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(Not really a blog about) Pynchon in Public Day, 2026

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Unless my math or some established facts are incorrect, Thomas Pynchon turned 89 today.

As far as I can tell, the first time I posted something Pynchon-related on Pynchon’s birthday (May 8, obv), was a portrait by James Jean, back in 2013. The next year I directly recognized the date of his birth in a round-up post, and the year after that I recognized what has been semi-formalized into “Pynchon in Public Day.” And then pretty much every year since then I’ve done something or other. In 2018, I had the gall to rank Pynchon’s novels, even though I hadn’t managed to finish Bleeding Edge at that point. I made a correction in August last year, ranking all the novels to date, and then felt the need to correct a list published at The Guardian later that month.

In Sept. 2025 Paul Thomas Anderson’s film One Battle After Another hit theaters. Based loosely (but tightly enough that anyone who read the novel would recognize it in the film) on Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, One Battle After Another was a hit — at least critically and culturally (it recouped its expenses and earned more than any other PTA film, but still wasn’t a mega-hit I guess — but it did much better than PTA’s adaptation of Inherent Vice, which I also loved, which had a very limited cultural impact). One Battle After Another won a bunch of meaningless awards. I loved it!

A few weeks later, Pynchon’s novel Shadow Ticket, a late career treat, hit shelves. I loved it too! In the meantime, I noticed that my favorite local bookstore (at both of its locations) was stocked with new Pynchon volumes which seemed to sell extraordinarily well. The Pynchon Reddit, once a somewhat quiet space to share analyses and tidbits, expanded like an unbelted belly filled with belches. It now suffers from fan art and dudes who feel the need to cast film versions of the Pynchon books they’ve read so far, and endless “What should I read next?” posts.

This is all pretty fucking great! I like that Pynchon’s audience has expanded, that his books are selling, and that people are reading them. And so well yeah — do we still need a Pynchon in Public Day?

Sure, why the hell not. It was always about fun, I think.

I didn’t do any kind of Pynchon post on 8 May 2025. My best friend of the past three decades died unexpectedly in his sleep on 5 May 2025 and I was a wreck. At what I suppose was his wake (a slow, rolling, evolving open house thing where old friends stayed at our house and drank and laughed and cried), I gave one of my dearest friends a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow because he said he wanted to read it. (I suggested V. to start but he wanted the big boy.) Another friend pointed out that there were like fifteen copies of Moby-Dick in the house and generously unencumbered me of a surplus Norton Critical Edition. (Mike, Dave, I know you don’t read this blog anymore, but have you cracked into those giants?)

I think if I had written something for Pynchon in Public Day last year, it would have been about the anticipation for Shadow Ticket and One Battle After Another. But I ended up writing about those things anyway, and so did a lot of other people.

If I was going to write a blog for Pynchon in Public Day, which I am not doing now, I might try to situate Shadow Ticket into his oeuvre (easy; it fits chronologically between Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow; it is also B-tier Pynchon. If I had to rank it I’d put it above Vineland and Inherent Vice, at least today. Ask me tomorrow, who knows).

But this isn’t a blog about Pynchon in Public Day.

 

On Antoine Volodine’s novel The Monroe Girls, an abject post-apocalyptic romantic comedy

Edwin TurnerLeave a comment

Each time I’ve written about an Antoine Volodine novel, I’ve dithered and dallied and despaired over neatly summarizing his expansive post-exotic project. It seems almost impossible to write about one of his novels without discussing how that novel fits within a robust textual (anti-)system. My abortive prefatory attempts might start with pointing out that “Antoine Volodine” is itself a fiction; the pen name is one of several heteronyms taken by a person whose “real” name may or may not be Jean Desvignes. I’d probably then point out that his works are crowded with writers, dissidents, rebels, narrators, all speaking after the apocalypse, and sometimes even after death. And then I’d likely try to somehow encapsulate the intertextuality of Volodine’s post-exotic project, which project is closer, I’d likely claim, to Fernando Pessoa’s or Søren Kierkegaard’s use of heteronyms than, say, an easier corollary, like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Tolkien’s Middle Earth. (I’d probably bring up Roberto Bolaño too.)

And then I would delete all that shit and just write about the fucking novel.

That was the deal when I wrote last year about Mevlido’s Dreams (2007) or the year before that when I riffed on Radiant Terminus (2014). I loved those books, although “loved” might not be the right word.

(I felt much freer writing about Writers (2010), the first Volodine fiction I read. After I read Writers I read more Volodine novels and began to better “understand” his project and consequently felt more a stifling self-imposed pressure to preface any piece of writing about a Volodine fiction with the kind of ridiculous swollen agglomeration of sweaty word salad that I’ve thus far heaped up on your plate, unasked for, dear reader.)

All of which is a ridiculous way to begin writing about The Monroe Girls, Volodine’s 2021 novel which is now available in English translation thanks to Alyson Waters (and publisher Archipelago Books).

What I want to say is something like: The Monroe Girls reads like a romantic comedy. An abject post-apocalyptic romantic comedy. An abject post-apocalyptic romantic comedy with a schizophrenic coward as its hero, a hero who anxiously vomits in pretty much every chapter he’s in.

The Monroe Girls is grim and gross, like all of Volodine’s stuff, but it also has an endearing, goofy, slapstick quality that ambles alongside a romantic, if insane, longing. And the reason that I’ll keep all my prefatory bullshit in this time is, like, I think some familiarity with what Volodine is doing across these books helps clarify why The Monroe Girls, while very much part of his oppressive, dread-soaked, dilapidated post-historical world, also feels like an outlier in its heightened (though still deadpan) humor and romantic flourishes.

I will call in a ringer to provide the context I think my reader needs. I will borrow the authority of no less than the great translator David Bellos, who describes Volodine’s project so clearly in a 2012 essay:

Roughly speaking, all Volodinian literature comes from after the final collapse and defeat of the revolution. What revolution? It is never directly identified with an event catalogued in world history, but the movement to which all narrators have or had belonged prior to their capture, incarceration or expulsion has general features that are quite clear. The movement was internationalist, egalitarian, anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist. It has no hope of ever making a difference anymore, save that fidelity to its ideas is what keeps all Volodine’s friends (his characters) in their cells and psychiatric wards.

…Wherever you venture in the Volodinian universe–jungle, steppe, city, slum–things are a mess. The environment is degraded, resources are scarce, buildings are dilapidated, equipment is either non-existent or in an advanced state of decay, and no productive activities appear to be going on at all. Perhaps, outside of the camps, prisons, wards and detention centers whence come the works of post-exotic literature there may still be structures that resemble normal life, but they impinge only briefly and aggressively into the carceral world of Volodine’s characters.

…One of the more striking features of Volodine’s narrator-characters is that some of them, for at least some of the time, are dead. Others are insane, and others are suffering (and aware that they are suffering) from amnesia. These partly fantastical premises (that is to say, partly characteristic of fantastic literature) are not just literary tropes. The post-exotic world from which Volodine reports pays little of our normal heed to the distinctions between memory and imagination, sanity and madness, or life and death.

So all of what Bellos describes there is true too for The Monroe Girls.

I used words like goofy and humor above, and said that The Monroe Girls is a romantic comedy. A brief description of the plot would not support such claims. Here goes:

Breton is our schizophrenic narrator. He hangs out with himself in a nearly-abandoned psychiatric compound where he spies (via special oneiric goggles and his own telepathy) on the “daydreams and adventures of the dead.” Specifically, the dead he spies on are Monroe and his titular girls. A former Party leader, Monroe was “executed once upon a time for deviationism.” In “the black space” he now operates from, Monroe molds his girls into revenant commandos, “formidable, beautiful, tough, brave, intelligent…the last egalitarian warriors.” He sends them back into the world of the living, the vanguard “armed faction of the future Party for whom he’d hoped and prayed since his execution.” The Party is anxious about this return, and enlists Kaytel, a kind of police chief to force Breton to track and monitor the Monroe girls. Unfortunately for the Party, it turns out that Breton was — is?— “madly in love” with one of these girls, a certain Rebecca Rausch. Our lovefool will do what he can to preserve Rebecca and the other girls, even as the oppressive Central Committee threatens (and delivers) violence upon him. The Monroe Girls progresses as a series of misadventures between Breton (and Breton), the various Monroe girls, and Kaytel, who ends up an oddly sympathetic character.

