromatic carpet toward elevators that each sat open-mouthed and mute in its shaft along one of the large Building’s two accessible sides. . .

Particularly the divorced Account Representative, who remarked, silently, alone, as his elevator dropped toward the Executive Garage, that, at a certain unnoticed but never unheeded point in every corporate evening he worked, it became Time to Leave; that this point in the overtime night was a fulcrum on which things basic and unseen tilted, very slightly—a pivot in hours unaware—and that, in the period between this pint and the freshsuited working dawn, the very issue of the Building’s ownership would become, quietly, in their absence, truly an issue, hung in air, unsettled. . . .

Again, these characters and their actions are described through the kind of no-nonsense, robotic language that would mirror the perceptions of the characters, who can be adequately identified merely as “Account Representative” and “Vice President of Overseas Production” (themselves invested with about the same degree of personality as the Executive Garage). This mirroring effect is perhaps especially pronounced in “Mr. Squishy,” from Oblivion, the last book of fiction to be published in Wallace’s lifetime:

In an unconventional move, some of this quote unquote Full-Access background information re ingredients, production innovations, and even demotargeting was being relayed to the Focus Group by the facilitator, who used a Dry Erase marker to sketch a diagram of Mister Squishy’s snack cake production sequence and the complete adjustments required by Felonies! at select points along the automated line. . .

The Focus Group facilitator, trained by the requirements of what seemed to have turned out to be his profession to behave as though he were interacting in a lively and spontaneous way while actually remaining inwardly detached and almost clinically observant, possessed also a natural eye for behavioral details that could often reveal tiny gens of statistical relevance amid the rough law surfeit of random fact. Sometimes little things make a difference. The facilitator’s name was Terry Schmidt and he was 34 years old, a Virgo. Eleven of the Focus Group’s fourteen men wore wristwatches, of which roughly one-third were expensive and/or foreign.

This story is a kind of inventory of the observations and memories that roll through Terry Schmidt’s mind as he “facilitates” his Focus Group, captured entirely in this kind of advertising/marketing-speak. What unites all of the passages I have highlighted is that they reveal the extent to which we all inhabit such language-worlds, ways of thinking that determine our interactions with the “outside” world, except that, caught as we are in these linguistic and syntactical webs, there really is no outside. And what each of these slightly different such webs have in common is that they blanch our words of most of their vigor, leaving only edgeless, etiolated husks. 

If Wallace thus does depict an exhausted language, it is exhausted not because its potential resources have been depleted but because the specific practices imposed by an enervated American culture have corrupted it. Ultimately, then, neither Wallace’s theme nor the strategy by which it is embodied could really be called distinctively postmodern. The attempt is finally to capture life as lived and experienced, the Way We Live Now, in other words a modified version of realism. The “stream of consciousness” method used by many prominent modernists was a modification of realism, an attempt to get at what is most  immediately “real” in human experience, consciousness itself, and Wallace’s strategy seems to me a further  development of this kind of psychological realism, even if Wallace finds himself writing in an era when even human mental processes can’t really be trusted as authentic, determined as they are by culture, by genetics, by forces beyond conscious human control.

How to tell stories when the language you must use is so thoroughly infected by artificial discourses, however authentically you manage to portray the inauthentic? Of course, you really can’t, except by simultaneously noting the way in which what you’re doing is telling a story. That Wallace’s fiction is so often fiction about fiction-making is thus less a sign of its postmodernism than it is again a function of an essentially realist strategy. Since the artificial discourses permeating contemporary American culture are enlisted (must be enlisted) to construct stories about the world, an unavoidable subject of Wallace’s work must be the ways in which these stories work. In Oblivion, in fact, almost all of the stories are in part about the fashioning of stories, a few quite explicitly.

“Another Pioneer” is ultimately not one of the better stories in Oblivion, finally too long to support its relatively obvious story-within-a-story premise (a tendency to overelaboration is arguably a weakness to which Wallace too often succumbs), and while “Mr. Squishy” is certainly a bravura performance that does make us believe in the portrayal of its protagonist’s feelings of being trapped inside a worldview he really no longer believes in, it isn’t as direct an example of Wallace successfully employing postmodern, metafictional strategies to meet more traditional  literary goals as “Good Old Neon.” At its core, this is indeed a story about a story, although we don’t know that until its conclusion. We do then discover that the narrative has been an impersonation by “David Wallace” of one of his high school classmates who died in a “fiery single-car accident he’d read about in 1991,”  an attempt by the presumed author of Oblivion to “imagine what all must have happened to lead up to” that crash, why someone “David Wallace had back then imagined as happy and unreflective and wholly unhaunted by voices telling him that there was something deeply wrong him that wasn’t wrong with anybody else and that he had to spend all his time and energy trying to figure out what to do and say in order to impersonate an even marginally normal or acceptable U.S. male” would drive into a bridge abutment.

It’s a thoroughly convincing impersonation, and emotionally charged in a way that has only been enhanced by what we now know about the conditions that precipitated David Foster Wallace’s own later suicide. But it is precisely in the act of “baring the device”—self-reflexively disclosing that the story is indeed a made-up story—that “Good Old Neon” produces its greatest emotional effect. For in addition to the story’s sympathetic representation of the imagined protagonist’s emotional distress is the revelation that it was the author’s own response to that distress that led “David Wallace” to write the story in the first place. In this way Wallace employs a “postmodern” strategy but does so in order to avoid the impression such a strategy “plays tricks” with the reader, allowing the writer to engage in cheap irony. Instead, this is a “self-conscious” story whose self-reflexivity reinforces the emotional sincerity of its storytelling and character creation.

Wallace was clearly enough attracted to the “idealism” embodied in the practice of the first-generation postmodernists. If such idealism was no longer quite possible to maintain (in Wallace’s view, because of its corruption by television and other forms of shallow irony), neither was it possible simply to return to the unselfconscious practices of traditional realism. Thus in a story like “Good Old Neon,” as well as in many of his other stories and in his magnum opus Infinite Jest, he wrote fiction unconventional and self-knowing enough that he would still frequently be identified by readers and critics as a postmodernist, but with an affective immediacy that also proved intensely appealing to the many readers who responded so fervently to his work. One could describe that work as a kind of “experiment” with the capacity of postmodernism to achieve more emotional resonance, and it would only be fair as well to say that if Wallace’s fiction is a further development of psychological realism, its expression of such realism is often surprising and always in Wallace’s distinctive style and voice. Still, in arguably reaffirming the ultimate ambition of realism to reflect existing reality as the central ambition of fiction, David Foster Wallace’s fiction can’t finally be comfortably included as a body of work clearly perpetuating the “really new” in literary art. It partly remains in the shadow of those adventurous writers of the 1960s and 70s on whom Wallace continues to look back with admiration, and partly attempts to escape that shadow by willfully misunderstanding the legacy of these writers and offering solutions to nonexistent problems, solutions that in the long run signal retreat.

Detecting a Wrongness 

Jonathan Lethem, like David Foster Wallace, is a writer whose work has been identified as second-generation postmodernism, although finally it has little in common with Wallace’s fiction other than a general disinclination to adhere to conventional storytelling norms. Lethem’s fiction as well is often linked with Pynchon and DeLillo as postmodern precursors, but in Lethem’s case their “postmodern irony” is mediated through the influence of science fiction, especially the work of Phillip K. Dick. This amalgamation of high postmodernism and popular literature is taken to be his signature variation on postmodernism in fiction, although much of his early work would seem to be more accurately characterized as straight science fiction. Beginning with Motherless Brooklyn (1999), Lethem began to publish books more likely to be categorized as “literary fiction” but continued to include elements of popular fiction (detective fiction and comic books as well as science fiction).

In a review of Lethem’s Chronic City (1999), Hari Kunzru describes the postmodern element in this novel as in part deriving from the author’s implicit acknowledgement that “he’s writing belatedly” and, further, the accompanying signal that he “wants us to know he knows.” This is indeed a very postmodern gesture, and perhaps in conveying this sense of belatedness Lethem is engaged in the same sort of strategy John Barth had in mind in positing a “literature of exhaustion” that exploited the “used-upness” of fictional form to generate new forms. However, where Barth and his fellow metafictionists forced a new attention on form, style, and narrative strategy, Lethem in Chronic City settles for vaguely surreal machinations of plot (an “alternative reality”) and loudly “colorful” characters (most of them given obviously Pynchon-derived names). While it might be debatable whether the greatest influence on a book like this ultimately is a version of postmodernism drawn from “the writing that inspired Lethem to become a writer” (as Kunzru puts it) or the demands of fantasy and science fiction, there is finally nothing that could be called formal innovation in Chronic City, nothing that really challenges readers to examine their assumptions about the novel as a form.

Lethem’s reputation as an experimental writer thus seems entirely based on his incorporation of the narrative conventions of genre fiction into novels that have otherwise been generally accepted as “serious." The plot devices of detective stories and science fiction allow Lethem to ostensibly bypass the requirements of ordinary realism, providing for an approach that blends caricature and pseudo-fantasy to produce what can best be described as whimsy. Whimsy is not a productive mode of either postmodern or experimental fiction, and in Chronic City it leaves an impression of aesthetic timidity. As William Deresiewicz says in his review of the novel, Lethem “wants realism, with the credibility it brings—wants us to take the world of the novel as a faithful copy of the world we know—but he also wants to stack the deck by deploying supernatural elements whenever he finds it convenient.” Thus the New York City portrayed in the narrative needs to be recognizable enough as New York City that we are able to associate the events and themes with the real place, but not so much that the author can’t introduce runaway tunnel robots, an illusory space mission doomed by the presence of Chinese space mines, and snowfall in August.

This sort of controlled fantasia can’t really be what the postmodernists had in mind as an alternative to conventional realism, nor is it credible as a revision or reorientation of postmodern challenges to inherited practice, an attempt to extend the reach of postmodern experiment into a different era and changed circumstances. It implies that postmodern experiment was simply a strategy designed to undermine the principle of verisimilitude, so that any work not strictly observing the rules of traditional realism could be called “experimental.” And while Lethem’s work is consistent with much postmodern fiction in that is essentially comic, the comedy of a novel like Chronic City is much too gentle, too shy of the more corrosive humor of the postmodern comedy of Pynchon or DeLillo. It doesn’t so much lack “real satiric bite,” as Kunzru maintains, as it never rises above mere satire, a relatively mild critique of post-9/11 New York under Bloomberg. The satiric purpose, in fact, predominates in a way that sets this novel apart from the postmodern comedies of such writers as Pynchon, John Barth, or Donald Barthleme, which don’t attempt to “correct” behaviors and institutions in the manner of conventional satire but portray human behaviors and institutions as resistant to amelioration (but no less deserving of laughter for that).

Chronic City’s satire is portentous enough that readers would certainly be justified in concluding it is an attempt to “say something” about America in the 21^st century, but the novel hardly conceals any deep meaning not made apparent through its choice of satirical targets. The story of the relationship between narrator Chase Insteadman, former child actor, and Perkus Tooth, former bohemian intellectual turned pothead, allows Lethem to canvass his “alternative” New York from top (Insteadman is something of a mascot for the city’s high society types) to bottom and to adjust his satirical focus accordingly. That the purport of the novel’s themes does not go much beyond this surface satire is actually in its favor, as we aren’t subjected to the kind of tedium the exploration of “ideas” in fiction usually entails. In this way Lethem is finally faithful to his postmodern predecessors: to the extent Barth or Pynchon or DeLillo incorporate ideas, they do so as inspiration for formal or narrative devices (“entropy” in Pynchon, for example) rather than abstractions with which to “wrestle.”

However, Chronic City nevertheless suffers from its own kind of tedium. It never attains the structural or stylistic vitality required for us to suspend our disbelief in its plot contrivances. The narrative drags along, its narrator’s language leaden and unnecessarily prolix. The narrator is himself an unengaging figure whose status as a blank slate on which his friend Perkus inscribes a more capacious understanding does not make him a compelling character over the course of a 450-page novel. Perkus himself is much less compelling than Lethem wants him to be. He’s an essentially stock countercultural type, and his recurrent cluster headaches and other mental problems make him seem more pathetic than heroic.

Lethem’s fiction in general is not without its pleasures, both stylistically and in its humor. Much of it displays a lively enough imagination, even if Chronic City ultimately falls flat. (And it collapses from an excess of satirical ambition rather than too little.) But precisely as a work that seems to be one of Lethem’s most ambitious, this novel does illustrate the way in which a writer clearly influenced by postmodern experimental fiction expresses that influence by muting it, softening its edges while remaining “quirky” enough that his work generally avoids being identified as “mainstream” literary fiction. Lethem circumscribes the most radical implications of the legacy of postmodern experiment, implications that potentially undermine all assumptions about fiction as a literary form, by translating its carnivalesque comedy into ordinary satire, its narrative innovations into eccentric fantasy, its linguistic play into a more or less conventionally literary prose style (although again not necessarily without its pleasures, nevertheless). Perhaps it could be said that Lethem is attempting to enhance the legacy of postmodernism by making it more universally appealing, but at best what we get is really a pastiche of postmodernism, one that may represent the creative sum of Lethem's important inspirations yet never finally goes beyond a kind of comprehensive aesthetic paraphrase of the originals.

A Kind of Impersonation 

For all of the ambivalence it seems to provoke in many readers and critics, the American fiction of the 1960s and 1970s (with scattered precursors in the 1950s and and a few lingering appearances in the 1980s) that probably will  now permanently be called "postmodern" continues to make its influence felt. Whether one should speak of this influence as a shadow cast over current writers or as an enduring light that still inspires through its brilliant illumination is perhaps a point of dispute, depending on one's view both of the legacy of postmodernism and the state of current fiction, but even writers who resolutely hew to the conventional can only do so because they consciously reject the legacy of experiment in fiction initiated by the modernists and quite self-consciously extended by the postmodernists. I would maintain that very little serious fiction published in the last thirty years could be said to be free of the effects of this legacy, either through the concerted attempt to evade it or through the direct inspiration many writers find in the work of numerous postmodernists.

The first and most notable group of writers to directly respond to the perceived excesses of postmodernism--although the term itself was not yet then in use--were the minimalists, in particular Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver, whose early work in its pared-down style and lack of affect was extensively discussed as the antithesis of the stylistic overflow and formal profusion (maximalism rather than minimalism) of postmodern fiction. If these writers and those they influenced returned to realism of a sort, their stories offered a portrayal of ordinary reality every bit as mundane and colorless as the avoidance of it by the posmodernists seemed to imply it was. Later, more regressive realists such as Richard Ford, Kent Haruf, and Richard Russo adopted a more fully conventional kind of realism, but it is very hard to imagine these writers would initially have been taken very seriously had not the minimalist neorealism of Beattie and Carver first established itself as a credible practice by which to "move on" from postmodernism. By now the work of such writers has become so conventional in approach that it represents a full-scale retreat to the assumptions of 19th century realism, but finally the very fact that this sort of backwards-looking fiction persists in spite of the modernist/postmodernist legacy gives it its ultimate significance as a steadfast refusal to "experiment" with alternatives to traditional narrative.