I don’t want to spoil too much — the fun and thrill of this novel is in its odd but brisk pacing and strange eruptions of humor — but I feel the need to share a climactic moment which is simultaneously heroic and ironic, romantic and mordant, as if Volodine inflates the revolutionary rhetoric simply to puncture it. Here is a scene, late in the novel; Rebecca, accompanied by Breton (and Breton) makes a “declaration of general policy…composed to recite before the final offensive…to convince the masses of the validity of the current action” (the “current action” being revolutionary violence):

“Workers, peasants!” she began. “Obscure members and members of no rank of the hospital personnel. Mental dissidents! Organic dissidents! Earthlings without a party and survivors! Schizophrenics and patients treated like cattle! Misguided torturers! Futureless thugs! Ordinary Party sympathizers! Dead soldiers! Living dead!”

Because I recognized myself in a few of the categories she was reeling off, I went to sit quietly in front of her, on a cement milestone that was wet but at the right height. I was pleased that someone, in a solemn speech, was taking into account the existence of people like me. Breton hesitated for ten seconds then sidled up beside me.

“She’s raving,” he whispered.

“Shut up,” I instructed.

One of the novel’s central formal conceits is Breton’s schizophrenia, which is less a psychological detail than another way the text refuses stable narrative position. The Breton/Breton split is not corrected or explained away; it persists as a structural doubling of perspective, in which even the “I” cannot remain singular. Early in the novel, the effect can be wonderfully confusing. Indeed, the novel’s second chapter reads like a revision or rewrite or reimagining of the novel’s first chapter. It also seems clear to the reader that the divided or doubled Breton exists within the narrative framework just as “realistically” as the single or solitary Breton. The “second” Breton is never remarked upon by other characters, but there is also nothing in the story that suggests that the double is merely a figment. The “other” Breton is just as valid an entity as any of the Bardo creatures that float through the Volodineverse.

Primarily, these Bardo creatures are, like, dead folks — not zombies, just, like, not living. Obviously there are the Monroe girls, who emerge from the “black and floating territory” to wreak havoc on the Party. It’s key to point out that they are flesh and blood, and Volodine renders them (and their armor, equipment, and weaponry) like action heroes or even comic-book heroes. At the same time, they are sleepwalkers, the spirit of failed revolution returned to the earth.

The Monroe girls contribute to the world of the dead, killing Party enforcers. One such episode is particularly comic; the dead don’t die right away in Volodineville; no, they’ll linger a bit, hang out, do a little investigating even. In one of my favorite bits of the novel, a pair of freshly-dead cops search an apartment. On the stairway, a long-dead but still-bickering couple snipe at the cops and each other. “It truly is a city of the dead,” one of the Monroe girls observes.

Intimate doubling pervades The Monroe Girls: the aforementioned dead cops; the old dead couple; Breton and Rebecca; Breton and Breton. Throughout his work, Volodine has often foregrounded loyalty to comrades as a virtue, one to be practiced even as the world turns to shit. The Monroe Girls imagines comradeship in different forms — bureaucratic, idealistic, romantic, and even sexual. There’s a strange horniness to some of the novel that points to sensual generation, an impulse I haven’t detected in other Volodine novels. Consider Kaytel’s other partner, Party leader Dame Patmos:

Despite being well over the hump of fifty, Dame Patmos remained attractive. Her face had grown wider, her flesh swollen, but the harmony of her features and even the lascivious proportions of her body had changed accordingly and today were still practically intact. The excess fat barely erased the memory of the radiant thirty-year-old woman she had been. She had metamorphosed into an enormous female mammal of fifty, voluptuous and still at ease with herself. She was aware she still had seductive powers if she put in some effort.

Volodine’s description of the sexual tension between Kaytel and Dame Patmos ironizes and undercuts any horny swelling though:

The two of them remained facing each other without a word for a long moment, like in a Taiwanese movie under terrible French influence, or like in a post-exotic tale right before a scene of criminal violence.

I love how Volodine doubles his simile here. The first simile points outward, toward a recognizable filmic register; the second turns inward. Both similes are rooted in the image of narrative, as if the scene can still be held together by recognizable frames — cinema, genre, the tale.

But Volodine’s narrators don’t get to stay safely inside those frames for long. The book keeps staging moments as if they belong to a legible scene of erotic or emotional intensity, and then breaking that scene from within, almost immediately, with something bodily and unassimilable. What looks like stylized tension tips into leakage, exhaustion, or violence, as if narrative itself can’t contain the material it is trying to organize.

Even romance, even the faint possibility of sensual connection, only ever holds for a second before the body insists on itself again. Volodine’s writing recalls and restages Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection (discussed at length in Powers of Horror). Abjection here is not simply disgust but the moment the seams that keep the illusion of a stable, coherent “I” intact give way: when inside and outside, self and other, life and death begin to leak into one another. What should stay expelled returns: odor, fatigue, nausea, proximity. Here’s Breton (and Breton’s) description:

I began to think about death. It was a question we rarely raised, Breton and I. The idea of life made us vomit. It returned constantly, this idea, and it startled us, fueled our hiccups and the various fluids we coughed up. It was extremely difficult to live, to survive, to continue this long passage through the universal madness, the universal schizophrenia of the camp, to face the hostility of all and sundry day after day. It was extremely difficult and pointless to take part in this slow obstacle course, to sense within ourself deep mental and physical decline, to feel our bodies grow exhausted, overcome with awful pains and awful smells. It was extremely wearisome to be obliged to move forward at all costs, with at most the perspective of a next step, a next chapter in a book whose end escaped us and would always escape us. Extremely difficult, thus painful, pointless, and punishing. Death for us was merely a neighboring territory into which we’d venture naturally… [Death] did not really exist for us and, in any case, never had we imagined going there for good.

Oh shit wait did I say that this novel was, like, a romantic comedy? I think it still is, somehow. Or maybe it’s a romantic comedy after romance, after comedy, after the illusion that selves or worlds could ever remain coherent long enough to sustain those genres.

I do know that I laughed a lot; I do know that this one felt somehow more, I don’t know, concentrated than the sci-fi sprawl of Radiant Terminus or Mevlido’s Dreams, more linear than the fragmentary (although complete) works Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven (1998), Minor Angels (1999), Writers, and Bardo or Not Bardo (2004).

Maybe it’s because of Breton’s sweetness, so unexpected in a Volodine fiction, so contrasting with his intense abjection — how sweet his love for Rebecca feels. (Of course there isn’t one stable Breton in this novel, so maybe it’s my mood we’re seeing here.)

And I’ll add that the novel’s last chapter, “Annex,” has been one of the funniest things I’ve read all year. Throughout The Monroe Girls, characters are frequently having to attest to which faction of the Party they sympathize with. “Annex” is a list of “The 343 Factions of the Party in its Glory Days.” Some of the factions have cool names (“The Black Bonnets,” “The Partisans of the Red Lotus”), some have straightforward or even clinical names (“The Leninists of the Fifth Day,” “The Monroe-Absolutists”), but as the list grows, the names grow more comical, more absurd — “The Disappointed by Polpotism,” “The Chinese Takeout,” or, I think my favorite, “Frankenstein’s Fiancées.”

Last on the list is “The Faction ‘This is the end, my friend, the end,'” and recent posts on Twitter and Instagram suggest that Volodine’s post-exotic project may indeed be coming to some kind of conclusion this summer: eleven books, published simultaneously by eleven different publishers, all under the heteronym Infernus Iohannes. Strangely appropriate, I guess. Volodine’s fictions are not a discrete, stable literary system; the post-exotic novels are the proliferating afterlife of voices, identities, factions, and failures. Even its ending arrives as multiplication. Great stuff.

The Monroe Girls by Antoine Volodine in translation by Alyson Waters is now available from Archipelago Books.

Bring on the breakdowns | On Nancy Lemann’s cult novel, Lives of the Saints

Edwin TurnerLeave a comment

Let us begin with confession: until a review copy of the new NYRB reissue landed in my mailbox a few months ago, I had never heard of Nancy Lemann or her 1985 debut novel Lives of the Saints. I didn’t know its cult reputation. I didn’t know its sharp-eyed narrator, Louise, or her object of fascination, Claude Collier. I didn’t know its portrait of New Orleans in the 1980s, or its tragicomic rendering of the breakdowns and crack-ups of established Garden District families. I didn’t know how fucking good this novel is.

Here is, roughly, what the novel is “about”: Lives of the Saints follows post-collegiate Louise as she chronicles the unraveling lives of the city’s old families, especially the Colliers and their elusive, magnetic prodigal boy Claude. Louise is simultaneously an insider who has grown up around these families, but also positioned somehow as an outsider looking in, untethered to her own family. As the novel ambles to a tragic climax, Louise’s observations on the Colliers emerge as a kind of witnessing, a kind of love. The novel is funny and odd and deeply compelling, great sentence after great sentence, told in Louise’s bright, frank cadence.

Lemann establishes her narrator’s sharp, funny mind immediately. Here’s the novel’s opening paragraph:

All in all, Henry Laines’ wedding was one of the worst events in my experience, tragic in society. Everyone that I have ever known was there, plus a party of out-of-towners whose broad Memphis and Charleston accents shocked me, although we were the same, Americans far from that hub of the universe along the East Coast.

I could sit around and unpack this opening salvo all day, but instead I’ll simply offer that it hooked me from the get-go. Those are some great sentences. We see here Louise’s mind thumbing through categories — fast, blunt, oddly formal, a bit acid. She quickly diagnoses Henry Laines’ nuptials: “Everyone had breakdowns at this wedding…Everyone was too drunk. Everyone was unglued.” This breakdown, this ungluing is the sociopsychic fabric of balmy New Orleans.

Louise’s phrasing tilts toward faux-romantic capital-letter verdicts, as when she notes that parties like the Laines wedding are known to “Bring On Breakdowns.” She is constantly formalizing this loose, chaotic world for her audience, and this “Very Long Party” at the novel’s outset is a fun, sweltering, oppressive initiation into the Garden District’s sweaty, decaying aristocracy. Drunken bridegroom Henry screams; revelers scream back. The party works its way into a loud, sweating organism that refuses to die. An all-caps “I LOVE YOU, GODDAMNIT!” rings out –devotion or threat? Louise watches it all with fanatic steadiness.

Claude Collier steps into this chaos and subtly changes its moral temperature. Lemann introduces him obliquely. Louise observes Claude, and then she observes how she observes Claude. “I noticed that,” she tells the reader (and no one else), after seeing Claude give (broken) Henry “a funny, somewhat pitying look” across the room. Claude’s own assessment is equally understated: “I think Henry is falling apart.” That diagnosis soon expands: “Everyone is falling apart.” These declarations are delivered like weather reports. But there’s nothing glib here. Indeed, Claude is a moral center in the chaotic universe Louise relates, and even if he himself is a victim of that chaos, “Claude Collier made the world seem kind.”

Kindness in Lives of the Saints evinces as labor, habit, reflex. Louise describes Claude’s “indiscriminate kindness” as “the meaning of generosity.” Mary Grace, Henry’s bride, remarks that Claude is the sort of person who “would give an ant a funeral.” Louise intuits that it’s Claude’s patience, his ears, that allow for radical kindness:

He could take chaos — though not his own — and turn it into a calm simplicity.

It was that he listened so intently, that he understood. He was not lofty, or he did not tend to philosophize. It was not like that. It was the air about him, gentle and uncorrupt, some steady, noble thing. He was constant. He was steadfast. If you were his friend, you were his friend for life.

Claude’s kindness and radical attention serve as a moral center at the core of Lives of the Saints. This is not to say that Lemann’s novel drifts into any stodgy piety. She grounds her novel in a delicious mix of the concrete and the absurd. For instance, Claude leaves physical traces of himself wherever he goes, littering dining room tables and barroom countertops with napkin shreds and chewed straws. He wears a “ludicrous apparatus called Acqua-Pac, for hangovers” like a ridiculous crown. His family speaks in surreal domestic riddles (“Are there any banana brains in this room?”) and greets disaster with surreal, charming, mordant clarity:

“I’m falling apart,” Claude announced calmly, deadpan, standing melodramatically in the middle of the room.

I laughed.

“She’s falling apart,” he said, pointing at me.

Mrs. Collier regarded him intently, despairingly.

“This family is in crisis,” Mrs. Collier said in her family’s curious deadpan.

“Now, now, Jane,” said Mr. Collier, “let’s all keep calm,” he said.

“I’m calm,” said Mrs. Collier.

“Let’s all keep very, very calm,” said Mr. Collier.

“We’re calm,” said Claude.

“This family is made up of emotional cripples,” said Mrs. Collier.

“It’s good to be an emotional cripple,” said Mr. Collier cheerfully.

“I like being an emotional cripple. It’s the only way to be. An emotional cripple.” He puffed on his cigar.

Claude’s kindness expands well past the venerable Garden District. He spends time with “wino lunatics…racestrack habits…other weird types of wrecks,” and shares money and booze alike with these outsiders. He frequents the Wakamba Club among “wrecked types of weirdos,” which, like, of course he is one too, a wrecked type of weirdo. Louise doesn’t romanticize this weirdo world; she simply tracks where Claude’s attention goes, and how easily it breaks the boundaries other less-wrecked folks (which is to say, normies) rely on for order’s sake.

Louise’s own relentless attention simultaneously anchors and propels the novel. She notices everything: shirt collars, cracked voices, unnamed rituals, sweaty seersucker suits, baggy Bermuda shorts, gin and tonic and lemons and limes, and the way certain families require constant crises to keep functioning. Late in the book she names her vocation plainly: “It is this passing parade which I chronicle.”

Midway through Lives of the Saints, a calamity strikes the Collier household, reframing the novel’s emotional scale. Lemann treats the tragedy less as a hoary plot point than as a shift in air pressure. The hyperbolic spectacle of breakdowns at the Laines’ wedding registered as public choreography. After the Colliers’ tragedy, the world narrows to something more private, stark, and sincere. Louise tries to comfort her dearest friend Claude:

It was his way to claim that he had never known despair, but I believe he had, even before this. I think it followed him down the green boulevards, and was his frequent companion. It told him that his desires were futile and that it is futile to hope or expect things, that hope is a tinsel thing which vainly flaps its tinsel wing, and told Claude therefore to be strong, alone. “Repair it by flight,” said St. Augustine. But no man can Escape Himself.

Nevertheless, Claude will try to escape himself. He boards a train for New York and then keeps going, carrying his grief, habits, sweetness, and jittery competence into colder air. Up in the Yankee North, Claude turns his restless attention to projects that sound half crackpot, half plausible, including “two compass-like instruments.” Our prodigal kid would like to find his way. It is both funny and oddly moving that the same man who cannot stop compulsively shredding napkins to bits also cannot stop composing lists of “ideas,” as if invention might serve the same purpose as manners, a way to keep calm, a way to keep other people from falling apart.

Such moments are sad but never sour. Lemann’s control of tone moves the novel’s mood between comedy and grief without glib sentimentality or maudlin posturing. Even at the edge of catastrophe, Claude remains Claude: fixing drinks, asking questions too blunt to be polite, taking the city’s most formal rituals as occasions for his deadpan curiosity. Consider the following mordantly comic scenario, which captures the South’s slow-draining, stifling decadence:

Claude was still sitting in the kitchen, fixing drinks for whoever came in and striking up weird conversations with them. He was talking to the undertaker.

It happened that the undertaker was a darkly glamorous twenty-nine-year-old man born in Paris. The funeral home was the family business, generations-old, elaborate and sumptuous, and the city’s oldest, a society funeral home. They were a society family. Claude had beckoned the undertaker into the kitchen, saying he wanted to “talk shop.” Then he asked the undertaker what kind of funeral he would like to have himself, after seeing so many other people’s funerals, and what kind of burial he would like to have. The glamorous undertaker said, “I would like to be exploded.”

“You mean, exploded, like with dynamite, at the funeral?” said Claude.

“Yes.”

This was Claude’s kind of person.

If that don’t float your boat I don’t know what to do for you.

“Tell me about your breakdowns…That’s what we’re all about down here…Breakdowns,” Claude says early in the novel, repeating the novel’s byword. And, as we might expect in a novel about breakdowns, Lives of the Saints refuses the satisfactions of a resolved plot. It frays, wanders, digresses, and vanishes into phone calls and absences. Lemann ends her first novel in the kind of disappearance that will resonate with anyone who’s loved someone who could not quite remain present. The final moments are actually a bit devastating, as I revisit them now. It all feels terribly real, like real life, with none of the teleological neatness of an ordered plot. The story does not “conclude” so much as it breaks down into the lived texture of drift, obsession, loyalty, unfinished longing.