"Experimental" as a term for categorizing works of fiction that embrace this legacy may have become contentious (mostly because of its association with the laboratory), but certainly words such as "unconventional" and "innovative" are still privileged in the literary discourse surrounding new fiction, especially the discourse used by the editors of literary magazines, whose calls for submissions routinely use the words to describe the sort of fiction they'd like to publish, even when a perusal of the fiction they actually publish reveals it to be entirely orthodox in both form and style. Clearly the postmodern attempt to make fiction more aesthetically audacious has had a lasting effect in giving terms like these an increased honorific value, but it is certainly questionable whether those now using them really understand them in quite the same way as such truly innovative writers as Donald Barthelme or Gilbert Sorrentino might have understood them.

There are of course writers whose work directly shows the influence of the first-wave postmodernists, writers such as Jonathan Lethem or George Saunders, although the influence results more in echoes and resemblances between their fiction and that of writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon than in the inspiration to create something comparably new. The same is true of Joshua Ferris, whose first novel, Then We Came to the End, elicited many comparisons to Don DeLillo and Joseph Heller. This novel is especially reminiscent of Heller's Something Happened, but finally it seems more an updating of the previous novel, transferring its vision of American corporate life to the current, hipper milieu of an advertising office, than an attempt to extend the possibilities of the kind of "black humor" fiction Heller's novels most cogently exemplified. It uses the model provided by a once-audacious approach and adapts it to much less adventurous purposes.

The "humor" in Something Happened is itself of a different sort than in Catch-22, less vaudevillian if no less disquieting, produced by the half-terrorized tone of its narration by protagonist Bob Slocum. Of course, its mode of narration is the most remarked-on feature of discussions of Then We Came to the End as well, its own mode of humor created through the use of a 1st-person collective narrator who certainly also expresses a great deal of anxiety that is uneasily humorous. But while both of these books could be called comic novels, the comedy of Something Happened could be called existential, the comedy of a successful, if ordinary, man struggling with his realization that he doesn't understand his life, that life itself frightens him more than anything else. Bob Slocum's way of relating this struggle, combining hysteria with brutal honesty, both makes us laugh aloud and cringe in recognition of our shared fate.

Then We Came to the End, however, is closer to social satire, its collective narration a way of observing the internet age office workplace, a version of Mike Judge's Office Space focusing on corporate "creatives" rather than directly on high tech drudges. The narrator provides the story just enough subjective flavoring, a way of registering the characters' own perspective on their circumstances, to give the novel a source of interest beyond the implicit commentary on economic arrangements under "late capitalism," but ultimately the anxiety caused by internal competition, negotiating a hierarchical structure that pretends not to be such, and coping with the dislocations caused by an economy in seemingly perpetual recession is all on the surface, felt by the narrator and all the employees he/she represents as an obstacle to happiness as job satisfaction, not as a fundamental affliction of the soul. Heller's novel uses the workplace setting to stage one man's struggle to find the meaning of existence. Ferris uses it to dramatize the perils of the postindustrial economy.

Ferris's second novel, The Unnamed, at first appears to move away from the social observation of Then We Came to the End and to indeed focus on the existential crisis experienced by its main character, although finally we can't be entirely sure exactly what has caused protagonist Tim Farnsworth's affliction, an uncontrollable impulse to walk, often for hours and days at a time. Is it a physical (i.e., neurological) impairment? A psychological disorder? An imperfectly repressed desire to escape his prototypical middle-class existence? Whatever the diagnosis, Farnsworth's condition results in a great deal of suffering indeed, both for himself and his family, suffering not redeemed by the novel's decidedly unhappy ending.

That the novel does not answer these questions for us is one of its strengths, but surely the last one is a question the novel tempts, and to the extent The Unnamed emphasizes Farnsworth's implicit revolt against a settled life and adult responsibilities, it, like Ferris's first novel, does seem at least partly intended as social commentary, although in this case there is really very little laughter in the protagonist's dilemma, except in the sense that it is certainly a very strange one. The novel's title suggests the influence of Beckett, but where Beckett, in both his fiction and his plays, employs a seemingly allegorical structure ultimately to empty allegory of its purported meaning, in The Unnamed Ferris leaves the possible allegorical meaning of Farnsworth's grim fate as the novel's primary source of interest, since formally it is the sort of extended picaresque narrative the subject almost necessarily entails (in fact extended well past its usefulness in illustrating Farnsworth's plight), and since neither Farnsworth nor any of the other characters really have much intrinsic interest beyond their role as the victims of these inexplicable circumstances.

In his most recent novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Ferris again changes tack, almost as if seeking to engage aesthetic elements neglected in the first two books. Thus it employs a first-person narration that at times appeals through strength of voice in a way comparable to Then We Came to the End but also works to evoke character and emotion more directly than the quasi-objective narration of the previous novel is able to do. The narrator protagonist of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is the most distinctly drawn character in Ferris's fiction so far, even while most readers are likely at best to have an ambivalent response to him (at worst to actively dislike him). The immediacy created by his first-person account inevitably pulls us toward greater sympathy, but the narrator himself does little to ingratiate himself and is in fact quite honest in communicating his frequent petulance and describing his poor treatment of other people, especially those who work for him. (The protagonist, Paul O'Rourke, is a dentist.)  

This tension between O'Rourke's generally quite frank and colorful narration and what that narration reveals about him for a while works fairly well to maintain the reader's interest in his further development, in the outcome of whatever actions he comes to take. O'Rourke is not so self-obsessed that he can't give us equally lively portrayals of the secondary characters as well, and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour over perhaps the first half of the novel is compelling enough using relatively conventional appeals to character (vivid, if not exactly "well-rounded") and narrative voice. (It has some novelty appeal as well, since there aren't very many works of fiction narrated by a dentist.) When the novel's plot starts to become more apparent, however, these virtues quickly get buried by a virtually inert story about an online stalker who has somehow hacked into O'Rourke's online accounts and assumed his identity, his subsequent attempts to track down the stalker, and a semi-mythical religious sect devoted to the denial of God's existence, a living descendant of which O'Rourke is purported to be.

Much of the novel's second half is thus structured as a mystery plot--first about the identity of the stalker, subsequently about the existence of the religious sect--but the mystery is so closely tied to O'Rourke's own inveterate atheism, endless talk about which eventually preoccupies his narrative, that by the time the purpose of the stalker's attention becomes clear one hardly cares. The intrigue surrounding the "Ulm," supposedly a lost tribe traceable to the Amalekites of the Bible, seems indebted to DeLillo (particularly The Names), but it retains none of the enigmatic resonance of DeLillo's invocation of ancient mystery; instead, Ferris uses the Ulm and their beliefs to straightforwardly "say something" about faith and doubt, flattening out O'Rourke as a character and reducing the novel to a symposium on religious belief in the process.

What begins as a comic novel of the sort in which comedy arises from our response to an abrasive, antiheroic character (exemplified by Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint or Sabbath's Theater) becomes instead a story of that character's metamorphosis or redemption. Perhaps we are to find additional humor in the fact that Paul O'Rourke's apparent conversion at the end of the novel is to a "faith" that affirms a faith in nonbelief, but by then O'Rourke has lost the very peevishness that gives him life as a character, so that To Rise Again at a Decent Hour in effect winds up taking away with its right narrative hand what it had previously given us with its left.  If at first O'Rourke presents himself as a contrarian with heterodox views and a prickly personality, at the novel's conclusion he has become duly chastened, finding solidarity with a reconstituted Ulm community in Israel, where he "never had to be lonely again."

If in the end Paul O'Rourke has tempered his own excesses, smoothed over the rough edges in both his personality and worldview, arguably Joshua Ferris in all three of his novels to date has done the same thing in their relationship to first-wave postmodern fiction. He has taken the narrative strategies, the character types, and the black humor we can find in the work of the earlier writers and employed them to much less provocative effect. These books are reminiscent enough of the work of Heller or DeLillo that we want to associate them with this earlier period in American fiction as its possible continuation, except that the three novels ultimately provide a blanched-out version of the iconoclastic spirit shared by those writers, a version made safe for social satire and"quirky" narratives that represents a limited view of the usable legacy of postmodern practices considered collectively. While The Unnamed lingers in the reading memory because of the extremity of the character's circumstances, and both Then We Came to the End and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour can be called, at least in part, entertaining enough to read, ultimately they together demonstrate that the postmodern legacy has to be one whose claimants attempt to exceed it, to make it seem conservative by comparison, not to do it homage through an admittedly skilled kind of impersonation.

Soaked in Meaning 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

It was perhaps inevitable that Ben Marcus’s fiction would come to seem more conventional following on his first book, The Age of Wire and String (1995), which could be taken either as a collection of short pieces employing a common subject and method or as a novel, and which surely qualifies as experimental in any intelligible definition of the word as it applies to the writing of fiction. It is an utterly singular work, requiring the reader to put aside all assumptions about the role of narrative, character, and setting in fiction. Not only does this book (considered either as a whole or in its parts) eschew all of these elements, but it almost seems to invent a form in which they could have no role; in this work they are notions as strange in their application to the “world” the book describes as the devices it does use no doubt seem to readers who assume “narrative” and “fiction” are essentially synonymous terms. Its own first words proclaim it “a catalog of the life project as prosecuted in the Age of Wire and String and beyond,” and the most satisfying reading of The Age of Wire and String allows it to resolve the uncertainties of this self-characterization as it will.

 Notable American Women (2002), Marcus’s next book, could hardly be called a conventional novel, but it does begin in a recognizable situation (family dysfunction), introduces relatively recognizable characters (the family of “Ben Marcus”), and tells a story of sorts (the story of how “Ben Marcus” is instructed in the tenets of the “Silentist” movement, which is dedicated to the achievement of complete silence). This novel could be called a narrative rather than a “catalog,” although it is a highly fragmented one that moves freely back and forth through time. Given the outrageous premise, this is not a novel of “realism,” although it never crosses over into outright fantasy. Instead, it works allegorically, using the outrageous premise to render the Marcus family drama more emphatically, to convert the apparently autobiographical elements of this drama into emblematic, if absurdist, melodrama.

The allegorical mode is again Marcus’s chosen method in The Flame Alphabet, although now it is more a straightforward sort of allegory without the explicit autobiographical focus on the experiences of “Ben Marcus” (however wary we should be of identifying this character literally with the biographical author) found in both The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women. It is, in fact, more or less a post-apocalyptic narrative, although it does not project into the future present political and cultural tendencies that have led to the dire conditions portrayed (perhaps the most common approach to the post-apocalyptic mode) but instead posits a more metaphysical source of affliction. Here, Marcus brings together motifs and themes that are treated more obliquely or more partially in his previous books, most obviously the notion that human beings have a vexed relationship with language, that language as a human attribute may finally do more harm than good, and that in our struggle to control language, to use it in ways that foster communication or expression, more often than not we fail. In The Flame Alphabet, the danger we court in our careless and frequently hurtful uses of language has been literalized in the form of a “language toxicity,” a plague whereby adults are sickened by, and presumably eventually die from, the words spoken by children (in the later stages, by all forms of language).

Prominent in the struggle to control language would be, of course, the struggle of the writer to induce it into satisfying rhetorical and aesthetic forms, to invoke it in a way that affirms human potential. The Flame Alphabet could be interpreted as a fable about this struggle, substituting a more subtle kind of metafiction for the blatant self-reflexivity of the previous books and their invocation of “Ben Marcus.” The narrator not only chronicles the toll the “language toxicity” takes on his own family, but also desperately tries to find a cure, experimenting with a new alphabet to address the fact that

the alphabet as we knew it was too complex, soaked in meaning, stimulating the brain to produce a chemical that was obviously fatal. In its parts, in combination, our lettering system triggered a nasty reaction. If the alphabet could be thinned out, shaved down, to trick the brain somehow, perhaps we could still deploy this new set of symbols, or even a single symbol, the kind you hold in your hand and reshape for different meanings, for modest, emergency-only communications.

The narrator surveys linguistic history to determine if any of its historical “scripts” might be free of the taint modern language can no longer conceal, an effort which ultimately fails, although at the novel’s close a serum is developed that makes it possible for the human race to temporarily survive. The implication clearly enough seems to be that language will never be safe for human production or consumption, that its effects will always be beyond our abilities to anticipate or understand. It is an odd theme for a novelist, unless we are to regard The Flame Alphabet as an instance of the struggle with language that provisionally succeeds, manages in its verbal ingenuity a momentary stay against the confusion that language itself breeds. Perhaps the book itself, in its achieved coherence, stands as the author’s own temporary victory in the struggle, as a tentative affirmation of the human.

The post-apocalyptic genre has become such a recognizable vehicle for writers wishing to convey a message, to “say something” about the state of humanity, that it is to me somewhat surprising that a self-confessed experimental writer such as Ben Marcus would turn to its narrative formula in the first place. Yet another tale of the twilight of the human race, however much it does avoid the usual social and political commentary to which such narratives can often be reduced, The Flame Alphabet doesn’t seem like a noteworthy contribution to the further development of innovative fiction. It unfortunately might leave the impression that “experiment” in fiction has been reduced to a vaguely futuristic story illustrating strange ideas about language.

Even if we don’t think they are so strange, we might nevertheless conclude that Marcus’s own skill with language implicitly threatens to undermine these ideas:

. .in Wisconsin there were early adopters. A fiendish strain of childless adults who consumed the toxic language on purpose, as a drug, destroying themselves under the flood of child speech. They stormed areas high in children, falling drunk inside cones of sound. They gorged themselves on the fence line of playgrounds where voice clouds blew hard enough to trigger a reaction, sharing exposure sites with each other by code. Later these people were found dried out in parks, on the road, collapsed and hardening in their homes. They were found with the slightly smaller faces we would routinely see on victims in only a few weeks.

Such a passage as this is both imaginative and exact. It succinctly captures the actions described through figurations that show impressive command of the resources of language. There is also a deadpan humor here that further confirms Marcus as a writer able to use words skillfully and with sensitivity to their effects. It doesn’t really suggest through its own formal or stylistic choices that this meaning is dangerous or unstable or even uncontrollably ambiguous in its proliferation. If language is indeed an elusive phenomenon whose power exceeds our capacity to wield it, this is a proposition that comes to our attention because it is advanced directly, in no uncertain terms, by the novel’s narrator and its narrative, not because the novel itself embodies the idea aesthetically either in style or form. The dissonance between the novel’s doom-laden message about the perils of human communication and its author’s proven facility — here and in his previous work — with the medium through which it occurs is rather hard to ignore, and it makes The Flame Alphabet seem an artistic misstep.

I would maintain that the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction has been an artistic misstep for contemporary American fiction as a whole, particularly for those writers whose work could otherwise be called adventurous (Marcus, for one, as well as Paul Auster or Cormac McCarthy) but who still seem to share the mistaken assumption that the adventurous “content” of stories of a future dystopia that overcomes America (in various manifestations) adequately substitutes for formal or stylistic innovation, or at least some specifically aesthetic strategy designed to expand our awareness of the possibilities of fiction as a form. The-post apocalyptic narrative does not inherently preclude such innovation, as evidenced by David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, a truly innovative, adventurous novel (by a truly adventurous novelist), but the “story” in this novel is never more than provisional in the first place, since it may be the delusion of the narrator, who believes herself to be the last human being left alive. Her circumstances (at least as she understands them) are not delineated directly but merely suggested by the series of often enigmatic statements she sets down (a la Wittgenstein) and that together comprise the novel’s formal structure. Thus the story emerges as a function of the structure rather than subsuming the structure to its own requirements.