There is more Nancy Lemann to read though, and even more of Claude Collier too; he shows up in her new novel The Oyster Diaries, which is being published concurrently by NYRB. Her follow up to Lives of the Saints, the journalistic not-novel Ritz of the Bayou has also been reissued (by Hub City Press). I’d love to see reissues of later novels like Sportsman’s Paradise and The Fiery Pantheon (which, if I’m correct feature some Collier characters) hit shelves too, and my guess is that we’ll reprints sooner rather than later.

I hope I’ve offered enough of a taste of Lemann’s lovely sentences to entice you. You might hear in those sentences crisp snap and mania for cadence reminiscent of works edited by the cult-editor-maniac-author Gordon Lish, who championed and edited Lemann’s novel at Knopf. Lemann’s gallows hilarity, heat and wreckage, and relentlessly charismatic prose also seem cousin to Barry Hannah (another Southerner who came into Lish’s orbit). Perhaps the most common point of comparison is Walker Percy, the obvious local patron saint, whose sharp comedy and moral weather occupy a similar space. (A “lovely nutty book about a lovely nutty girl,” Percy remarked of Lives of the Saints. He was apparently mentor and hero to Lemann.) I was also reminded very much of Whit Stillman’s first film Metropolitan while reading Saints, with its (Metropolitan’s) talky, mannered young elites moving through ritualized parties, cyphers afflicted with their own malaise and decay. Lemann’s novel reads like its inverse. Stillman’s world is winter, drawing rooms , self-conscious discourse; Lemann’s is summer and seersucker, where kindness is something you practice,  not a pose.

Maybe most of all, Saints reminded me of the intense yet nebulous cloud of wonderful memories I have of New Orleans, a city I’ve returned to again and again in my life at different ages — strange and alien and warm and comforting, sweltering, thumping, alive in its own rhythms and ecstasies, its joys accessible to anyone willing to attend, to taste, to listen. I loved Lives of the Saints; I finished it and insisted my wife read it immediately; she loved it too. I hope you will love it too. Very highly recommended.

“This demon is capitalism. Special Ability: Ravenous hunger” | On Thomas Kendall’s cybernoir novel How I Killed the Universal Man

Edwin TurnerLeave a comment

Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man is a near-future sci-fi novel working squarely in the cybernoir tradition of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. Like Gibson, Kendall constructs a world where corporate systems saturate daily life and set the limits of perception. Like PKD, Kendall foregrounds reality’s instability, where what is seen, felt, and remembered can’t be trusted as one’s own. Kendall reworks the cybernoir lineage through a critique of media culture and wellness technology, showing how late-capitalist systems present themselves as therapeutic while covertly expanding their nefarious authority. 

Our hero John Lakerman is a journalist for donkeyWolf, a “self-consciously edgy multi-social new(s) presence with a polyamorous approach to truth and ethics” that profits from “Attention Disordering Content.” From the outset, Lakerman understands himself less as an agent than as a conduit. He describes himself as “merely language, an impoverished language uninhabited by being,” and just “a data leak.” This diminished sense of self becomes explicit in one of the novel’s most telling admissions: “He had always wanted to be a robot…He’d always wanted to be a machine.” Lakerman’s desire isn’t so much a nihilist fantasy as it is an adaptive response to a world that already treats him as a tool, mere equipment.

Lakerman is sent to Miami to investigate Noumenon, a designer drug whose name strikes him as empty philosophical branding, “self-consciously clever and a total misunderstanding of the concept.” It’s a gonzo gig: he’ll take the drug himself and “report back from the other side of its meaning.” Under the supervision of Dr. Andrea Christoff at Lifepax (“here to carry you when nature can’t”), he enters a controlled Noumenon trial before exploring the Miami club circuit, where the drug circulates freely.

Crossing (literally) the threshold, Lakerman reads “cryptic messages” in the movement of club-goers’ bodies: “What they might see meant everything. What they could see was possibility. What they would see was another matter.” Capital, via biotech, mediates, manages, and tiers perception, parceled in preset doses. Kendall’s hyperheated dystopian Miami, a landscape of “block-shaped universes” and horizons “constructed by deprivation,” gives that logic spatial form. Space is segmented, experience preformatted, and Lakerman’s role as “reporter” starts to look like another interface the system ventriloquizes.

Lakerman leaves Miami, but the cityscape’s stratified logic stays with him. Back in London, news of a mass-shooting in Miami finds its way into his feed, and the “quaintness of a non-global catastrophe” showing up there strikes the jaded Lakerman as unusual. A too-specific detail from the report finds him returning to his last story on Noumenon, and his investigation widens into a corporate network linking Lifepax to the now-defunct Phenom Games. What began as a gonzo drug story becomes an inquiry into how experience itself is engineered, circulated, and monetized.

Lakerman’s investigation leads him to UbIQ, a biotech platform offering implants framed as “an advanced biometrics wellness program and early health warning system.” The smooth clinical reassurance of corporate jargon masks UbIQ’s reality as a tool of continuous emotional surveillance: “It registers how much you cry, when you cry, and at what.” As Lakerman encounters UbIQ (the name a loud, clear echo of PKD’s 1969 novel Ubik), the ground of proof gives way beneath him. Official records deny what he remembers, corroborating traces disappear, and even his own logs refuse to stabilize events into something demonstrably real.

He keeps investigating though, and the novel shifts to question not simply what Lakerman can know, but what kind of system makes knowing structurally dependent on corporate infrastructures and then repackages that dependence as “care.” Kendall distills this systemic condition, the internalization of capitalist infrastructure as perception, feeling, and “wellness,” into a blunt image of saturation: “Like plastic in fish, the way everything has a little capitalism mixed in.” Control arrives as smart drugs, implants framed as therapy, games that train attention and identity. It surrounds the self and takes up residence inside it.

A Boschian mural on the side of a church (titled a bit-on-the-nosedly Allegorical Futures) states the book’s critique outright: “This demon is capitalism. Special Ability: Ravenous hunger.” The mural is signed T.OR who Kendall later links to the game-world Lakerman is pulled toward. The mural names the engine; the game teaches how to live with it: “HIKTUM is a game that teaches you how to be multiple.” That “multiplicity” isn’t Whitman’s multitudinous freedom but training: become flexible, divisible, easier to manage. The endpoint is the Universal Man, “a thing [that] cannot be rendered but can be leased.” The novel’s late refrain “Nobody survives love” marks the cost of a world where even intimacy is folded into the logic of extraction.

Lakerman’s trajectory isn’t a personal tragedy so much as a case study in a world where media platforms, pharmaceuticals, and “wellness” tech jointly manage what can be felt, remembered, and proved — and where that management manufactures people who want to be managed. Kendall leaves Lakerman’s final position unresolved, but the arc is clear. The wish to become a machine (seamless, efficient, immune) collapses into submission to the systems already in place. In HIKTUM, control isn’t the existential threat of abstract violence, but rather what we feed to our heads and bodies. The diagnosis is that we don’t experience these systems as coercion. We submit to them as upgrades.

Readers drawn to cybernoir’s paranoiac pressures will get a kick out of Kendall’s transhumanist noir, which I’ve failed to describe the weirdness of here. How I Killed the Universal Man also makes a strong case for seeking out Whiskey Tit, an independent press committed to weirdness. Check it out.

On Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

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Robert Coover’s sophomore novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is in print again via New York Review Books, with a new introduction by Ben Marcus. First published in 1968, The Universal Baseball Association connects the comparatively grounded late modernism of Coover’s first novel The Origin of the Brunists (1966) to the more overtly experimental postmodern fiction he became best known for — works like The Public Burning (1977), Spanking the Maid (1982), and Gerald’s Party (1986). In this light, The Universal Baseball Association makes an accessible point of entry into Coover’s oeuvre. (Coeuvre? Sorry. Sorry!) The Universal Baseball Association offers the conceptual daring and formal play of Coover’s mature work framed within a more emotionally-accessible narrative. Along with the metatextual fables collected in Pricksongs & Descants, it makes a strong starting place for readers coming to Coover for the first time. And unlike the zany and morally-elastic stories in Pricksongs & Descants (and a lot of Coover’s later work), UBA retains a realistic emotional core that many readers look for. It gives us someone to care about.

That someone is Henry Waugh, an accountant who spends his nights running a solitary baseball league of his own invention. He conjures his Universal Baseball Association with dice, elaborate scorecards, and meticulous record books — but most of all imagination. Henry’s is a coherent, vibrant world, a closed system with its own history, genealogy, politics, and language.

From the novel’s outset we sense that Henry’s game has already surpassed the imaginative confines of a normie’s pastime. Now in its fifty-sixth season, The Universal Baseball Association is an immersive, generative world, rich in folklore, mythos, culture. We also see (as those around him can see) that his  fantasyland threatens to subsume him entirely. Our boy is hardly excelling at his day job, as his concerned coworker Lou points out. Much of the novel’s early tension comes from Henry’s attempt to bridge his fantasy world to the “real” world. But his endeavors to recruit others to the game fail.

Still, Henry tries. Early on, he describes his project to his “old friend” Hettie, a “neighborhood B-girl” he takes home from a dive bar after a few (too many) drinks:

“I’m an auditor for a baseball association.”

“I didn’t know they had auditors, too,” she said.

“Oh, yes. I keep financial ledgers for each club, showing cash receipts and disbursements…And a running journalization of the activity, posting of it all into permanent record books… Politics, too. Elections. Team captains. Club presidents. And every four years, the Association elects a Chancellor, and I have to keep an eye on that.”

Inebriated Henry boasts, fumbles, and flirts with Hettie; the scene is pure Coover — manic horniness wrapped in nerdiness (or maybe vice versa). Henry continues his awkward seduction with this zinger:

He took a grip on her behind. “People die, you know.”

It excites Hettie! And sure, hypothetical deaths on a game boy’s ledger are, like, sexy. It’s Henry’s idealism that really soars here though. He describes the hunt for perfection that drives his exquisite archival project:

…what a wonderful rare thing it is to do something, no matter how small a thing, with absolute unqualified utterly unsurpassable perfection! …to do a thing so perfectly that, even if the damn world lasted forever, nobody could ever do it better, because you had done it as well as it could possibly be done. …In a way, you know, it’s even sad somehow, because, well, it’s done, and all you can hope for after is to do it a second time.

How sad is Henry’s satisfied melancholy? — or is it melancholic satisfaction? A thing done perfectly is finished, fixed, closed. The league’s record books promise such permanence, but in doing so foreclose living possibility into completed fact. What could happen becomes only what has happened.

Henry tries to counter that closure by designing a system that lives, generates, and regenerates. He rejects games that repeat themselves mechanically, like pinball, which he dismisses as “a static game, utterly lacking the movement, grace, and complexity of real baseball.” Instead, he builds a structure governed by controlled randomness. It’s worth quoting at length some of Henry’s process to give you a taste of his rational mania:

When he’d finally decided to settle on his own baseball game, Henry had spent the better part of two months just working with the problem of odds and equilibrium points in an effort to approximate that complexity. Two dice had not done it. He’d tried three, each a different color, and the 216 different combinations had provided the complexity, all right, but he’d nearly gone blind trying to sort the colors on each throw. Finally, he’d compromised, keeping the three dice, but all white, reducing the total number of combinations to 56, though of course the odds were still based on 216. To restore—and, in fact, to intensify —the complexity of the multicolored method, he’d allowed triple ones and sixes—1-1-1 and 6-6-6—to trigger the more spectacular events, by referring the following dice throw to what he called his Stress Chart, also a three-dice chart, but far more dramatic in nature than the basic ones. Two successive throws of triple ones and sixes were exceedingly rare—only about three times in every two entire seasons of play on the average—but when it happened, the next throw was referred, finally, to the Chart of Extraodinary Occurrences, where just about anything from fistfights to fixed ball games could happen. These two charts were what gave the game its special quality, making it much more than just a series of hits and walks and outs. Besides these, he also had special strategy charts for hit-and-run plays, attempted stolen bases, sacrifice bunts, and squeeze plays, still others for deciding the ages of rookies when they came up, for providing details of injuries and errors, and for determining who, each year, must die.

That final detail, must die, is crucial. Mortality is a rule of the UBA, a key ingredient to the league’s emotional, psychological, and moral ballast. Death gives the game stakes, introducing irreversibility into an otherwise repeatable system. Death also exposes the risk at the heart of Henry’s design. The same randomness that generates excitement also engenders loss. And Henry must submit to that randomness, even though he created it, even if it means killing off one of his most beloved players:

Oh, sure, he was free to throw away the dice, run the game by whim, but then what would be the point of it? Who would [the player] really be then? Nobody, an empty name, a play actor. Even though he’d set his own rules, his own limits, and though he could change them whenever he wished, nevertheless he and his players were committed to the turns of the mindless and unpredictable—one might even say, irresponsible—dice. That was how it was. He had to accept it, or quit the game altogether.

Henry is the great Creator of this system, but he’s also subject to its rules, an order of his own grace. The autonomy of the league depends on his restraint. Without the rules, the players would collapse into pure fiction (which of course they are); with the rules, the players acquire a simulacrum of reality.

These rules restrain Henry; they are the mechanism by which his inventions become more than inventions, and nowhere is that mechanism clearer than in the act of naming:

…name a man and you make him what he is. Of course, he can develop. And in ways you don’t expect. Or something can go wrong. Lot of nicknames invented as a result of Rookie-year surprises. But the basic stuff is already there. In the name. Or rather: in the naming.

Like Adam naming the animals, Henry brings his players into being through language. They do not preexist their names. Naming is not just merely descriptive, but generative. Once named, a UBA player can develop, succeed, fail, even die, but nothing happens until the name enters the system.

(An aside: in the UBA, Coover gives his contemporary Thomas Pynchon a run for his money in the zany names department. (Zany songs, too, but this review is already bloated.))

The naming, the rules, the chronicles are all bound in the auspiciously-capitalized archive of the Universal Baseball Association, The Book. A grandiose tome,

it consisted of some forty volumes, kept in shelves built into the kitchen wall, along with the permanent record books, league financial ledgers, and the loose-leaf notebooks of running life histories. He seemed to find more to write about, the more he played the game, and he foresaw the day when the number of archive volumes would pass the number of league years.

Too, Henry’s Book is an amalgam of discursive textual approaches, all filtered through his manic imagination:

Style varied from the extreme economy of factual data to the overblown idiom of the sportswriter, from the scientific objectivity of the theoreticians to the literary speculations of essayists and anecdotalists. There were tape-recorded dialogues, player contributions, election coverage, obituaries, satires, prophecies, scandals…His own shifting moods, often affected by events in the league, also colored the reports, oscillating between notions of grandeur and irony, exultation and despair, enthusiasm and indifference, amusement and weariness. Lately, he had noticed a tendency toward melancholy and sentimentality. He hoped he’d get over it soon. 

Henry’s archive expands, its relentless growth challenging the Association’s foundations. Record-keeping no longer mediates the league but rather constitutes it, collapsing the distinction between event and commentary. Statistics, essays, interviews, and speculative fragments stand on equal footing, none quite stabilizing the others. In this sense, the novel anticipates the metatextual logic of later works like the stories of Pricksongs & Descants and The Public Burning, where narration proliferates without authority and systems generate their own interpretive noise. Henry’s text-making generates layers of discourse that displace rather than resolve one another, much as Coover’s infamous story “The Babysitter” multiplies incompatible narrative versions without privileging a final account. The archive thickens without coherence. Henry’s attempt at a complete archive results in formal excess. It’s born of love, or obsession, or both, but Henry’s discursive text-making ultimately exposes the instability of both the league and the act of narration itself.

Coover juxtaposes the league’s self-enclosed textual machinery against the crowded, bodily immediacy of Henry’s everyday life. Scenes with his coworker Lou, especially in bars and restaurants, are full of conflicting textures and excess:

They bundled in, warm odors assailing them gently, past a sign that read: Go thy way and eat thy bread with joy! Piped-in radio music floated over the kitchen noises, the whump of doors, rattle of cocktail shakers, the bubble and buzz of underwater voices. Walls in a lush green with gold sparkle, cedar wainscoting, soft glow throughout, yet at the same time, linoleum floors and tawdry leatherette booths. Frilly lamps at the tables like little flowers, massive paintings and prints of whaling ships and dead pheasants on the walls. Elegant bar of carved wood in the romantic style, but the tabletops were cheap speckly formica. Dark-suited business types were conferring in one booth, young kids necking in the next. Yet somehow it all hung together okay.

Their meal (in Coover’s Henry’s free indirect imagination) tips into vivid grotesquerie:

Pink sea monsters, washed up on a shore of lettuce leaves and parsley, arrived, iced, their pungent sauce piercing through the present aroma of the Old Fashioneds’ bitters like an arrow: zingo! right to the nose! and to the palate! terrific!