The post-apocalypse genre is finally all about story in this latter way. “What happens” is unavoidably the central and ultimate source of interest, but at same time the genre encourages stories that aspire to “say something” even more than to simply reveal what happens. Markson’s novel could be called experimental because the story it tells cannot be separated from the form through which it is related, ultimately because it is really just the fortuitous outcome of the rigorous attention Markson pays to the form, to its aesthetic integrity. If experimental fiction is to remain valuable as the cutting edge of literary practice, it must at the least contest the notion that “telling a story” exhausts the possibilities of fiction as a literary form or that a novel works best as a disguised form of social commentary. The popularity of the post-apocalyptic genre among writers not otherwise inclined to produce “mainstream” literary fiction suggests that this genre has become a kind of substitute for more challenging demonstrations of what is possible in fiction.

Nothing New 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

Even fans of Mark Danielewski and his typographically adventurous novels House of Leaves and Only Revolutions should be disappointed with The Fifty Year Sword. Previously published only in the Netherlands in 2005, this novella adds almost nothing to a consideration of the aesthetic possibilities of manipulating the physical features of a printed book not already present in the two novels, and if anything the underlying narrative to which these manipulations are meant to contribute is even less compelling than those we encounter in House of Leaves and Only Revolutions. If the former manages to bring some life to what is finally an overly familiar narrative (perhaps two interlocking but overly familiar narratives) through its challenges to the protocols of the printed page, and the latter partially substitutes, at least for a while, the sheer audacity of its defiance of these protocols for an even more lackluster narrative, The Fifty Year Sword does neither of these things. Its textual provocations are tepid, mere flourishes, its story, such as it is, little more than a convenience and difficult to take seriously.

The Fifty Year Sword does little more to depart from the typographical conventions of fiction than to give the appearance of printed verse, or verse dialogue. (That the lines of dialogue are color-coded as a way of identifying the speakers seems simply a repetition of the same sort of device used in the two novels, and altogether it is not a particularly interesting device, anyway.) At one point the text is printed vertically rather than horizontally, requiring us to rotate the book in our hands, but again this move is the sort of thing we have come to expect from House of Leaves and Only Revolutions, and once it has been established that our assumptions about how to properly read a book are to an extent arbitrary, to simply keep issuing this reminder without offering compelling demonstration of how literature might continue to be enhanced by reading differently makes the effort seem mostly gimmickry. (Fortunately, in The Fifty Year Sword use of the device is limited, so we aren’t really forced to dwell on its apparent lack of purpose.) Otherwise, the unconventional or “innovative” elements of The Fifty Year Sword are restricted to the use of graphic illustrations (many of them) and various misspellings and neologisms, neither of which are in fact innovative at all. The wordplay seems particularly derivative of Joyce in Finnegans Wake — “pricksticking,” “indacitation” — while the illustrations are generally unremarkable, albeit not terribly intrusive.

Danielewski gave a reading of The Fifty Year Sword in 2010, when it was still unavailable in the United States as a printed text. Perhaps this “theatrical performance,” as it was described, managed to make the novella’s story seem more substantive, or at least more dramatic, but shorn of the whizz-bang and stagy spectacle it doesn’t make for very captivating reading as a book. It is more or less a children’s story in which a group of orphans listen to a figure identified as “the Story Teller” relate a story about magical swords. A touch of “adult” interest is added in the conflict between the seamstress Chintana and Belinda Kite, who has had an affair with Chintana’s husband. The novella ends with Belinda Kite literally being cut to pieces (in a delayed response to one of the swords) and falling apart “even as slices of joints and nails/scattered apart on the frosty stone/followed /by the slow tumbling/slivers of the rest/of Belinda Kite’s/hand.” Again this scene might have greater effect when reproduced in a “theatrical performance,” but then perhaps it might have been written directly for such a performance rather than as a work of fiction, where the artificial arrangements of the words in this description can neither substitute for the visual immediacy of the scene as performed nor finally elevate it beyond the rather ordinary fairy tale-ish story it concludes.

The most useful service the publication The Fifty Year Sword might offer is to confirm the initial achievement of House of Leaves, but also to illustrate the limitations of that achievement, at least as Danielewski has so far shown in his attempts to follow up on the accomplishments of his first novel. House of Leaves established the basic principle underlying his alternative practice as a fiction writer, that “the book” as traditionally conceived and formatted is an object whose properties we have come to consider fixed but are in fact entirely contingent and thus open to reconception. House of Leaves is a prodigious attempt at such revision, including experiments with typeface, print placement (in the traditional column, multiple columns, in areas cordoned off in various ways, rightside-up, upside-down, sideways, in brief snippets at the top, bottom, and middle of the page), the insertion of visual/graphic aids, the “proper” function of the page in general. Danielewski wants the reader’s eye to roam around the page, to suspend the expectation that a literary text must adhere to the conventions of reading associated with the European codex (left-to-right, top-to-bottom) that now define what “reading a book” signifies. This is certainly a perfectly valid strategy, based on a valuable insight that could continue to inspire writers of innovative fiction. However, Danielewksi and his admirers have attempted to promote his work as if this insight is unique to him and his fiction sui generis, when in fact writers such as Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Fedeman investigated the possibility of taking the printed page as malleable 40 years ago. Federman’s Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976), in fact, are at least as radical as Danielewski’s novels in their textual disruptions, and, in my opinion, more aesthetically satisfying.

House of Leaves provides its share of aesthetic satisfaction, but even it is marred by a wellworn and formulaic story, the story of an “outsider” existing on the margins of society (in this case an outcast with a scholarly bent and a mental illness) the conventionality of which isn’t really enlivened much by its intersection with a secondary narrative that doesn’t rise much above the level of an ordinary horror story, nor can either of these stories really sustain interest to the end of a 700-page novel. This has in turn the unfortunate effect of more heavily burdening the novel’s textual play with even more of the responsibility for maintaining the reader’s attention, a burden it cannot quite fully shoulder at such length. The formal experiments of House of Leaves thus threaten to seem grafted onto a narrative that is really only an excuse for the exercise of these experiments. The fiction by Sukenick and Federman engaging in similar, and antecedent, experiments, never left such an impression. Their experiments were integral to the story being created through the formal effects, the “content” not distinguishable from the “form” that gives the story its singular expression. These works are also self-reflexively aware of themselves as stories in process, so that the literal act of inscription, of arranging words, sentences, and paragraphs on the page becomes part of the narrative content. Although House of Leaves does depict its protagonist as a writer of sorts, at least as the “editor” of the manuscript that brings the twin narratives together, this activity finally seems as much a fortuitous justification of the novel’s typographical pyrotechnics as an effort to explore the implications of this inscriptive free-for-all in a reconsideration of the aesthetic ordering of fiction.

This limitation is even more pronounced in Only Revolutions and The Fifty Year Sword. In Only Revolutions the pyrotechnics finally seem the novel’s only real source of interest, since once the reader is able to discern its narrative line (and this isn’t easy), it proves to be yet again formulaic and dull, essentially a version of a “road novel” in which its two peripatetic outsider characters travel across the country, with the additional twist that they drive across time as well. This science fiction element parallels the horror element in House of Leaves, intended to provide the otherwise perfunctory story with some additional appeal, but if anything it falls even flatter. The story of the two young lovers and their adventures across time and space has almost no drama, not even of the episodic kind found in most picaresque narratives, and its characters are entirely colorless. Thus while the pyrotechnics might be even more flamboyant — competing accounts meeting in the middle of the book, requiring us to flip the book over and read from both “front” and “back” — eventually the tedium induced by the narrative makes it increasingly difficult to continue the attempt to assimilate them. Ultimately it is hard to deny that Only Revolutions is indeed a very experimental novel, but it is a decidedly failed experiment, albeit of a sort that might still be adapted successfully in another context — something briefer, or at least with a more effective fusion of matter and manner.

Unfortunately we cannot conclude from The Fifty Year Sword that Only Revolutions might be just an understandable misstep after the audacious debut of Danielewski’s iconoclastic project in House of Leaves, its flaws the product of unfocused or misdirected ambition. It does not show us a writer exercising much ambition at all but merely repeating the same moves his first book prepares us to expect, repetition Only Revolutions continues at exhausting length. Certainly The Fifty Year Sword is a very slight work, and a first-time reader of Danielewski who starts here is most likely to conclude it is superficially unusual, but hardly in a way that is likely to change the course of literary history. Such a reader might in fact find it simply boring. Still, the disappointment of this book should not altogether rule out the chance Danielewski will discover a new and surprising strategy in a future work exploiting his essential insight into the plasticity of the literary text, one that allows neither our notions of “text” nor of “story” to go unexamined. Only Revolutions was not that work, but perhaps the “serial novel” Danielewski is soon to be publishing will be. (Simply that he has chosen to publish it in serial form is not, of course, itself a particularly venturesome or innovative move.) For now, House of Leaves remains as an admirable literary performance that unfortunately threatens to become merely a curiosity.

Reading Optional 

(This review originally appeared in American Book Review.)

Arguably what has over the past 50 years been called "experimental" fiction is inherently a "conceptual" fiction. The efforts among such postwar American writers as John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Raymond Federman to question established norms and to extend the formal possibilities of fiction challenged readers to put aside the assumption that a work of fiction is identical with its "story," which in turn enlists "character," "setting" and "theme" to give it substance. Not all readers would necessarily describe their expectations in this way, nor cling rigidly to them, but even the innovations of modernism (which arguably only altered perceptions of how plots could be organized and characters presented) did not finally overturn assumptions about the centrality of narrative as the default structural principle of fiction.

Writers like Sorrentino and Federman contest these assumptions by disrupting complacent reading habits and substituting for the formal structure provided by narrative (a structure that pretends to be no structure at all but instead the embodiment of fiction in its natural state) an alternative form created for this particular work, whose "concept" the reader must ultimately grasp in order to affirm the work's aesthetic integrity. Inveterate experimental writers such as these essentially attempt to reinvent "form" with each new work, requiring that readers regard literary form (at least in fiction, although the stakes are the same in poetry as well) as perpetually unsettled, always subject to revision and re-creation. Most readers of fiction, of course, remain unwilling to relinquish their inherited conception of form as something already known, an established paradigm by which to judge the work's "success," and so experimental or adventurous writers must still attempt to break through ingrained reading habits by, if necessary, rudely interrupting them.

Perhaps it is the persistence of these passive reading habits, despite the efforts of various outlaws, absurdists, metafictionists, and other assorted postmodernists, that accounts for the appearance of a more direct form of conceptualism in Davis Schneiderman's [SIC], as well as his previous novel, Blank. (INK, the third book in a conceptualist trilogy, is scheduled for publication in 2014.) Both books bring to fiction the programmatic conceptualism that has featured prominently in Amerian art since Joseph Kosuth's 1969 manifest, "Art After Philosophy," and that more recently has been rather flamboyantly adapted to poetry by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith. Blank is a series of pages that are, well, blank except for a few pages with chapter titles on which the blank pages refuse to elaborate. Schneiderman has said of the book that it "takes as its starting point that there is no starting point. . .this is literature that exceeds its frame and grows to encompass and then process its own discussions" and that it is "a conceptual work that allows you an entry point into a world beyond realist and experimental/innovative literature. This is conceptual work that responds to the at-times alienating character of contemporary art" (The Nervous Breakdown, April 26, 2011)

While such remarks surely do manifest a kind of postironic glibness that warns us not to take them altogether seriously, finally we have to accept that the provocation of Blank is indeed directed toward the purposes Schneiderman describes here, or the book threatens to become merely a joke (although we should not underestimate the extent to which it is indeed intended partly as a joke). No doubt Schneiderman does want us to think of his book as going "beyond" both "realist and experimental/innovative literature" and to regard its "content" as radically indeterminate (if it can be said to have content). That the book is meant as a response "to the at-times alienating character of contemporary art" is somewhat vague—What kind of response? To what feature of contemporary art that makes it "alienating"?—but more generally this notion that art is fundamentally a response to the nature of art is one of the controlling ideas behind conceptual art going back at least to Kosuth (who himself argues it goes back to Duchamp). Presumably Schneiderman wants us in particular to have in mind the "character" of contemporary fiction (especially in its "literary" version), but the moves he makes in describing his "conceptual book" are recognizably those associated with conceptualism.

Blank certainly follows the central principle associated with conceptual art: once we have identified its motivating concept, we have appreciated its "art," which has almost nothing to do with execution, with the way the writer works with the "materials" at hand. We do not judge this book by its artful disposition of words, since it contains none (aside from the chapter headings, which more call attention to the absence of words than furnish us with a few scarce specimens). [SIC] is equally conceptual, although in this case the text is full of words, except that none of them have been written by the author. (He does conspicuously lay claim to them, nonetheless.) Part 1 of the book consists of a series of appropriated canonical literary works, proceeding in a more or less chronological sequence, form "Caedmon's Hymn" to Joyce's Ulysses, each work presented as "by Davis Schneiderman." Part 2 is a "translation" of Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," although it is actually a transformation of the text through several different languages as produced by an online translation program. Part 3 consists of a miscellany of documents produced since 1923 (the cutoff date for determining the "public domain"), including Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address, a recipe for a "1943 Victory Cake," the source code for the Melissa virus, and the first 30 Tweets—all again putatively "by Davis Schneiderman."

Thus while [SIC] unlike Blank seems to provide a text we might read (a text composed of other texts), it turns out to be one we don't need to read. Again once we have assimilated the underlying concept bringing the texts together, unless we would like, say, to re-read Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" for its own sake, we have little reason to do more than skim through the book's pages to get its "point." [SIC] is an implicit critique of copyright, of the "ownership" of writing and the taboo of plagiarism. Conversely, one might see it as the celebration of the possibilities of appropriation, a kind of literary remixing. Finding this critique satisfying must finally depend on the extent to which the reader also finds him/herself in sympathy with the philosophy of artistic appropriation and considers the product of such appropriation compelling as a work of art, since there are otherwise no aesthetic standards against which a book like this can be measured. Certainly there are many readers who would find this sort of thing simply irrelevant to art, perhaps its very antithesis. Others would just as surely defend it as a necessary tonic against bloated claims on behalf of "originality" and a challenge to us to think seriously about what we do expect of art.

I myself do not find originality an altogether empty term, at least if we concede that originality in art or literature is always a relative claim, a perception that a specific work or writer has exploited a formal possibility not previously so fully realized or produced effects with language so well-rendered, not an assertion that something wholly new, unconstrained by convention or uninfluenced by other artists and the history of the form, has been created or is even possible. Davis Schneiderman would likely deny that in its way his book aspires to originality, but it seems to me that it asks to be taken as original in the most radical sense, a book so utterly removed from the ordinary practices of "literary fiction" that it is a work of art on its own terms, not on those tied to existing formal requirements or to literary history. It seeks to be regarded as sui generis, a book that can be judged only by the criteria its sets up for itself. However, if there are few, if any, touchstones in previous fiction by which to assess it, [SIC] is recognizable enough as a fellow traveler with conceptualism in contemporary art, as well as with the escapades of Goldsmith. In this context, [SIC] can't really be called original (save perhaps in bringing conceptualism to fiction), but, more importantly, it's really not that interesting, either.