The real world is messy, abject, excessive, embodied, lacking the clean structure of the league, but alive in a way the league cannot be. In the real world, bodies eat, drink, touch, but meaning is diffuse, nothing is fully accounted for. Real reality is a system without closure, with no stabilizing center. The UBA is Henry’s answer to messy reality.

But so and when the aforementioned tragic death of a beloved player occurs, Henry finds his fantasyland shaken, destabilized in ways his imagination had not anticipated. His careful system, with its ledgers and tables and charts cannot make meaning of the grief he feels. Already predisposed to melancholy, Henry slides into a depression that league play cannot resolve. There’s no joy in the game. A veteran player diagnoses the situation succinctly:

What if…we have passed, without knowing it, from a situation of sequential compounding into one of basic and finite yes-or-no survival, causing a shift of what you might call the equilibrium point, such that the old strategies, like winning ball games, sensible and proper within the old stochastic or recursive sets, are, under the new circumstances, insane!

By the outset of the novel’s final third act, Henry is in a bad place:

Not once, in the Universal Baseball Association’s fifty-six long seasons of play, had its proprietor plunged so close to self-disgust, felt so much like giving it up, a life misused, an old man playing with a child’s toy; he felt somehow like an adolescent caught masturbating… He was destroying the Association, he knew that now. He’d kept no records, hadn’t even logged a single entry in the Book.

As the UBA unravels, so do Henry’s relationships in the real world. He alienates and insults Hettie and his drunken bid to get Lou to play the game with him ends in another intrusion of wet, messy reality — Lou spills beer over the Henry’s charts and ledgers, the corporeal material of the game.

Dejected and alone in his apartment, drunkenly spinning, Henry returns to his game, a vengeful God cheating at dice to produce a 6-6-6 roll in an act of premeditated murder. The Creator has finally violated his own rules. Reality then literally spews out of our Henry, as he abjectly vomits “a red-and-golden rainbow arc of half-curded pizza over his Association” before passing out.

As the penultimate chapter begins, Henry has settled down a bit. The UBA’s season is over with no fanfare, no additional textuality beyond raw stats: “Journalists quit writing, just watched. Nobody interviewed anybody. No one sought autographs.” Nothing more to write.

Revivified, but a bit insane, Henry finds a way back to the “perfection”  he’s previously thought, but now understands it as something from the insulated system he’d previously imagined:

he’d discovered…that perfection wasn’t a thing, a closed moment, a static fact, but process, yes, and the process was transformation…

By the end of the chapter, our hero transforms, synthesizing the imaginative and the real. A fantasy baseball player walks into a bar. There he finds all his favorite figments:

…Witness York and Ham Craft and Maggie Everts and Walt McCamish and Bo McBean, here they come! and Rag Rooney and Jaybird Wall and Cash Bailey with his champion Patsies, the whole goddamn whooping and hollering lot of them! and Chauncey O’Shea and Royce Ingram!

Our hero is finally subsumed into the game. He will not appear again in the novel.

The final, eighth chapter is set a hundred years in the future (the future of the UBA, that is), and is populated by the league descendants of Henry’s creation, now more philosophical (and disembodied) than ever. As one player remarks: 

We have no mothers… The ripening of their wombs is nothing more than a ceremonious parable. We are mere ideas, hatched whole and hapless…”

The players have moved on to their own meta-narratives, without the authorial impositions of Henry. A kind of fatalistic-but-perhaps-optimistic view takes hold: “Even if there weren’t [a record-keeper], I think we’d have to play the game as though there were,” one player remarks.

The novel ends with a baseball game, a match nestled comfortably into a mythology generated from fateful Season LVI (a season so fateful that it rattled the Creator J.W.H. such that he has disappeared from the narrative). Descendants of that season’s two victims face off as pitcher and batter — but with the reassurance of the new perfection:

“It’s not a trial,” says Damon, glove tucked in his armpit, hands working the new ball. …”It’s not even a lesson. It’s just what it is.”

The radical inconclusiveness here is mirrored in Coover’s architecture for his eight-chapter baseball novel, which refuses to give its readers a perfect ninth inning. The structure seems to dare the reader to imagine that ninth inning.

In the Universal Baseball Association, games require a witness. The continuity of record keeping requires the fiction of someone who guarantees continuity. The league persists only at the cost Henry has been paying from the start: life displaced by its administration. For The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., the reader is the witness, called up to Coover’s minor majors (or is that vice versa?). It’s a workout for the imagination, I suppose —  rules, events, records, history, myth. 

And it’s more fun than I think I’ve expressed here — I’ve quoted Coover’s prose at length, maybe too much, but I don’t think I’ve fully conveyed how rich and hardy the text is, how warm and comforting the world that he conjures is, populated by singers and slingers and general bonhomie. It’s Famous Times All the Time, except when it’s melancholy, sad, or just plain bonkers. The Universal Baseball Association is part of the great American postmodern canon. Come and play.

Blog about some recent reading (Jan. and Feb. 2026)

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Joy Williams’ collection The Pelican Child was the first book I read this year. I picked up a copy back in December and surprised myself by reading most of it over a few days. It’s a much heavier collection than the wry vignettes of 2013’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God or its sequel, Concerning the Future of Souls (2024). The stories here alight on mortality, human ecological cultural aesthetic, etc. Opener “Flour” strikes me as a postmodern riff on Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and the fable (literally fabulous?) closer “Baba Yaga and The Pelican Child” made me tear up a little and then hate myself a little. A book about death where young people, tattooed with the lines of long-dead poets, are the clean-up crew working the night shift sweeping up the detritus of the 21st century. (It was “Argos,” about Odysseus’s good and loyal boy, that really killed me if I’m honest.)

There are still a few stories at the back of Robert Bingham’s 1997 collection Pure Slaughter Value. I will tuck them away for another time. I loved these stories and then I found myself angry at his spoiled clever preppy narrators. “The Other Family” is one of the better stories I’ve read in a long time.

I reread Robert Coover’s second novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), back in January and made some notes for a review. This is not that review. I am not a Coover expert but I think this is as good an introduction to his novels as anything. (No it’s not; get Pricksongs & Descants.)

Speaking of Universal—I had an early misfire with Thomas Kendall’s 2023 novel How I Killed the Universal Man, but then started it again the other night with a perhaps clearer idea of what the author was trying to do. I think I was thinking something more straightforward, more cyberpunknoir, something less, I dunno, formally meta or post. More thoughts to come.

I think George Saunders’ new novel Vigil fucking sucks.

Is Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool a novella? A novelette? A short story? Should we care? I loved The Last Samurai (2000), thought Lightning Rods (2011) seemed like a novel written quickly for money, and found myself embarrassed for everyone involved with her collection Some Trick (2018), including the editor, publisher, bookseller who sold it to me, and myself — but maybe I should go back and try it again? I thought The English Understand Wool was really good! It was funny and silly and sharp.

I have spent the past few months reading what I could get my little pink hands on of David Ohle’s incredible post-apocalyptic comedy, the Moldenke Saga (a term I have just now coined, maybe). I will do a Whole Thing on these novels at some point, but I read The Blast in one night and felt really sad that it was over and then the next night I read most of the last Moldenke novel, The Death of a Character, and then I woke up around 4am that morning and finished it and got a little choked up. In novels like Motorman, The Age of Sinatra, and The Old Reactor, Ohle has given us a fittingly grotesque, grody, gnarly, abject, hilarious, zany, and emotionally-resonant zombie funhouse mirror for our own gross times. These novels are woefully underread and still, for the most part, in print. Seek them out.

Wanting to scratch an Ohle itch, I turned to Literature Map to suggest some proxy; this machine offered Stanley Crawford as a proximal prosist. I picked up a few of his novels the other weekend, including 1972’s Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine, which I read over the course of a few hours late at night and then reread the next night. It’s not like the Ohle oeuvre, excepting that it’s wholly, utterly original at the conceptual aesthetic rhetorical level, is generally tragicomical, mythical, epic — but also compact, and funny and alarming. So it’s very much in the Ohlesphere. Seek it out.

And also scratching that apocalyptic itch is  Antoine Volodine’s 2021 novel The Monroe Girls (in translation by Alyson Waters). It’s got this cracked bifocal Bardo thing going on, which I will not explain here and now. The print in the Archipelago edition is small for my aging eyes. I’ve read it in the afternoon; it is not an afternoon book, it is a 2am book.

I read the first half of Jan Kerouac’s “semi-autobiographical” novel Baby Driver (1981) last night. The writing immediately struck me as very bad, very overwritten, ostentatious and clumsy, but I kept going, charmed by the charmingly charming naivety of the novel, which is not a naive novel at all, which turns into a rough and ready sex and drug novel, or sex and drug autobiography, or autofiction. (My instinct is that this is an autobiography with a lot of whoppers.) Our heroine is on heroin pretty quick, then turning tricks, then on to other adventures. But there’s a glib smudging of purple prose over any would-be tragic contours. She likes it! She really likes it! At least I think.

And yes, J. Kerouac is J. Kerouac’s only (acknowledged) child, and yes, he pops in now and then, a jolly fibbing wino, the poseur some of us always pegged him for, maybe a better phrase-turner than lil Jan, but somehow I think less real.

 

Death/Blast/Bonus (Books acquired, late Feb. 2026)

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I got a copy of the last (maybe latest?) of David Ohle’s Moldenke novels, The Death of a Character, in today’s mail. I’ve read or reread Ohle’s Moldenke’s novels over the past few weeks, and I think they are some of the best, grossest, funniest diagnoses of the emerging 21st-century apocalypse I’ve ever encountered. I’m a bit sad that The Death of a Character might be the last one, but there’s always rereading. I got a copy of Ohle’s 2014 short novel The Blast, which I think is a Moldenke novel without Moldenke. (Ohle’s 2008 novel The Pisstown Chaos is basically a Moldenke novel without Moldenke.)

I also got a copy of a 1981 anthology called A Reader of New American Fiction which features a piece by David Ohle I’d never heard of before, called “Easy Neutronics.” I got the book via interlibrary loan, requesting it as part of an in-class demo I was doing during a class. It arrived bearing the stamp of Brevard Community College (née Brevard Junior College), which is now Eastern Florida State College. Thank you to the librarian in Titusville.

The book appears to have never been read.

 

Miserable comforters are ye all | On George Saunders’ hollow new novel Vigil

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George Saunders’ latest novel Vigil is told primarily from the perspective of a ghost, Jill “Doll” Blaine, a spirit who has resisted elevation to up there in order to remain on Earth, where she guides her dying “charges” into the afterlife.

Her latest (and perhaps last) charge is one K.J. Boone, an oil tycoon dying in the “slop room” of his least favorite house. Boone spent his career denying climate science, spreading misinformation and doubt, and enriching himself from fossil fuels. He’s also a flaming asshole. He remains unrepentant as he approaches death. Gentle Jill takes compassion on the dying man, trying to “comfort” him into the next step, even as he verbally abuses her.

Jill is not the only spirit interested in Boone’s afterlife. Other ghosts pop up at the deathbed, some compassionate, some confrontational; some voices urge Boone toward self-awareness while others reinforce his denial.

We meet the most adversarial of Boone’s visiting spirits very early in the novel. As Jill arrives to comfort her “charge,” she’s interrupted by “the Frenchman,” a zany phantom who urges her not to comfort Boone but rather to “lead him, as quickly as possible, to contrition, shame, and self-loathing.” We soon learn that the Frenchman — presumably Étienne Lenoir — “had a hand in the invention of the beast.”

The “beast” here is the internal combustion engine, the great evil lurking in the background of Vigil. The Frenchman wails that his invention “poisons” the earth, air, and sea, and he spends his afterlife in a purgatory that’s one-part self-flagellation, one-part punishing avenger. It is his goal to make K.J. Boone suffer.

As Vigil toots out its plot in fragments and vignettes, we come to understand just why Boone might deserve to suffer. He conspired with other oil executives to suppress research about just how damaging carbon emissions are. Furthermore, he helped fund a right-wing ecosystem designed to manufacture constant doubt and discord. He was, in short, a willing and knowing architect of a great deal of awful shit.

Most of the obscene climate disaster takes place offstage. There are brief sketches of unstoppable fires, relentless drought, beached dolphins, ravaged forests. Famine. A climate refugee is even trotted out at one point. Etc. But Saunders focuses his camera primarily on the deathbed of the Great Man, K.J. Boone. When Boone’s degrading insults become too much — or when she’s simply distracted — Jill might confer with other spirits or drift into her own tragic past (and happy past, too). But mostly, yeah, Saunders is interested in attending to the dying old asshole.

Radical empathy has always been Saunders’ calling card, but Vigil asks too much of the reader’s patience and rewards very little in return. I suppose we are to take our narrator Jill’s charming naivety as Zen, but her mantra “Comfort. Comfort, for all else is futility” is hokey pablum.

Jill’s other mantra goes something like, you are an inevitable occurrence. All persons are inevitable; their choices are inevitable; their atrocities are inevitable. This passive worldview is a wonderful Get Out of Jail Free card, I suppose, but it’s ultimately unpersuasive. Isn’t Jill’s choice for compassion just that, a choice? Saunders’ argument — and the book does read like a sentimental screed — posits evitability with one hand while using inevitability in the other hand as a kind of cloth to wipe away real, earthly sin. It’s a parlor trick, an amusement to comfort us in dismal times.

Which is all good and yes I guess sure why not? would be fine if Vigil was, like, funny, right? Is Saunders not heir apparent to Vonnegut, to Parker, to Twain? But the humor of Vigil is not humor but rather the “idea of humor,” the shadow of humor. This novel is lifeless, bloodless, hollow.

I suppose we are meant to find some black humor in Boone’s bombastic blather and his encounters with the Frenchman and other spirits. But the premise wears thin quickly. It’s clear that Saunders wants his audience to find empathy for this imp; that he believes empathy is some kind of emotional solution. But there’s not enough of a human there to empathize with. The character is too flat, more a prop than a villain.

Vigil suffers too when compared to so many stories that mine similar territory, from A Christmas Carol to Citizen Kane to There Will Be Blood. In his NYT review of Vigil, Dwight Garner wrote that “it’s as if Clarence, the angel from It’s a Wonderful Life, came down to oblige Mr. Potter instead of George.” Garner’s characterization is fair, but Lionel Barrymore’s Potter evinces more twinkling Satanic charm than dull, horrible K.J. Boone.

Nor will Vigil fare favorably when compared to prominent climate fiction novels like The Road, The Parable of the Sower, or Oryx and Crake (let alone the under-read Moldenke novels of David Ohle). To be fair, Saunders is not attempting “cli-fi”; the earth’s imminent ecological collapse is not the soul of the novel. The souls of the novel are dying Boone and comforter Jill.

The rhetorical style of Vigil becomes especially tedious. While Jill’s voice sometimes gives over to a purposeful “elevated” style, much of the novel blips out in choppy fragments and stilted dialogue. There’s no fat on the novel, but there also isn’t much muscle. The quippiness in the end feels hollow, the voices undifferentiated, the “wisdom” merely platitudes.

The one real exception to the verbal doldrums happens very early in the novel, as the Frenchman perches on Boone’s deathbed, reading from “a tremendous stack of papers”:

The cardinal, he shouted, feeds on bits of plastic piping. In a ballroom filling with mud, chairs squeak in objection. A groggy hippo (What hippo, I wondered, why speak of hippos in this fearful place, this somber moment?) rolls yellow eyes up at a hunter seeking its ivory canines. A juvenile jaguar creeps forward, dismembers a poodle in a bright pink jacket.

Saunders seems to lovingly parody something sharper and stranger than what’s happening in Vigil, as if a lost text by André Breton or Antonin Artaud had infiltrated the novel. The feral energy and burst of color here are more dramatic than the weak tea that follows. I have more empathy for the cardinal eating plastic or the jaguar eating pets than I do for C. Koch Jay Tee Boone Pickens Hayward Dee Woods Chevron Valdez, Esq.

Saunders’ strongest work, like the stories in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and The Tenth of December, skewered the deadened language of late capitalism while showcasing real and earned small-h heroism from the ordinary people doing their best in a system that they do not have the energy to resist.

There was always a touch of sentimentality to Saunders’ early stuff, a nice note to balance the bitter humor. But his work over the past decade has overindulged the sweet stuff. The prescient satire of a few decades ago has mellowed into a tepid drip of self-satisfied invocations to comfort, forgive, and absolve. Saunders loves his characters; he loves his readers more. And he wants, I think, to offer his readers comfort now in a miserable, miserable time. But now is not the time for comfort.