Finally it is rather hard to know why we shouldn't prefer a straightforward nonfiction polemic against the ill effects of copyright (including its perpetuation of the myth of "ownership," of "intellectual property") over the more indirect version of this critique as found in [SIC]. In some ways a writer like Davis Schneiderman performs a worthwhile enough service in reminding even those of us who favor experimental writing that we can still impose too many formal requirements on a work of fiction, and "The Borges Transformations" is a provocative demonstration of the inherent instability of meaning in any text. But in essentially reducing the scope of his iconoclasm to a secondary role that primarily reinforces what the book wants to "say" about the subject it indirectly raises, [SIC] almost negates whatever adventurous impulse might seem to animate a work ostensibly so unconventional. Such didacticism only makes experimental fiction a means of achieving the sort of conventional goal—in this case, communicating a "theme"—emphasized by the "realist" fiction to which it is supposed to be an alternative.

The Glass of Endless Windows 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

It is probably accurate to call Blake Butler a “stylist,” although what his fiction offers is not “style” of the kind usually signified in discussions of literary writing: we find little evocative sensory description, few flourishes of figurative language, not much careful balancing of sentence types and lengths to achieve a “poetic” rhythm. Although his new novel, Alice Knott, at first seems somewhat more straightforwardly expository, soon enough we begin to get the kind of serpentine prose we have come to expect in a Butler novel, as when Alice seems to overhear her own thoughts in a synesthetic rush:

And when I looked in search of any world that might remain, I saw the sound of all time become broken, open everywhere around, the glass of endless windows, mirrors sight on sight, which through its rupture of my perspective I could then begin to hear another kind of speaking, the loudest, thickest voice I’d ever felt, comprised from all the people I’d ever known, each of them speaking at the same time, their choir brutal and unrehearsed, spreading through me with its sick yearning. . . .

As the novel progresses and Alice seems to lose control of her perceptions altogether, this sort of overflowing discourse becomes even more pronounced. (Readers of Butler’s previous novel, The 300,000,000, will surely find it familiar.) Such a sentence as this might be called “meandering,” but it is not so much that the language rambles — indeed, Butler’s prose conveys the impression that each turn of thought is syntactically appropriate and exact in meaning — than that it is actively engaged in an earnest effort to attain precise expression, although in Butler’s case precision does not involve specificity of detail but the proper level of abstraction. This does not in itself make his prose style less effective, but it does signal a different conception of “style” and requires a different kind of response from the reader.

The more abstract language arises in part from the emphasis Butler gives to depicting his characters’ states of mind, their processing of experience, rather than external activities rendered from outside or in addition to subjective awareness. This strategy has become even more acute in its stylistic ramifications in his most recent work, as both The 300,000,000 and now Alice Knott focus on characters whose mental status is questionable to begin with and who are to one extent or another portrayed as increasingly unstable as the narratives in each novel proceed. In effect, the reality of their uncertain cognitive states is evoked realistically — not by artificial devices meant to suggest mental breakdown, but by translating it into language that approximates it as accurately as possible. Thus even though The 300,000,000 presents the “thoughts” of both of its protagonists as already expressed in writing — in the case of Gretch Gravey, the putative serial killer whose actions are the foundation of the novel’s psychedelic narrative, in a notebook found at the scene of his crimes, whereas Flood, the police detective, leaves behind a heavily annotated case file — it is writing clearly meant to reflect these characters’ disordered way of comprehending the world.

Butler’s style seemed to embody a different sort of ambition in his earliest work. Although still often accumulative and elaborate, the sentences in books like Ever (2009) and Scorch Atlas (2010) seemed more crafted for their sonic effects in the “consecution” mode of writers like Gordon Lish and Gary Lutz, as in this passage from Ever, Butler’s first published book:

Meanwhile, in the outside during certain weeks the air would fold. The light comprising certain sections of certain rooms would burst or bubble. Strings of night might gleam of glass. The dirt would swarm with foam. . . .

These early works (including the novels There is No Year (2011) and Sky Saw (2012)) are somewhat more plot-oriented, at least in the sense of focusing on things that happen, although the “things” are often bizarre and irreal. They do introduce images and motifs that will continue to be central to The 300,000,000 and Alice Knott, in particular dysfunctional families and creepy houses. But the emphasis over the course of Butler’s published fiction has shifted from an imagistic sort of surrealism to, paradoxically, perhaps, a form of psychological realism by which the often hallucinatory images and phantasmagorical actions are presumably accurate renditions of the characters’ mental states.

However, it might be said that in The 300,000,000, at least, such a description of the novel’s method is complicated by the extreme unreliability of its narration. Not only are there two different sources of plot and perspective, Flood and Gravey, but we have Gravey’s account only as a part of Flood’s “report,” and within the case file itself there are annotations appended, additional information purportedly given by a number of the boys living in Gravey’s house, his acolytes or accomplices, as well as brief notes added by Flood’s colleagues. Thus the point of view is dispersed among a variety of characters, and finally there is no way to definitively determine either that Flood is actually Gravey’s creation, a part of his presumed psychosis, or perhaps that Gravey is in fact a figment of Flood’s imagination, a product of his own psychological breakdown. That this dense (stylistically and structurally), 450-page novel might finally be just an elaborate fever dream (although whose fever is unclear) is actually one of its most oddly compelling features.

Alice Knott isn’t, it seems to me, as formally elastic in this way as The 300,000,000. It is more directly a representation of mental instability, and for that reason is less engaging than the previous novel. Although there are hints — sometimes more than hints, as when Alice is whisked away by a mysterious man who tells her, “At this point, non-vital visibility is all but locked down, at least until the system has regained stability” — that Alice is a subject in some sort of cognitive behavioral study or experiment, they are vague enough that they might be manifestations of the noise roiling around in her head. When, at the novel’s conclusion, we are shown a video in which an aged Alice Knott is seen lying on a table, wires connecting her head to a video monitor relaying images of her life, the scene seems less a revelation that the novel we have read may be a video projection of the confusions swirling around in Alice Knott’s mind (or maybe one that creates such confusions), or a confirmation that video/digital technology has come to control our very powers of cognition, than simply a continuation of the novel’s dramatization of the turmoil within, of the dislocations of memory and perception that seem to define Alice Knott as a character, now perpetually on display.

There is even some ambiguity about the character’s exact identity. Is she in fact “Alice Knott,” the apparent wealthy heiress whose priceless paintings are being stolen and destroyed, the act of destruction being circulated in a viral video that begins to cast suspicion on Alice herself as the possible perpetrator? Or is she really “Alice Novak,” an artist whom, we are told, Alice Knott closely resembles, and who seems to the sort of artist who might undertake a video incineration of a de Kooning painting as a form of performance art? (Alice Knott watches a news broadcast reporting Alice Novak’s suicide, at the scene of which “several dozen” of her own artworks are discovered “burned on site.”) The same uncertainty holds true for Alice Knott’s memories of her own family: Does she really have a brother named Richard who is a convicted serial killer? If so, why can she not at first summon a memory of his presence, and why in the subsequent memories she does finally recall is he such a blurry and fluctuating figure? Did Alice in fact have two fathers, one who disappeared and became her “unfather,” and one who suddenly shows up at some point after, but whom Alice never really accepts as genuine?

Yet finally these unanswered questions only mark the novel more firmly as a portrayal of psychological disturbance. The discontinuities and the ultimate disunity of Alice Knott’s consciousness may make her seem fractured and adrift, but that may indeed be her condition, however removed from ordinary conceptions of character that might make her. More broadly, to the extent the novel subverts expectations of unified character, the radical displacement of Alice Knott’s personality allows Butler ultimately to present a sort of synoptic vision of consciousness at large, even though there are of course peculiarities in Alice Knott’s life story and circumstances that provide the vision with specificity. But it is here, at the intersection of Butler’s style and the heterodox psychological realism he invokes, where the most severe problem with both The 300,000,000 and Alice Knott. Butler’s treatment so strenuously seeks to evoke the erratic awareness of the characters with its sinuously articulate language that, at the length at which such episodes of streaming memories and distorted perceptions are presented, Butler’s prose simply becomes wearisome.

This problem is less acute in The 300,000,000, its extended length notwithstanding, because Gretch Gravey is such a creepily compelling character, although Flood’s manifold excursions into a phantasmic netherworld in the novel’s second half do indeed eventually begin to pall. In Alice Knott, however, the practice does not adapt well to the novel’s protagonist, who is not exactly an uninteresting character but such a nebulous one that neither her family drama nor her status as a wealthy art patron (if that is indeed her status) really rise above the generic, however much the discontinuities of memory and the ambiguities of her present circumstances render her story inscrutable. The story itself is not interesting enough to be a satisfactory substitute for a protagonist who consistently stimulates the reader’s attention, particularities of plot notwithstanding. This is not to say that Alice Knott holds no interest as a character, just that such interest is not especially well-served by Butler’s stylistically elaborate form of psychological realism.

Alice Knott begins in a much more restrained style that more or less directly relates the robbery of Alice’s art collection and the ensuing video showing the destruction of de Kooning’s Woman III. The art heist/media frenzy plot continues as a kind of side show feature for a while (leading to fears of an art-despoiling “plague” that eventually draws in a concerned President of the United States), but by the novel’s end this subplot has largely faded away in favor of almost exclusive focus on Alice Knott’s deteriorating state. In this way the novel is similar to The 300,000,000, where by the narrative’s close Gretch Gravey’s alleged serial killings are clearly no longer part of the story and attention is likewise given over to Flood’s descent into a maelstrom of delusions. Still, the specter of Gravey’s deeds and his mysterious muse, “Darrel,” take possession of Flood’s being thoroughly enough that Gravey continues to be a presence in the novel, while whatever initial salience cultural attitudes toward art is meant to exhibit in the story of Alice Knott finally seems obscure.

In both novels, a central conceit that does help to bring additional unity and thematic implication to each is the interaction between the main characters and their homes, which manifest themselves to the characters in a physical way that might recall the emblematic setting of the venerable “old dark house.” A preoccupation with homes and houses is evident in almost all of Butler’s fiction, and almost always an uncanny and at times even sinister atmosphere pervades these houses, sometimes going beyond atmosphere to, indeed, supernatural transfigurations that appear to corporeally embody the psychological conditions of its inhabitants. Flood finds himself trapped in the soulless underworld concealed beneath Gravey’s death house, encountering only phantoms conjured by his own mind. Alice Knott has never felt entirely comfortable in her house — even though (perhaps because) it is her childhood home — and finally the geometry of the house seems to shift around her as if in response to her own shifting memories.

This focus on Americans’ precarious relationship to “home” may be the most singular element in Blake Butler’s work so far. The effect produced in The 300,000,000 is frightening, if ultimately exhausting. In Alice Knott, the motif helps add resonance to the novel, but as well the limitations of Butler’s now habitual formal and stylistic maneuvers are beginning to seem more apparent.

The Really New 

The response to Sergio de la Pava's A Naked Singularity included numerous references to the book as "postmodern," "innovative," or "absurdist," terms that by now are mostly used to indicate that the work at hand is not a conventional work of "realism." Often postmodernist and realist seem to be the only two categories available in which to put new works of fiction--the former to designate anything that runs counter to the broadest currents of mainstream "literary fiction," the latter to identify the fundamental aesthetic orientation of mainstream fiction. A Naked Singularity is clearly enough not mainstream, from its length (de la Pava seems more interested in putting everything in than in exercising editorial restraint) to its long stretches of dialogue without expository supplement, its gradual shift from a kind of expose of the American judicial system to a crime novel complete with "caper," all enveloped in a quasi-science fiction atmosphere that may just be the eerie reflection of the protagonist's psychological breakdown. But do these qualities alone warrant calling the novel "postmodern"? Moreover, does calling it postmodern further make it "innovative"?

There's no doubt that A Naked Singularity takes real risks if its intended audience is indeed typical readers of literary fiction. That de la Pava chose to self-publish his novel after it was rejected by every agent to whom he sent it suggests, of course, he does not consider this to be his likely audience. The reader of A Naked Singularity needs to be willing to become immediately immersed in the daily business of a big-city American court at its most random and chaotic, in the company of the novel's protagonist, Casi, a public defender attempting to negotiate his own way through an environment that ultimately we understand has taken its toll on him, despite the fact that he has apparently been successful enough at his job he has yet to lose a case that has gone to trial. (He spends most of his time attempting to prevent his clients from going to trial in the first place through plea bargaining.) There is little indication in the novel's first 100 pages that anything like a conventional plot of the kind we might expect from a novel with a legal setting is going to develop, although Casi's account of the courtroom scenes and his interaction with his clients is quite compelling on its own.

This early part of the novel doesn't avoid realism but, if anything, could be described as hyperrealism. The depiction of the hellish atmosphere and moral degradation of the New York lower courts is uncompromising and unrelenting as we follow Casi through his daily activities. If the ultimate goal of realism is to represent life as lived as faithfully as possible, A Naked Singularity surely accomplishes the task, giving Casi's encounters with his colleagues and his clients its scrupulous attention. Such an approach can seem postmodern only when "realism" has become confused with conventional storytelling: "plot," after all, is an artificial imposition on the artistic treatment of reality in fiction, since rarely do we experience our lives as "story," complete with beginnings, middles, and ends. Historically, realism has been a mode most supportive of character and setting, and certainly A Naked Singularity provides plenty of both.

Eventually it provides plenty of plot as well, but by the time we get to the heist, meticulously planned by Casi and a colleague, and its ultimately violent outcome, we have also been introduced to several other narrative strands, including Casi's interactions with his family and his volunteer work on a death penalty case from Texas, as well as the interpolated stories Casi tells about various boxers of the 1980s, especially Wilfrid Benitez, with whom Casi seems to have a strong connection. This digressiveness would appear to be another feature of the novel that might lead readers and reviewers to call it postmodern, but finally all of these strands work together to provide a coherent character portrait of the protagonist. Because the novel is further unified by Casi's first-person narration, the digressions are less a symptom of postmodern fragmentation than an alternative method of characterization that arguably renders his increasingly erratic behavior and deteriorating state of mind with more fidelity than a more linear, conventional form of "psychological realism" would.

The postmodern writers with whom de la Pava has been most frequently compared are Wallace, Pynchon, and Gaddis, and of the three it seems to me that A Naked Singularity has most in common with the latter, particularly A Frolic of His Own with its similar legal setting, but the reliance on dialogue in Gaddis's fiction provides the closest parallel to de la Pava's approach in his novel, although he does not pursue the strategy as radically as Gaddis does. Moreover, although Gaddis is frequently classified as a postmodernist, his work is much less explicitly metafictional or absurdist, much less an attempt to create a distorted or artificial world separate from reality than to be truer to reality by getting it all in, the sheer babble and noise of American culture as reflected by the perpetual talk of his characters. A Naked Singularity certainly could be identified as a novel of "excess" ( a designation coined by Tom Le Clair), and it shares with Gaddis as well as Pynchon and Wallace a willingness to violate the boundaries of what would ordinarily be considered "well-made fiction," creating in the process an impression of excess that is actually very carefully calibrated in its effects. The work of all of these writers puts the reader in the same position as the characters in their novels, who often find themselves in the middle of a seemingly overwhelming "system" they are attempting to comprehend.

If A Naked Singularity bears comparison to the meganovels of Pynchon, Gaddis, and Wallace, it is hard to say that it advances beyond the achievements of these earlier works, either formally or thematically. To suggest that this novel probably should not be considered innovative is not to undervalue its own achievement. At a time when ambition in American fiction is most often expressed in the "social novel," in hybrid genre forms such as the post-apocalyptic narrative and tepid forms of magical realism, or simply in securing a contract with a mainstream publisher, it is refreshing that a writer is willing to be more formally adventurous, in a mode less assimilable to prevailing expectations of "literary fiction"--so much so that no agent or publisher was willing to take a chance on this book. The most foolish miscalculation on the part of those who concluded this novel was not worth publication is in the assumption that readers would not find it engaging because of its unorthodox structure, but in fact once we have oriented ourselves to its method the novel is quite entertaining (if at times disturbing in its portrayal of the dysfunction of out "system of justice"). In the novel's expository passages, Casi's voice attracts our interest, and de la Pava's control of language in general should be apparent to any serious reader.

There really can be no fixed category of "innovative" fiction. Sergio de la Pava is admirably following up on the innovations of Gaddis and Pynchon, exploring possibilities suggested by their example, but the invocation of a term like "postmodern" as a convenient way to identify a book like A Naked Singularity works more to obscure our perception of what's truly innovative in new works of fiction than to assist it. No familiar terms will seem adequate to describe the introduction of the really new.

The Postmodern Genre

Jim Gauer's Novel Explosives (Zerogram Press, 2016) seems at first to be an almost paradigmatic example of a "meganovel,” exemplifying in its approach LeClair’s description of the "art of excess." It is a 700-page behemoth (its length made even more daunting by its generally very long paragraphs) that tells what initially presents itself as a quite complex story requiring multiple points of view, a fractured narrative--although the story takes place over the course of a week, we begin at the end of the week, go back to the beginning, and are subsequently presented alternating episodes from beginning, middle, and end--and a style that is uninhibited, to say the least, in both its syntactical overabundance and its often arcane vocabulary. Quite clearly as well, it intends to take on the heftiest and most far-reaching of themes: the nature of human identity, insatiable greed, the corruption of social and cultural norms of decency.

Yet finally the novel seems not so much a complex response to what has become a complex reality, but a sustained embellishment of a relatively simple--if at times disturbing--story of the intersection of financial chicanery and the drug trade and a relentless enhancement of the details and circumstances of that story with endlessly proliferating information, often deliberately esoteric. The outrageousness of this strategy, whereby, for example a few minutes of a character's time is extended for pages while we are told about the physics underlying the situation or the technological developments contributing to the plot turn underway, can be rather entertaining in itself, but, while Pynchon and DeLillo preceded Gauer in creating information-saturated narratives, their novels seemed to be attempting to reveal how perceptible reality was increasingly conditioned by the sometimes imperceptible forces (political, technological, historical) flowing together in the formation of modernity. Novel Explosives seems content simply to add mathematical and scientific explanations to its ongoing narrative actions, slowing those actions down at the same time they act as a kind of reinforcement of the novel's realism rather than an interrogation of it.

And, indeed, ultimately this is an intensely realistic novel, deeply immersing us in the milieu of each of its settings: a town in Mexico where the novel begins with a man who has forgotten who he is (but not what he knows) and how he came to be in the town; the world of megacapitalism inhabited by an unnamed "venture capitalist" (later he is referred to as "Douchebag" by those who are pursing him), who turns out to be the amnesiac to whom we are first introduced; and the world (underworld, perhaps more accurately) in which move a pair of criminal enforcers employed by an American drug overlord, whose activities bring together predatory capitalism and the drug trade, the latter obviously being portrayed as an extreme but logical extension of the former. One of the enforcers, Raymond, arguably becomes the novel's protagonist when he begins to rebel against the orders given to him by his employer, exhibiting a moral conscience the other characters lack. We are able to appreciate Raymond's change of heart, however, mostly because we have been so relentlessly exposed to the pervasive moral rot polluting the environment in which he finds himself, which by extension reflects the corruption of the larger socioeconomic system that makes it possible.

Novel Explosives comes closer to being a species of satire than the kind of postmodern pastiche we might associated with Pynchon or DeLillo. Certainly the novel makes its share of metafictional gestures—starting with its title, which refers literally to a kind of advanced explosive but which also clearly enough alludes to the novel we are reading, with its attempt to “explode” the narrative and stylistic expectations some readers might bring to it--and while this contributes to its predominantly comic tone, in effect adding its own representational objectives to the array of potential satirical targets, it doesn't finally negate those objectives. Surely few people could read Novel Explosives without concluding that the author intends it to draw attention to the corruption and criminality it highlights so that we can be aware, at least, of the scope of the problem we face if we hope to combat it. Indeed, it might be said that the novel goes beyond satire to become more straightforwardly a critique of capitalism in its 21st century variety, a critique given more immediate force through its realization in the form of a postmodern novel.

But then this appropriation of the postmodern novel of excess for its rhetorical convenience--adding it as a kind of elaborate supplement to an otherwise polemical narrative--makes it something less (or other) than an postmodern novel, since Pynchon and DeLillo are not satirists, except to the extent that satire might be a indirect and secondary effect of their more radically incongruous and unsettling portrayals of an enigmatic and often impenetrable reality. Thus it would be both unfair and ultimately inaccurate to say that Novel Explosives is derivative of the work of these earlier writers. While to a degree a novel like this would not be possible without the prior example of Pynchon and De Lillo (as well as Gaddis and McElroy), we could say that those writers have enabled Gauer in his endeavor to write a complex, large-scale novel whose complexity is mostly a surface complexity that supports the novel's ultimate representational ambition: to amplify the characters and their circumstances as much as possible, but in order to enhance the verisimilitude of the depictions. Postmodern fiction questions the capacity of language to fully achieve verisimilitude; Novel Explosives does not manifest such skepticism, even if it must extend the resources of language almost to the bursting point to achieve its goal.

Still, it is in its invocation of language that this novel is most impressive. If its style could be called excessive, it is excessive in the most audacious and frequently entertaining way. If the sentences and paragraphs are elongated and labyrinthine, it is not because of the author's lack of control but because he maintains such measured control that they can be trusted to do their work. The Venture Capitalist celebrates his success in that vocation:

We should, at this point, probably take our seats; the salads have arrived, and the wine is being poured, and with our market cap now hovering above $10 billion, and plenty of oxygen trapped in the ever-expanding market bubble, death by live burial would seem to be out of order. We're starting with an ethereal Corton-Charlemagne, a $500 white from the Burgundy region, which is about as far from Bahr al Gazal as you can possibly get, a wine that in my understated Elicit Networks tasting notes is "all but inevitable" and "brilliantly executed" and "seemingly so accidental but so richly deserved," though to be perfectly honest, let's not kid ourselves, no one in Silicon Valley, much less North Dallas, really gives a shit about ethereal Burgundies, since they're more about earthy poetry, and epiphanic moments, than power and elegance, measured in fruit-pounds of torque, and Parker, rather famously, no longer bothers to even taste them.

The tone of this passage, a kind of mock sincerity, typifies the style of the novel as a whole, but especially the sections narrated by the Venture Capitalist. Although ultimately the style flags in the last third of the novel, this is as at least as much because the narrative itself has been stretched beyond its capacity to sustain interest in its resolution, not because the prose itself wears out its welcome.

Novel Explosives is certainly by far more interesting than most of what gets published by prominent publishers, even prominent independent publishers, as "literary fiction." However, the novel too nearly seems to treat the "postmodern novel" as itself a genre to be adopted for me to fully embrace it. Most readers would find it a less intimidating work than its size might suggest, but in a way that is also the source of my disappointment with it.

Metafictional Machinations 

William Luvaas is probably best known for his 2013 book Ashes Rain Down, a linked collection of stories depicting a mountain community trying to subsist in a near future in which climate change has wreaked its havoc and the world order has apparently collapsed. Prior to this book, Luvaas had published two novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (1987) and Going Under (1994), as well as another collection of stories, A Working Man’s Apocrypha (2007). The two novels are more or less works of conventional realism — although stylistically quite well executed — but in A Working Man’s Apocrypha several stories seemed to be moving away from strict realism (a couple anticipating the post-apocalyptic fables of Ashes Rain Down). That book shares realism’s goal of evoking a specific place and the people who live there, but it does so through an imagined extension of current reality, one in which the laws of that reality don’t entirely apply.

Beneath the Coyote Hills could also be described as a departure from realism as practiced in most literary fiction, although in this case not via post-apocalyptic fantasy but by calling into question the reliability of the narrative it constructs. The story relates the travails of a luckless writer who in the novel’s present has gone “off the grid,” living as a squatter in the southern California desert. Intertwined with Tommy Aristophanos’s first-person account of his struggle to endure in this stark environment — an account that moves freely in time to provide the backstory that led Tommy to his current circumstances — are excerpts from Tommy’s novel, one that he has apparently been writing for many years. These excerpts eventually provide us with the life of “V. C. Hoffstetter,” a man whose inexorable rise to success offers the reverse scenario of Tommy’s apparent failure.

Hoffstetter may be a projection of Tommy’s own brother, of whom we don’t otherwise see much but who, like Hoffstetter and unlike Tommy, was highly ambitious and presumably achieved his ambition. Fictional versions of both Tommy and his brother also appear in Tommy’s novel — entitled The Great Hofstetter — so it is perhaps appropriate to regard V. C. Hoffstetter (a.k.a. “Volt”) as Tommy Aristophanos’s imagined alter ego. Volt — a self-obsessed, self-righteous, sociopathically ruthless corporate executive — represents Tommy’s attempt, conscious or unconscious, to reframe his failures as a kind of success. Indeed, Tommy’s chronicle of his journey from promising writer and family man to desert rat at first seems to position Beneath the Coyote Hills as a kind of meditation on the American obsession with material success, as well as on male aggression and the vagaries of luck.

But then we find that Tommy’s fictional creations have crossed over into his “real life.” About halfway into the novel, just when his life finally seemed on track (he has a family and relative job security), Tommy discovers when applying for a home mortgage that the CEO of his broker’s parent company is … V. C. Hoffstetter. Shortly after this, Tommy’s life begins to unravel: he loses his job, his son is diagnosed with cancer and eventually dies, and his wife’s insurance company declines to pay their son’s medical bills. When his house is scheduled for repossession, Tommy insists on a meeting with Hoffstetter since, he tells his wife, “I invented him, for crissake. Who do you think I’ve been writing about all these years? You think I don’t recognize my own creation?”

We might attribute Tommy’s seemingly delusional state to the epileptic seizures — “spells,” he calls them — he has experienced all his life. The worst of these spells put him in a “dark fog” or “waking darkness”:

I move back and forth from past to present without transition, can’t be sure if events are happening around me or inside my head. All day, disjunctive voices call my name; I turn and find no one there. Time shatters at my feet, vagrant images like figments of torn-up photographs perch an instant on the event horizon of the brain before being sucked into the deep hole of amnesia. I wince from present to past, not sure where I am.

This description comes close to approximating the structure of Tommy Aristophanos’s narrative and its effect on the reader. Tommy seems to inhabit a space where time has indeed shattered, a state of being in which the notion of temporal progress has become irrelevant; and the reader moves with him “back and forth from past to present” — although the resulting episodes do have a larger coherence, are more than “vagrant images” flashing before his brain’s “event horizon.” But ultimately we too can’t be sure if events are happening to and around Tommy or mostly inside his head.

This disorienting effect is only magnified when we learn further that “Tommy Aristophanos” is the “model” for a character in a novel written by Volt Hofstetter’s wife. When Tommy and Lizbeth Hofstetter meet and discuss the implications of their respective authorship of one another, surely some apotheosis of metafictional legerdemain has been achieved. Luvaas uses their encounter to reveal one final piece of Tommy’s life story — that his father was killed in a car accident while Tommy was at the wheel, the guilt over which has caused him to repress the circumstances of his father’s death, perhaps sabotaging his efforts to attain a conventionally successful existence. Lizbeth Hoffstetter is finally able to get Tommy to accept the truth of what happened (including the fact that Tommy himself was not to blame), which, if it doesn’t signal Tommy’s recommitment to a stable life, does lead him to burn his novel manuscript. He has now realized that “you can’t rewrite your life by fantasizing your way out of it, but you can learn to stop railing against your fate and accept it.” As if symbolically reinforcing Tommy’s act of purification, the olive grove he has been occupying is consumed in a seasonal wildfire.

In destroying his manuscript, Tommy believes he has in effect made Hofstetter and his wife disappear. The novel’s conclusion seems to encourage us to interpret the self-reflexive complications — who’s authoring whom, what’s real and what’s imagined? — as symptoms of Tommy’s febrile brain in its medically untreated state and to regard his purification by fire as a cleansing of illusions and the prelude to a necessary reorientation to the world. If this is the case, if the metafictional maneuvering is just a way of embellishing an otherwise straightforward story of self-discovery, of externalizing a character’s internal conflicts, it doesn’t seem merely a cavil to ask whether this strategy is perhaps needlessly baroque, implicitly professing to be more radical than it really is. If the effect of most works of metafiction — of “postmodern ”self-reflexivity in general — is to undermine our assumption that fiction offers direct access to reality, the blurring of the line between illusion and the presumably real in Beneath the Coyote Hills suggests that reality itself is often indistinguishable from fiction.

While this is an apt enough formulation of Tommy’s experience of his reality, likely some other, less oblique strategy for evoking his troubled relationship with the world would have worked just as well. The potential distraction caused by what some readers might regard as narratorial sleight-of-hand is not finally balanced by a palpable engagement with the representational questions raised by such flagrant artifice. Luvaas ultimately does not push the book’s metafictional questioning to the point of exposing his own narrative as a literary mirage, but then it would be difficult to understand why he might want to do that in the first place. For surely we are meant to take Tommy Aristophanos and his personal dilemma seriously. Despite the shadow of doubt cast over his corporeal status, Tommy is a vividly rendered character, both in the color of his narrative voice and in his depicted efforts to adapt to his circumstances. To disclose that he is a mere figment of the imagination — not just the author’s imagination but that of another fictional character — seems a superfluous gesture, perhaps even inimical to the novel’s thematic intention.

Like his previous work, Beneath the Coyote Hills is a novel that seeks to be about something. Ashes Rain Down is about the catastrophic effects of climate change. Going Under is about the degradation of family life caused by alcoholism. Beneath the Coyote Hills goes into considerable detail about the subprime lending scam that led to the financial crisis of 2007–2008. And while it would be an oversimplification to say that any of these works are solely or primarily about such topical issues, to obscure these issues in a metafictional cloud would be a puzzling strategy indeed.

Another consistent feature of Luvaas’s fiction — one ultimately grounded in the underlying assumptions if not necessarily the traditional practices of realism — is the attention it pays to the influence of place, specifically the West Coast from southern Oregon (Luvaas’s native region) to southern California. The depictions of climate-ravaged Sluggards Creek in Ashes Rain Down and of the southern California desert in Beneath the Coyote Hills is one of the most impressive achievements of these books. California seems to serve in William Luvaas’s imagination as the most appropriate setting for tales of extremity: the elemental, harsh qualities of the landscape reinforce the sense of stark clarity with which the characters must learn to view their circumstances. The final set piece in Coyote Hills — describing the fire that will send Tommy Aristophanos on his way again, “traipsing like Cain along the highways” — is an especially compelling example of Luvaas’s skill at rendering the tangible power of the environment:

There’s nothing so terrifying or exhilarating as fire. Something eternal that touches the earth. So you might half understand the orgiastic thrill it gives an arsonist. All that furious energy. But what we feel most is animal fear, watching flames move up steep hillsides freight-train fast, forming their own updraft, sucking air up from the valley, right out of our lungs. Fire wends snake-slow up ravines, leaving them aglow like rivers of molten lava. At dusk, a surreal orange nimbus backdrops the Coyote Hills. Clouds of smoke glow incandescent red. We watch hot spots flare up higher in the mountains, secondary blazes kindled by embers falling in the tall timber. Soon the entire San Jacinto Range will be ablaze.

The primary strength of Luvaas’s fiction is in the vigor and lucidity of the writing, and these qualities are evident in Beneath the Coyote Hills. If this novel ventures somewhat equivocally into postmodernist whimsy, it is nevertheless an admirable book well worth reading.

The Material Construction of the Book 

There are at least three ways by which we might classify Zachary Thomas Dodson's Bats of the Republic in order to characterize it adequately and evaluate it fairly: as a postapocalyptic narrative, as an example of the "steampunk" subgenre of science fiction, and as a so-called "illuminated" novel. Viewing it from one of these perspectives does not preclude regarding it as a creative joining of these forms (and it is one of the novel's strengths that it does blend them more or less seamlessly), but they each need to be considered carefully before coming to any conclusions about the merits of the novel as a whole.

As a postapocalyptic story it is entirely familiar and conventional. A "Collapse" has occurred, leaving the United States divided into a handful of "city-states," with most of the country reduced to a presumable wasteland the inhabitants of the city-state refer to as "the rot." The city-state in which the story is set is the "Texas Republic," which is characterized by a 1984-ish sort of authoritarian power structure. The protagonist of this story, Zeke Thomas, is in line to become a "Senator" in this power structure, but the story mostly chronicles Zeke's disillusionment with his life in the city-state and his attempt to escape it. There's the usual sort of hyper-surveillance, threatened violence, and underground resistance (in this case literally underground), making for an entirely run-of-the-mill dystopian narrative, just another offering in a genre that itself has become overworked and underinspired.

But Bats of the Republic is not simply a postapocalyptic narrative. It also features many of the conventions and motifs of steampunk, most of them quite explicitly employed. Zeke's story is paired with another set in Victorian America, focused on Zeke's presumed ancestor, Zadock Thomas (the purity of Zeke's "bloodline" is part of the conflict animating his story), who undertakes a mission to deliver a mysterious letter to an equally mysterious general just prior to the Mexican-American War. Zadock works for the Museum of Flying, operated by Joseph Gray (who sends him on the mission), and is courting Gray's daughter, Elswyth. Elswyth's deceased mother, we learn, wrote a novel called The City-State, excerpts from which, it eventually becomes clear, we are reading as the story of Zeke Thomas. It is a futuristic narrative projecting a 19th century vision of what a dystopic future might be like, complete with "advanced" steam-powered technology such as "steamsabres" possessed by law enforcement and a "steammoat" surrounding the city-state to prevent escape.

Probably fans of steampunk would appreciate Dodson's handling of its elements more than I am able to, given my limited familiarity, although the context this provides for the apocalyptic tale makes its pedestrian qualities somewhat easier to accept (and perhaps giving it some interest as a kind of literary anachronism, a version of what Orwell might have produced had he been writing a hundred years earlier). But the narrative type and genre variations offered by Bats of the Republic are further complemented by the textual embellishments that make it an "illuminated" novel. In addition to a multitude of typefaces and considerable variety in its page design, the text includes drawings, maps, diagrams, transcripts, facsimiles of letters, old newspapers, and other documents, as well as a novel-within-the-novel (a lightly fictionalized account of the Gray family), presented as a series of photocopies.

Dodson's approach is similar to that of Mark Danielewski, who similarly enhances his not otherwise very compelling narratives with various visual insertions and typographical manipulations. Bats of the Republic has more narrative substance than the generally insipid "story" underlying the textual machinations of, say, Only Revolution, but in both cases fiction as a literary form and object of aesthetic experience is replaced with an aestheticization of the book itself as object, the material construction of the book replacing our more intangible interaction solely with the written text as the focus of experience. In few cases do the visual embellishments in Bats of Republic really contribute anything that adds to or mediates the written text, most often merely reinforcing the text with literal illustrations, graphic aids, sometimes acting simply as ornaments. The visual elements are certainly well-rendered and the book as whole impressively presented (Dodson is apparently a book designer by trade, in addition to running a small press), but I for one ended up admiring the author's skill at design more than his vision of what a work of innovative fiction might accomplish.

Bats of the Republic or Only Revolution could be usefully contrasted with the work of Steve Tomasula, a writer who superficially seems to share an interest in adding visual devices to written text. But Tomasula's devices are truly integrated with his prose, adding shades of meaning, exploring the limits of the printed page, and extending the scope of prose fiction in ways that neither Danielewski nor Dodson, at least on the evidence of his first novel, seem inclined to pursue. Tomasula's fiction expands our awareness of the boundaries fiction might challenge and still be true to the form. It makes readers consider how rigidly they should adhere to inherited assumptions about the boundaries of the form while also providing a satisfying reading experience. Tomasula tells stories, but they are narratives with intrinsic interest in and of themselves, not rehearsals of familiar plots. The experience of reading Bats of the Republic is more like witnessing a writer attempting to compensate for an otherwise lackluster story with a flashy display of extraneous decoration.

Incorporating visual elements and unsettling our "normal" access to the words on the page are justifiably "experimental" moves for an adventurous writer to make, especially since so much fiction so thoroughly aspires to a kind of visual acuity through its imagery and its tropes. Such a project highlights that aspiration and its limits, and might even encourage an exploration of the possibilities of language that don't rely on the invocation of visual imagery, which can indeed often devolve into flourishes of "fine writing." This is one of the effects of Steve Tomasula's fiction, but a novel like Bats of the Republic at best repeats the experiments of Tomasula, as well as such previous writers as William Gass, Ronald Sukenick, and Raymond Federman, without really sharing their commitment to questioning deep-seated assumptions about the aesthetic purposes of fiction. It adopts those experiments to create a pleasingly designed book that some readers might enjoy but that doesn't really work to enlarge our understanding of how fiction might continue to reinvent itself.

Postmodernism on Steroids

For readers only nominally familiar with postmodern fiction, Daniel James’s The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas might indeed seem offbeat, even “difficult.” With its extreme self-reflexivity—the protagonist’s name is “Daniel James,” and he is trying to write a book—its rhetorical layers—sections about Daniel James in his authorial quest, sections about the titular Ezra Maas, taken from the vestiges of the book Daniel did manage to write, commentary (in footnotes) from the unnamed “editor” who claims to have assembled the book we are actually reading, along with other inserted documents—and its hall of mirrors play with illusion and identity, the novel emphatically shouts “unconventional.” And the novel certainly avoids unconventional storytelling, although it ultimately does offer a more or less linear narrative—if side trips are allowed.

But for more experienced readers of postmodern fiction (reaching back to Beckett and Borges, ahead to Barth and Auster), the novel’s themes and devices likely seem fully recognizable, if not derivative of those earlier writers. Indeed, one could read The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas as almost a parody of the postmodern novel, a comic apotheosis of postmodern tropes and strategies—a prodigious Borgesian labyrinth from which there is no escape, for the characters or the reader. In the end, however, James doesn’t seem to want so much to mock the postmodern novel and its metafictional maneuvers but simply to play its games at full speed, to indulge them fr (even excessively) without much concern to cloak the artifice in pseudo-seriousness. This is postmodernism on steroids.

The novel’s very exorbitance makes it inherently entertaining, at least intermittently—there are times when the actions portrayed start to seem repetitive and the metafictional moves too predictable. These may be the inevitable dangers of any lengthy metafiction that attempts to carry out the logic of its own conceits, but in this case it is also the consequence of the limitations of its subject, or at least the limitations of its co-protagonist, the ostensible object of the authorial doppelganger’s investigation. (At one point in the novel, “Daniel James” meets what he takes to be his own doppelganger, who may or may not be the “real” Daniel James, making the hall of mirrors effect even more vertiginous.) “Daniel James” is writing a biography of the modern Renaissance man, Ezra Maas, who makes the task almost impossible by his secretiveness, which achieves its own apotheosis when he literally disappears, reportedly dead but ultimately a mystery, one that Daniel is determined to solve.

The problem is that Ezra Maas is not a very interesting character. He is known (in the fictional world of the novel) above all as a controversial artist, in some way associated with most of the major developments in contemporary art, from Pop to Performance Art, but he is also a dabbler in literature, science, religion, and other intellectual pursuits. Perhaps this ought to make him an intriguing character, but in effect Maas is made so grandly into everything that he comes off as nothing in particular. This is exacerbated by the paucity of exposure we get to his artwork (mostly descriptions of his weirder “installations”), but really what is emphasized most about Ezra Maas is the mere fact of his elusiveness. Thus finally he is not an enigma but a cipher. He is the literary device by which The Unauthorized Autobiography of Ezra Maas is constructed, but it is hard to sustain interest in a figure so manifestly synthetic, so attenuated by the restrictions of his assigned role.

It is of course possible, within the perceptual field set up by the novel, that Ezra Mass does not actually exist, that he is the product of Daniel’s paranoid imagination, or simply a fictional character the editor has created, along with Daniel (or that the editor and Daniel are one and the same). Thus, to ask that he seem “real,” a “rounded” character is beside the point. It is also conceivable that Ezra Maas is intentionally a sketchy character, since he apparently has spent most of life trying to make himself as much of a public nonentity as possible. If “Daniel James” finally fails to evoke a fully-formed portrait of Ezra Maas, one that takes us beyond the fact of his eccentricity, perhaps this is not a sign of Daniel’s inadequacy as a biographer but the confirmation of his success at getting at the truth about Ezra Maas (which Daniel insists to everyone he meets is his goal). Ezra Maas is indeed simply the sum of all the known facts about him. Otherwise, there is no there there.

Still, the patently contradictory impressions of Ezra Maas given to Daniel by those associated with him (collected in “Ezra Maas: An Oral History” and interspersed throughout the novel—although it is not entirely clear whether these were to be part of Daniel’s biography or have been assembled by the editor from Daniel’s notes) do not so much make Maas into a complex character as so insist on his mutability that all of his conflicting qualities are essentially canceled out, leaving him again mostly a blank. The repetition of this device unavoidably causes the reader to assume that, no matter where Daniel James’s search for the truth takes him next, we will not learn the “truth” because there is no truth about Ezra Maas, only endlessly mutating conjecture. At some point, this becomes merely tedious.

However, the novel’s larger formal conceit manages to sustain interest, and “Daniel James” is a more interesting character than Ezra Maas. One suspects that Daniel is actually less interested in Ezra Maas himself than in managing to write a book, and thus arguably The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas is more an investigation into its own modes of representation, and their arrangement into an integrated work of fiction, than an investigation into the life of a reclusive artist. Its most provocative theme is not the slipperiness of identity or the elusiveness of truth but the configuration of fiction as a literary form. Its most pressing concern is to show how failure can be the grounds for success, how aesthetic order can be produced from disorder. (In this regard, the postmodern novel Ezra Maas most resembles is Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew.) The authorial Daniel James is best represented not by “Daniel James” the would-be biographer but the editor of all the documents that have been gathered to create The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas.

But finally this sort of play with point of view and structural legerdemain are the prototypical features of postmodern fiction, and while Ezra Maas provides a diverting enough variation on the self-reflexive strategies of postmodernism, its elaborate artifice seems little different in kind from that first cultivated by writers such as Barth and Robert Coover. It doesn’t really advance the further possibilities of self-reflexivity as a literary technique or introduce any particular formal innovations. (It is most accurate to call The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas an epistolary novel, a form that goes back to the very beginnings of the novel, and the extension of the form to the assemblage of various kinds of documents is relatively common in contemporary fiction.) Most palpably, it seems more a summing-up of the paradigmatic practices of postmodern fiction, an anatomy of its fundamental assumptions, than an attempt to revise or reinvigorate it to better fit with changed cultural circumstances.

The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas is not necessarily an aesthetic failure: its use of the compiled document form is deft enough—although the editor’s footnotes do at times seem superfluous—and the novel does evoke an effectively creepy tone as Daniel becomes more and more suspicious of the entire shady apparatus built around Ezra Maas by the “Maas Foundation” and literally starts to fear for his safety. The novel does not take itself too seriously, making it easier to accept its more prankish qualities. But the sense it leaves that finally nothing much is at stake does prompt reflection on the remaining value of the term “postmodern” in identifying certain works of fiction that are blatantly unconventional, especially in their efforts to “bare the device.” Perhaps this mode has entered its mannerist period, destined to repeat the same strategies and gestures. Perhaps the way forward for adventurous or experimental fiction lies not in the flamboyant antics of Ezra Maas (or the novels of a writer like Mark Danielewski), but in more subtle reimaginings of form and a renewed attention to the yet untapped resources of language.

The response to Sergio de la Pava's A Naked Singularity included numerous references to the book as "postmodern," "innovative," or "absurdist," terms that by now are mostly used to indicate that the work at hand is not a conventional work of "realism." Often postmodernist and realist seem to be the only two categories available in which to put new works of fiction--the former to designate anything that runs counter to the broadest currents of mainstream "literary fiction," the latter to identify the fundamental aesthetic orientation of mainstream fiction. A Naked Singularity is clearly enough not mainstream, from its length (de la Pava seems more interested in putting everything in than in exercising editorial restraint) to its long stretches of dialogue without expository supplement, its gradual shift from a kind of expose of the American judicial system to a crime novel complete with "caper," all enveloped in a quasi-science fiction atmosphere that may just be the eerie reflection of the protagonist's psychological breakdown. But do these qualities alone warrant calling the novel "postmodern"? Moreover, does calling it postmodern further make it "innovative"?

There's no doubt that A Naked Singularity takes real risks if its intended audience is indeed typical readers of literary fiction. That de la Pava chose to self-publish his novel after it was rejected by every agent to whom he sent it suggests, of course, he does not consider this to be his likely audience. The reader of A Naked Singularity needs to be willing to become immediately immersed in the daily business of a big-city American court at its most random and chaotic, in the company of the novel's protagonist, Casi, a public defender attempting to negotiate his own way through an environment that ultimately we understand has taken its toll on him, despite the fact that he has apparently been successful enough at his job he has yet to lose a case that has gone to trial. (He spends most of his time attempting to prevent his clients from going to trial in the first place through plea bargaining.) There is little indication in the novel's first 100 pages that anything like a conventional plot of the kind we might expect from a novel with a legal setting is going to develop, although Casi's account of the courtroom scenes and his interaction with his clients is quite compelling on its own.

This early part of the novel doesn't avoid realism but, if anything, could be described as hyperrealism. The depiction of the hellish atmosphere and moral degradation of the New York lower courts is uncompromising and unrelenting as we follow Casi through his daily activities. If the ultimate goal of realism is to represent life as lived as faithfully as possible, A Naked Singularity surely accomplishes the task, giving Casi's encounters with his colleagues and his clients its scrupulous attention. Such an approach can seem postmodern only when "realism" has become confused with conventional storytelling: "plot," after all, is an artificial imposition on the artistic treatment of reality in fiction, since rarely do we experience our lives as "story," complete with beginnings, middles, and ends. Historically, realism has been a mode most supportive of character and setting, and certainly A Naked Singularity provides plenty of both.

Eventually it provides plenty of plot as well, but by the time we get to the heist, meticulously planned by Casi and a colleague, and its ultimately violent outcome, we have also been introduced to several other narrative strands, including Casi's interactions with his family and his volunteer work on a death penalty case from Texas, as well as the interpolated stories Casi tells about various boxers of the 1980s, especially Wilfrid Benitez, with whom Casi seems to have a strong connection. This digressiveness would appear to be another feature of the novel that might lead readers and reviewers to call it postmodern, but finally all of these strands work together to provide a coherent character portrait of the protagonist. Because the novel is further unified by Casi's first-person narration, the digressions are less a symptom of postmodern fragmentation than an alternative method of characterization that arguably renders his increasingly erratic behavior and deteriorating state of mind with more fidelity than a more linear, conventional form of "psychological realism" would.

The postmodern writers with whom de la Pava has been most frequently compared are Wallace, Pynchon, and Gaddis, and of the three it seems to me that A Naked Singularity has most in common with the latter, particularly A Frolic of His Own with its similar legal setting, but the reliance on dialogue in Gaddis's fiction provides the closest parallel to de la Pava's approach in his novel, although he does not pursue the strategy as radically as Gaddis does. Moreover, although Gaddis is frequently classified as a postmodernist, his work is much less explicitly metafictional or absurdist, much less an attempt to create a distorted or artificial world separate from reality than to be truer to reality by getting it all in, the sheer babble and noise of American culture as reflected by the perpetual talk of his characters. A Naked Singularity certainly could be identified as a novel of "excess" ( a designation coined by Tom Le Clair), and it shares with Gaddis as well as Pynchon and Wallace a willingness to violate the boundaries of what would ordinarily be considered "well-made fiction," creating in the process an impression of excess that is actually very carefully calibrated in its effects. The work of all of these writers puts the reader in the same position as the characters in their novels, who often find themselves in the middle of a seemingly overwhelming "system" they are attempting to comprehend.

If A Naked Singularity bears comparison to the meganovels of Pynchon, Gaddis, and Wallace, it is hard to say that it advances beyond the achievements of these earlier works, either formally or thematically. To suggest that this novel probably should not be considered innovative is not to undervalue its own achievement. At a time when ambition in American fiction is most often expressed in the "social novel," in hybrid genre forms such as the post-apocalyptic narrative and tepid forms of magical realism, or simply in securing a contract with a mainstream publisher, it is refreshing that a writer is willing to be more formally adventurous, in a mode less assimilable to prevailing expectations of "literary fiction"--so much so that no agent or publisher was willing to take a chance on this book. The most foolish miscalculation on the part of those who concluded this novel was not worth publication is in the assumption that readers would not find it engaging because of its unorthodox structure, but in fact once we have oriented ourselves to its method the novel is quite entertaining (if at times disturbing in its portrayal of the dysfunction of out "system of justice"). In the novel's expository passages, Casi's voice attracts our interest, and de la Pava's control of language in general should be apparent to any serious reader.

There really can be no fixed category of "innovative" fiction. Sergio de la Pava is admirably following up on the innovations of Gaddis and Pynchon, exploring possibilities suggested by their example, but the invocation of a term like "postmodern" as a convenient way to identify a book like A Naked Singularity works more to obscure our perception of what's truly innovative in new works of fiction than to assist it. No familiar terms will seem adequate to describe the introduction of the really new.

The Postmodern Genre

Jim Gauer's Novel Explosives (Zerogram Press, 2016) seems at first to be an almost paradigmatic example of a "meganovel,” exemplifying in its approach LeClair’s description of the "art of excess." It is a 700-page behemoth (its length made even more daunting by its generally very long paragraphs) that tells what initially presents itself as a quite complex story requiring multiple points of view, a fractured narrative--although the story takes place over the course of a week, we begin at the end of the week, go back to the beginning, and are subsequently presented alternating episodes from beginning, middle, and end--and a style that is uninhibited, to say the least, in both its syntactical overabundance and its often arcane vocabulary. Quite clearly as well, it intends to take on the heftiest and most far-reaching of themes: the nature of human identity, insatiable greed, the corruption of social and cultural norms of decency.

Yet finally the novel seems not so much a complex response to what has become a complex reality, but a sustained embellishment of a relatively simple--if at times disturbing--story of the intersection of financial chicanery and the drug trade and a relentless enhancement of the details and circumstances of that story with endlessly proliferating information, often deliberately esoteric. The outrageousness of this strategy, whereby, for example a few minutes of a character's time is extended for pages while we are told about the physics underlying the situation or the technological developments contributing to the plot turn underway, can be rather entertaining in itself, but, while Pynchon and DeLillo preceded Gauer in creating information-saturated narratives, their novels seemed to be attempting to reveal how perceptible reality was increasingly conditioned by the sometimes imperceptible forces (political, technological, historical) flowing together in the formation of modernity. Novel Explosives seems content simply to add mathematical and scientific explanations to its ongoing narrative actions, slowing those actions down at the same time they act as a kind of reinforcement of the novel's realism rather than an interrogation of it.

And, indeed, ultimately this is an intensely realistic novel, deeply immersing us in the milieu of each of its settings: a town in Mexico where the novel begins with a man who has forgotten who he is (but not what he knows) and how he came to be in the town; the world of megacapitalism inhabited by an unnamed "venture capitalist" (later he is referred to as "Douchebag" by those who are pursing him), who turns out to be the amnesiac to whom we are first introduced; and the world (underworld, perhaps more accurately) in which move a pair of criminal enforcers employed by an American drug overlord, whose activities bring together predatory capitalism and the drug trade, the latter obviously being portrayed as an extreme but logical extension of the former. One of the enforcers, Raymond, arguably becomes the novel's protagonist when he begins to rebel against the orders given to him by his employer, exhibiting a moral conscience the other characters lack. We are able to appreciate Raymond's change of heart, however, mostly because we have been so relentlessly exposed to the pervasive moral rot polluting the environment in which he finds himself, which by extension reflects the corruption of the larger socioeconomic system that makes it possible.

Novel Explosives comes closer to being a species of satire than the kind of postmodern pastiche we might associated with Pynchon or DeLillo. Certainly the novel makes its share of metafictional gestures—starting with its title, which refers literally to a kind of advanced explosive but which also clearly enough alludes to the novel we are reading, with its attempt to “explode” the narrative and stylistic expectations some readers might bring to it--and while this contributes to its predominantly comic tone, in effect adding its own representational objectives to the array of potential satirical targets, it doesn't finally negate those objectives. Surely few people could read Novel Explosives without concluding that the author intends it to draw attention to the corruption and criminality it highlights so that we can be aware, at least, of the scope of the problem we face if we hope to combat it. Indeed, it might be said that the novel goes beyond satire to become more straightforwardly a critique of capitalism in its 21st century variety, a critique given more immediate force through its realization in the form of a postmodern novel.

But then this appropriation of the postmodern novel of excess for its rhetorical convenience--adding it as a kind of elaborate supplement to an otherwise polemical narrative--makes it something less (or other) than an postmodern novel, since Pynchon and DeLillo are not satirists, except to the extent that satire might be a indirect and secondary effect of their more radically incongruous and unsettling portrayals of an enigmatic and often impenetrable reality. Thus it would be both unfair and ultimately inaccurate to say that Novel Explosives is derivative of the work of these earlier writers. While to a degree a novel like this would not be possible without the prior example of Pynchon and De Lillo (as well as Gaddis and McElroy), we could say that those writers have enabled Gauer in his endeavor to write a complex, large-scale novel whose complexity is mostly a surface complexity that supports the novel's ultimate representational ambition: to amplify the characters and their circumstances as much as possible, but in order to enhance the verisimilitude of the depictions. Postmodern fiction questions the capacity of language to fully achieve verisimilitude; Novel Explosives does not manifest such skepticism, even if it must extend the resources of language almost to the bursting point to achieve its goal.

Still, it is in its invocation of language that this novel is most impressive. If its style could be called excessive, it is excessive in the most audacious and frequently entertaining way. If the sentences and paragraphs are elongated and labyrinthine, it is not because of the author's lack of control but because he maintains such measured control that they can be trusted to do their work. The Venture Capitalist celebrates his success in that vocation:

We should, at this point, probably take our seats; the salads have arrived, and the wine is being poured, and with our market cap now hovering above $10 billion, and plenty of oxygen trapped in the ever-expanding market bubble, death by live burial would seem to be out of order. We're starting with an ethereal Corton-Charlemagne, a $500 white from the Burgundy region, which is about as far from Bahr al Gazal as you can possibly get, a wine that in my understated Elicit Networks tasting notes is "all but inevitable" and "brilliantly executed" and "seemingly so accidental but so richly deserved," though to be perfectly honest, let's not kid ourselves, no one in Silicon Valley, much less North Dallas, really gives a shit about ethereal Burgundies, since they're more about earthy poetry, and epiphanic moments, than power and elegance, measured in fruit-pounds of torque, and Parker, rather famously, no longer bothers to even taste them.

The tone of this passage, a kind of mock sincerity, typifies the style of the novel as a whole, but especially the sections narrated by the Venture Capitalist. Although ultimately the style flags in the last third of the novel, this is as at least as much because the narrative itself has been stretched beyond its capacity to sustain interest in its resolution, not because the prose itself wears out its welcome.

Novel Explosives is certainly by far more interesting than most of what gets published by prominent publishers, even prominent independent publishers, as "literary fiction." However, the novel too nearly seems to treat the "postmodern novel" as itself a genre to be adopted for me to fully embrace it. Most readers would find it a less intimidating work than its size might suggest, but in a way that is also the source of my disappointment with it.

Metafictional Machinations 

William Luvaas is probably best known for his 2013 book Ashes Rain Down, a linked collection of stories depicting a mountain community trying to subsist in a near future in which climate change has wreaked its havoc and the world order has apparently collapsed. Prior to this book, Luvaas had published two novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (1987) and Going Under (1994), as well as another collection of stories, A Working Man’s Apocrypha (2007). The two novels are more or less works of conventional realism — although stylistically quite well executed — but in A Working Man’s Apocrypha several stories seemed to be moving away from strict realism (a couple anticipating the post-apocalyptic fables of Ashes Rain Down). That book shares realism’s goal of evoking a specific place and the people who live there, but it does so through an imagined extension of current reality, one in which the laws of that reality don’t entirely apply.

Beneath the Coyote Hills could also be described as a departure from realism as practiced in most literary fiction, although in this case not via post-apocalyptic fantasy but by calling into question the reliability of the narrative it constructs. The story relates the travails of a luckless writer who in the novel’s present has gone “off the grid,” living as a squatter in the southern California desert. Intertwined with Tommy Aristophanos’s first-person account of his struggle to endure in this stark environment — an account that moves freely in time to provide the backstory that led Tommy to his current circumstances — are excerpts from Tommy’s novel, one that he has apparently been writing for many years. These excerpts eventually provide us with the life of “V. C. Hoffstetter,” a man whose inexorable rise to success offers the reverse scenario of Tommy’s apparent failure.

Hoffstetter may be a projection of Tommy’s own brother, of whom we don’t otherwise see much but who, like Hoffstetter and unlike Tommy, was highly ambitious and presumably achieved his ambition. Fictional versions of both Tommy and his brother also appear in Tommy’s novel — entitled The Great Hofstetter — so it is perhaps appropriate to regard V. C. Hoffstetter (a.k.a. “Volt”) as Tommy Aristophanos’s imagined alter ego. Volt — a self-obsessed, self-righteous, sociopathically ruthless corporate executive — represents Tommy’s attempt, conscious or unconscious, to reframe his failures as a kind of success. Indeed, Tommy’s chronicle of his journey from promising writer and family man to desert rat at first seems to position Beneath the Coyote Hills as a kind of meditation on the American obsession with material success, as well as on male aggression and the vagaries of luck.

But then we find that Tommy’s fictional creations have crossed over into his “real life.” About halfway into the novel, just when his life finally seemed on track (he has a family and relative job security), Tommy discovers when applying for a home mortgage that the CEO of his broker’s parent company is … V. C. Hoffstetter. Shortly after this, Tommy’s life begins to unravel: he loses his job, his son is diagnosed with cancer and eventually dies, and his wife’s insurance company declines to pay their son’s medical bills. When his house is scheduled for repossession, Tommy insists on a meeting with Hoffstetter since, he tells his wife, “I invented him, for crissake. Who do you think I’ve been writing about all these years? You think I don’t recognize my own creation?”

We might attribute Tommy’s seemingly delusional state to the epileptic seizures — “spells,” he calls them — he has experienced all his life. The worst of these spells put him in a “dark fog” or “waking darkness”:

I move back and forth from past to present without transition, can’t be sure if events are happening around me or inside my head. All day, disjunctive voices call my name; I turn and find no one there. Time shatters at my feet, vagrant images like figments of torn-up photographs perch an instant on the event horizon of the brain before being sucked into the deep hole of amnesia. I wince from present to past, not sure where I am.

This description comes close to approximating the structure of Tommy Aristophanos’s narrative and its effect on the reader. Tommy seems to inhabit a space where time has indeed shattered, a state of being in which the notion of temporal progress has become irrelevant; and the reader moves with him “back and forth from past to present” — although the resulting episodes do have a larger coherence, are more than “vagrant images” flashing before his brain’s “event horizon.” But ultimately we too can’t be sure if events are happening to and around Tommy or mostly inside his head.

This disorienting effect is only magnified when we learn further that “Tommy Aristophanos” is the “model” for a character in a novel written by Volt Hofstetter’s wife. When Tommy and Lizbeth Hofstetter meet and discuss the implications of their respective authorship of one another, surely some apotheosis of metafictional legerdemain has been achieved. Luvaas uses their encounter to reveal one final piece of Tommy’s life story — that his father was killed in a car accident while Tommy was at the wheel, the guilt over which has caused him to repress the circumstances of his father’s death, perhaps sabotaging his efforts to attain a conventionally successful existence. Lizbeth Hoffstetter is finally able to get Tommy to accept the truth of what happened (including the fact that Tommy himself was not to blame), which, if it doesn’t signal Tommy’s recommitment to a stable life, does lead him to burn his novel manuscript. He has now realized that “you can’t rewrite your life by fantasizing your way out of it, but you can learn to stop railing against your fate and accept it.” As if symbolically reinforcing Tommy’s act of purification, the olive grove he has been occupying is consumed in a seasonal wildfire.

In destroying his manuscript, Tommy believes he has in effect made Hofstetter and his wife disappear. The novel’s conclusion seems to encourage us to interpret the self-reflexive complications — who’s authoring whom, what’s real and what’s imagined? — as symptoms of Tommy’s febrile brain in its medically untreated state and to regard his purification by fire as a cleansing of illusions and the prelude to a necessary reorientation to the world. If this is the case, if the metafictional maneuvering is just a way of embellishing an otherwise straightforward story of self-discovery, of externalizing a character’s internal conflicts, it doesn’t seem merely a cavil to ask whether this strategy is perhaps needlessly baroque, implicitly professing to be more radical than it really is. If the effect of most works of metafiction — of “postmodern ”self-reflexivity in general — is to undermine our assumption that fiction offers direct access to reality, the blurring of the line between illusion and the presumably real in Beneath the Coyote Hills suggests that reality itself is often indistinguishable from fiction.

While this is an apt enough formulation of Tommy’s experience of his reality, likely some other, less oblique strategy for evoking his troubled relationship with the world would have worked just as well. The potential distraction caused by what some readers might regard as narratorial sleight-of-hand is not finally balanced by a palpable engagement with the representational questions raised by such flagrant artifice. Luvaas ultimately does not push the book’s metafictional questioning to the point of exposing his own narrative as a literary mirage, but then it would be difficult to understand why he might want to do that in the first place. For surely we are meant to take Tommy Aristophanos and his personal dilemma seriously. Despite the shadow of doubt cast over his corporeal status, Tommy is a vividly rendered character, both in the color of his narrative voice and in his depicted efforts to adapt to his circumstances. To disclose that he is a mere figment of the imagination — not just the author’s imagination but that of another fictional character — seems a superfluous gesture, perhaps even inimical to the novel’s thematic intention.

Like his previous work, Beneath the Coyote Hills is a novel that seeks to be about something. Ashes Rain Down is about the catastrophic effects of climate change. Going Under is about the degradation of family life caused by alcoholism. Beneath the Coyote Hills goes into considerable detail about the subprime lending scam that led to the financial crisis of 2007–2008. And while it would be an oversimplification to say that any of these works are solely or primarily about such topical issues, to obscure these issues in a metafictional cloud would be a puzzling strategy indeed.

Another consistent feature of Luvaas’s fiction — one ultimately grounded in the underlying assumptions if not necessarily the traditional practices of realism — is the attention it pays to the influence of place, specifically the West Coast from southern Oregon (Luvaas’s native region) to southern California. The depictions of climate-ravaged Sluggards Creek in Ashes Rain Down and of the southern California desert in Beneath the Coyote Hills is one of the most impressive achievements of these books. California seems to serve in William Luvaas’s imagination as the most appropriate setting for tales of extremity: the elemental, harsh qualities of the landscape reinforce the sense of stark clarity with which the characters must learn to view their circumstances. The final set piece in Coyote Hills — describing the fire that will send Tommy Aristophanos on his way again, “traipsing like Cain along the highways” — is an especially compelling example of Luvaas’s skill at rendering the tangible power of the environment:

There’s nothing so terrifying or exhilarating as fire. Something eternal that touches the earth. So you might half understand the orgiastic thrill it gives an arsonist. All that furious energy. But what we feel most is animal fear, watching flames move up steep hillsides freight-train fast, forming their own updraft, sucking air up from the valley, right out of our lungs. Fire wends snake-slow up ravines, leaving them aglow like rivers of molten lava. At dusk, a surreal orange nimbus backdrops the Coyote Hills. Clouds of smoke glow incandescent red. We watch hot spots flare up higher in the mountains, secondary blazes kindled by embers falling in the tall timber. Soon the entire San Jacinto Range will be ablaze.

The primary strength of Luvaas’s fiction is in the vigor and lucidity of the writing, and these qualities are evident in Beneath the Coyote Hills. If this novel ventures somewhat equivocally into postmodernist whimsy, it is nevertheless an admirable book well worth reading.

The Material Construction of the Book 

There are at least three ways by which we might classify Zachary Thomas Dodson's Bats of the Republic in order to characterize it adequately and evaluate it fairly: as a postapocalyptic narrative, as an example of the "steampunk" subgenre of science fiction, and as a so-called "illuminated" novel. Viewing it from one of these perspectives does not preclude regarding it as a creative joining of these forms (and it is one of the novel's strengths that it does blend them more or less seamlessly), but they each need to be considered carefully before coming to any conclusions about the merits of the novel as a whole.

As a postapocalyptic story it is entirely familiar and conventional. A "Collapse" has occurred, leaving the United States divided into a handful of "city-states," with most of the country reduced to a presumable wasteland the inhabitants of the city-state refer to as "the rot." The city-state in which the story is set is the "Texas Republic," which is characterized by a 1984-ish sort of authoritarian power structure. The protagonist of this story, Zeke Thomas, is in line to become a "Senator" in this power structure, but the story mostly chronicles Zeke's disillusionment with his life in the city-state and his attempt to escape it. There's the usual sort of hyper-surveillance, threatened violence, and underground resistance (in this case literally underground), making for an entirely run-of-the-mill dystopian narrative, just another offering in a genre that itself has become overworked and underinspired.

But Bats of the Republic is not simply a postapocalyptic narrative. It also features many of the conventions and motifs of steampunk, most of them quite explicitly employed. Zeke's story is paired with another set in Victorian America, focused on Zeke's presumed ancestor, Zadock Thomas (the purity of Zeke's "bloodline" is part of the conflict animating his story), who undertakes a mission to deliver a mysterious letter to an equally mysterious general just prior to the Mexican-American War. Zadock works for the Museum of Flying, operated by Joseph Gray (who sends him on the mission), and is courting Gray's daughter, Elswyth. Elswyth's deceased mother, we learn, wrote a novel called The City-State, excerpts from which, it eventually becomes clear, we are reading as the story of Zeke Thomas. It is a futuristic narrative projecting a 19th century vision of what a dystopic future might be like, complete with "advanced" steam-powered technology such as "steamsabres" possessed by law enforcement and a "steammoat" surrounding the city-state to prevent escape.

Probably fans of steampunk would appreciate Dodson's handling of its elements more than I am able to, given my limited familiarity, although the context this provides for the apocalyptic tale makes its pedestrian qualities somewhat easier to accept (and perhaps giving it some interest as a kind of literary anachronism, a version of what Orwell might have produced had he been writing a hundred years earlier). But the narrative type and genre variations offered by Bats of the Republic are further complemented by the textual embellishments that make it an "illuminated" novel. In addition to a multitude of typefaces and considerable variety in its page design, the text includes drawings, maps, diagrams, transcripts, facsimiles of letters, old newspapers, and other documents, as well as a novel-within-the-novel (a lightly fictionalized account of the Gray family), presented as a series of photocopies.

Dodson's approach is similar to that of Mark Danielewski, who similarly enhances his not otherwise very compelling narratives with various visual insertions and typographical manipulations. Bats of the Republic has more narrative substance than the generally insipid "story" underlying the textual machinations of, say, Only Revolution, but in both cases fiction as a literary form and object of aesthetic experience is replaced with an aestheticization of the book itself as object, the material construction of the book replacing our more intangible interaction solely with the written text as the focus of experience. In few cases do the visual embellishments in Bats of Republic really contribute anything that adds to or mediates the written text, most often merely reinforcing the text with literal illustrations, graphic aids, sometimes acting simply as ornaments. The visual elements are certainly well-rendered and the book as whole impressively presented (Dodson is apparently a book designer by trade, in addition to running a small press), but I for one ended up admiring the author's skill at design more than his vision of what a work of innovative fiction might accomplish.

Bats of the Republic or Only Revolution could be usefully contrasted with the work of Steve Tomasula, a writer who superficially seems to share an interest in adding visual devices to written text. But Tomasula's devices are truly integrated with his prose, adding shades of meaning, exploring the limits of the printed page, and extending the scope of prose fiction in ways that neither Danielewski nor Dodson, at least on the evidence of his first novel, seem inclined to pursue. Tomasula's fiction expands our awareness of the boundaries fiction might challenge and still be true to the form. It makes readers consider how rigidly they should adhere to inherited assumptions about the boundaries of the form while also providing a satisfying reading experience. Tomasula tells stories, but they are narratives with intrinsic interest in and of themselves, not rehearsals of familiar plots. The experience of reading Bats of the Republic is more like witnessing a writer attempting to compensate for an otherwise lackluster story with a flashy display of extraneous decoration.

Incorporating visual elements and unsettling our "normal" access to the words on the page are justifiably "experimental" moves for an adventurous writer to make, especially since so much fiction so thoroughly aspires to a kind of visual acuity through its imagery and its tropes. Such a project highlights that aspiration and its limits, and might even encourage an exploration of the possibilities of language that don't rely on the invocation of visual imagery, which can indeed often devolve into flourishes of "fine writing." This is one of the effects of Steve Tomasula's fiction, but a novel like Bats of the Republic at best repeats the experiments of Tomasula, as well as such previous writers as William Gass, Ronald Sukenick, and Raymond Federman, without really sharing their commitment to questioning deep-seated assumptions about the aesthetic purposes of fiction. It adopts those experiments to create a pleasingly designed book that some readers might enjoy but that doesn't really work to enlarge our understanding of how fiction might continue to reinvent itself.

Postmodernism on Steroids

For readers only nominally familiar with postmodern fiction, Daniel James’s The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas might indeed seem offbeat, even “difficult.” With its extreme self-reflexivity—the protagonist’s name is “Daniel James,” and he is trying to write a book—its rhetorical layers—sections about Daniel James in his authorial quest, sections about the titular Ezra Maas, taken from the vestiges of the book Daniel did manage to write, commentary (in footnotes) from the unnamed “editor” who claims to have assembled the book we are actually reading, along with other inserted documents—and its hall of mirrors play with illusion and identity, the novel emphatically shouts “unconventional.” And the novel certainly avoids unconventional storytelling, although it ultimately does offer a more or less linear narrative—if side trips are allowed.

But for more experienced readers of postmodern fiction (reaching back to Beckett and Borges, ahead to Barth and Auster), the novel’s themes and devices likely seem fully recognizable, if not derivative of those earlier writers. Indeed, one could read The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas as almost a parody of the postmodern novel, a comic apotheosis of postmodern tropes and strategies—a prodigious Borgesian labyrinth from which there is no escape, for the characters or the reader. In the end, however, James doesn’t seem to want so much to mock the postmodern novel and its metafictional maneuvers but simply to play its games at full speed, to indulge them fr (even excessively) without much concern to cloak the artifice in pseudo-seriousness. This is postmodernism on steroids.

The novel’s very exorbitance makes it inherently entertaining, at least intermittently—there are times when the actions portrayed start to seem repetitive and the metafictional moves too predictable. These may be the inevitable dangers of any lengthy metafiction that attempts to carry out the logic of its own conceits, but in this case it is also the consequence of the limitations of its subject, or at least the limitations of its co-protagonist, the ostensible object of the authorial doppelganger’s investigation. (At one point in the novel, “Daniel James” meets what he takes to be his own doppelganger, who may or may not be the “real” Daniel James, making the hall of mirrors effect even more vertiginous.) “Daniel James” is writing a biography of the modern Renaissance man, Ezra Maas, who makes the task almost impossible by his secretiveness, which achieves its own apotheosis when he literally disappears, reportedly dead but ultimately a mystery, one that Daniel is determined to solve.

The problem is that Ezra Maas is not a very interesting character. He is known (in the fictional world of the novel) above all as a controversial artist, in some way associated with most of the major developments in contemporary art, from Pop to Performance Art, but he is also a dabbler in literature, science, religion, and other intellectual pursuits. Perhaps this ought to make him an intriguing character, but in effect Maas is made so grandly into everything that he comes off as nothing in particular. This is exacerbated by the paucity of exposure we get to his artwork (mostly descriptions of his weirder “installations”), but really what is emphasized most about Ezra Maas is the mere fact of his elusiveness. Thus finally he is not an enigma but a cipher. He is the literary device by which The Unauthorized Autobiography of Ezra Maas is constructed, but it is hard to sustain interest in a figure so manifestly synthetic, so attenuated by the restrictions of his assigned role.

It is of course possible, within the perceptual field set up by the novel, that Ezra Mass does not actually exist, that he is the product of Daniel’s paranoid imagination, or simply a fictional character the editor has created, along with Daniel (or that the editor and Daniel are one and the same). Thus, to ask that he seem “real,” a “rounded” character is beside the point. It is also conceivable that Ezra Maas is intentionally a sketchy character, since he apparently has spent most of life trying to make himself as much of a public nonentity as possible. If “Daniel James” finally fails to evoke a fully-formed portrait of Ezra Maas, one that takes us beyond the fact of his eccentricity, perhaps this is not a sign of Daniel’s inadequacy as a biographer but the confirmation of his success at getting at the truth about Ezra Maas (which Daniel insists to everyone he meets is his goal). Ezra Maas is indeed simply the sum of all the known facts about him. Otherwise, there is no there there.

Still, the patently contradictory impressions of Ezra Maas given to Daniel by those associated with him (collected in “Ezra Maas: An Oral History” and interspersed throughout the novel—although it is not entirely clear whether these were to be part of Daniel’s biography or have been assembled by the editor from Daniel’s notes) do not so much make Maas into a complex character as so insist on his mutability that all of his conflicting qualities are essentially canceled out, leaving him again mostly a blank. The repetition of this device unavoidably causes the reader to assume that, no matter where Daniel James’s search for the truth takes him next, we will not learn the “truth” because there is no truth about Ezra Maas, only endlessly mutating conjecture. At some point, this becomes merely tedious.

However, the novel’s larger formal conceit manages to sustain interest, and “Daniel James” is a more interesting character than Ezra Maas. One suspects that Daniel is actually less interested in Ezra Maas himself than in managing to write a book, and thus arguably The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas is more an investigation into its own modes of representation, and their arrangement into an integrated work of fiction, than an investigation into the life of a reclusive artist. Its most provocative theme is not the slipperiness of identity or the elusiveness of truth but the configuration of fiction as a literary form. Its most pressing concern is to show how failure can be the grounds for success, how aesthetic order can be produced from disorder. (In this regard, the postmodern novel Ezra Maas most resembles is Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew.) The authorial Daniel James is best represented not by “Daniel James” the would-be biographer but the editor of all the documents that have been gathered to create The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas.

But finally this sort of play with point of view and structural legerdemain are the prototypical features of postmodern fiction, and while Ezra Maas provides a diverting enough variation on the self-reflexive strategies of postmodernism, its elaborate artifice seems little different in kind from that first cultivated by writers such as Barth and Robert Coover. It doesn’t really advance the further possibilities of self-reflexivity as a literary technique or introduce any particular formal innovations. (It is most accurate to call The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas an epistolary novel, a form that goes back to the very beginnings of the novel, and the extension of the form to the assemblage of various kinds of documents is relatively common in contemporary fiction.) Most palpably, it seems more a summing-up of the paradigmatic practices of postmodern fiction, an anatomy of its fundamental assumptions, than an attempt to revise or reinvigorate it to better fit with changed cultural circumstances.

The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas is not necessarily an aesthetic failure: its use of the compiled document form is deft enough—although the editor’s footnotes do at times seem superfluous—and the novel does evoke an effectively creepy tone as Daniel becomes more and more suspicious of the entire shady apparatus built around Ezra Maas by the “Maas Foundation” and literally starts to fear for his safety. The novel does not take itself too seriously, making it easier to accept its more prankish qualities. But the sense it leaves that finally nothing much is at stake does prompt reflection on the remaining value of the term “postmodern” in identifying certain works of fiction that are blatantly unconventional, especially in their efforts to “bare the device.” Perhaps this mode has entered its mannerist period, destined to repeat the same strategies and gestures. Perhaps the way forward for adventurous or experimental fiction lies not in the flamboyant antics of Ezra Maas (or the novels of a writer like Mark Danielewski), but in more subtle reimaginings of form and a renewed attention to the yet untapped resources of language.