Blog about George Saunders’ novel Vigil, a novel I have not yet read (Book acquired 11 Feb. 2026)

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I’ve been reading a lot of David Ohle lately — the Moldenke cycle, specifically. I read The Pisstown Chaos (2008) late last year, then kept going with The Old Reactor (2013), and then reread The Age of Sinatra (2004). I’m near the end of a  reread of Ohle’s seminal weirdo novel Motorman (1972) right now, and I’ve got The Blast (2014) and The Death of a Character (2021) on the way.

The Moldenke books take place in an abject, stinky, ruinous post-apocalyptic landscape populated with jellyheads, neutrodynes, imps, Stinkers, and Americans. The world runs on broken logic and bureaucratic absurdity. Order is repeatedly disrupted by Chaoses and Forgettings. Bodies fail; technology fails. Ohle relates these stories in a genteel, dry tone (especially in the later books) that mocks any hint of a Hero Saving the Day. His novels, especially those published during US America’s foolish GWOT misadventures, capture the spirit of my country’s farcical post-twentieth-century trajectory.

But this blog post is ostensibly about George Saunders, or rather George Saunders’ new novel Vigil, which I have not yet read, having only just today received a review copy in the mail.

I do not think that a writer has a cultural duty to respond to now, or Now, or even “Now!” if you like–but I do think that Saunders has always aimed to respond to the US American zeitgeist in his fictions. And in the best of his fictions — including the stories “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Pastoralia,” “Sea Oak,” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries” — Saunders skewered US American absurdity with a tender pathos that balanced his dark humor without overpowering its core anger. But Saunders’ later fiction is perhaps over-seasoned with love, empathy, all that hippy-dippy shit. It’s not necessary to look through everyone’s eyes. Empathy has its limits. Latter-day Saunders often read to me as, in its worst moments, sanctimonious.

NYT critic Dwight Garner didn’t use the word “sanctimonious” to describe Saunders in his negative review of  Vigil, but his lede comes close:

“Once you start illustrating virtue, you had better stop writing fiction,” Robert Penn Warren wrote. It was once difficult to imagine this dictum might apply to George Saunders.

From the start, in the mid-1990s, he’s been an American original, a briskly whiskered national asset. He’s an ineluctably strange, dark and funny writer whose work has some of Mark Twain’s subversive wit, Kurt Vonnegut’s cosmic playfulness and Donald Barthelme’s laboratory blitzing of high and low culture.

It was my colleague who alerted me to this review, which I skimmed, noting the phrase “Downhill Alert!”, before dispensing with it. (My colleague wants me to read the book in some kind of, uh, I don’t know, tandem?, with him.)

This colleague loved Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo. I did not love Lincoln in the Bardo. I couldn’t even finish it. I found it maudlin, trite. It was like watching your dad try and impress your boss (I don’t know what that means). I wrote that year, 2017, that—

Lincoln in the Bardo might be a really good novel and I just can’t see it or hear it or feel it. I see postmodernism-as-genre, as form; I read bloodless overcooked posturing; I feel schmaltz. I failed the novel, I’m sure. I mean, I’m sure it’s good, right? The problem is me, as usual.

By 2018 I had changed my mind on that last sentence. I read Saunders’ New Yorker published short story “Little St. Don” and thought it was a massive, massive failure to respond to the incipient fascist encroachment of the first Trump administration. I concluded that,

Saunders loves his reader too much. The story wants to make us feel comfortable now, comfortable, at minimum, in our own moral agency and our own moral righteousness. But comfort now will not do.

I thought Saunders’ next two New Yorker stories were a smidge stronger, calling “Elliott Spencer,” “a stylistically-bold tale about poor people who are reprogrammed and then deployed as paid political protesters.” Of “Love Letter,” I suggested that the exercise “reads like a thought experiment with no real conclusion, no solid answer. Or, rather, the solution is there in the title: love. But is that enough?”

Vigil is about a dying oil tycoon visited by a comforting angel, or series of angels, or something like that. It is, if I understand correctly, Saunders’ take on “climate fiction,” which I imagine will not really dwell in the nasty gross irreal reality of the fall we are falling into right now. But I could be wrong. I can’t help but notice that Vigil seems to be organized, like Lincoln in the Bardo, around a “Great Man” in USAian history — a mover and shaker, a powerbroker, a markmaker, etc. I’ll try to read it with an open mind, but I have to admit that even the prospect pales against my recent dip into Ohle’s sour, funky flavors. But we shall see.

 

A note to readers new to Infinite Jest

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A note to readers new to Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest poses rhetorical, formal, and verbal challenges that will confound many readers new to the text. The abundance of (or excess of) guides and commentaries on the novel can perhaps have the adverse and unintentional consequence of making readers new to Infinite Jest believe that they can’t “get it” without help.  Many of the online analyses and resources for Infinite Jest are created by and targeted to readers who have finished the novel or are rereading the novel. While I’ve read many insightful and enlightening commentaries on the novel over the years, my intuition remains that the superabundance of analysis may have the paradoxical effect of actually impeding readers new to the text. With this in mind, I’d suggest that first-time readers need only a dictionary and some patience.

Infinite Jest is very long but it’s not nearly as difficult as its reputation suggests. There is a compelling plot behind the erudite essaying and sesquipedalian vocabulary. That plot develops around three major strands which the reader must tie together, with both the aid of—and the challenge of—the novel’s discursive style. Those three major plot strands are the tragic saga of the Incandenzas (familial); the redemptive narrative of Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, with Don Gately as the primary hero (sociocultural); and the the schemes of the Québécois separatists (national/international/political). An addictive and thus deadly film called Infinite Jest links these three plots (through discursive and byzantine subplots).

Wallace often obscures the links between these plot strands, and many of the major plot connections have to be intuited or outright guessed. Furthermore, while there are clear, explicit connections between the plot strands made for the reader, Wallace seems to withhold explicating these connections until after the 200-page mark. Arguably, the real contours of the Big Plot come into (incomplete) focus in a discussion between Hal Incandenza and his brother Orin in pages 242-58. Getting to this scene is perhaps a demand on the patience of many readers. And, while the scene by no means telegraphs what happens in IJ, it nonetheless offers some promise that the set pieces, riffs, scenes, lists, and vignettes shall add up to Something Bigger. 

Some of those earliest set pieces, riffs, scenes, lists, and vignettes function almost as rhetorical obstacles for a first-time reader. The  novel’s opening scene, Hal Incandenza’s interview with the deans at the University of Arizona, is chronologically the last event in the narrative, and it dumps a lot of expository info on the reader. It also poses a number of questions or riddles about the plot to come, questions and riddles that frankly run the risk of the first-time reader’s forgetting through no fault of his own.

The second chapter of IJ is relatively short—just 10 pages—but it seems interminable, and it’s my guess that Wallace wanted to make his reader endure it the same way that the chapter’s protagonist–Erdedy, an ultimately very minor character—must endure the agonizing wait for a marijuana delivery. The chapter delivers the novel’s themes of ambivalence, desire, addiction, shame, entertainment, “fun,” and secrecy, both in its content and form. My guess is that this where a lot of new readers abandon the novel.

The reader who continues must then work through 30 more pages until meeting the novel’s heart, Don Gately, but by the time we’ve met him we might not trust just how much attention we need to pay him, because Wallace has shifted through so many other characters already. And then Gately doesn’t really show up again until, like, 200 pages later.

In Infinite Jest, Wallace seems to suspend or delay introducing the reading rules that we’ve been trained to look for in contemporary novels. While I imagine this technique could frustrate first-time readers, I want to reiterate that this suspension or delay or digression is indeed a technique, a rhetorical tool Wallace employs to perform the novel’s themes about addiction and relief, patience and plateaus, gratitude and forgiveness.

Where is a fair place to abandon Infinite Jest? 

I would urge first-time readers to stick with the novel at least until page 64, where they will be directed to end note 24, the filmography of J.O. Incandenza (I will not even discuss the idea of not reading the end notes. They are essential). Incandenza’s filmography helps to outline the plot’s themes and the themes’ plots—albeit obliquely. And readers who make it to the filmography and find nothing to compel them further into the text should feel okay about abandoning the book at that point.

What about a guide?

There are many, many guides and discussions to IJ online and elsewhere, as I noted above. Do you really need them? I don’t know—but my intuition is that you’d probably do fine without them. Maybe reread Hamlet’s monologue from the beginning of Act V, but don’t dwell too much on the relationship between entertainment and death. All you really need is a good dictionary. (And, by the way, IJ is an ideal read for an electronic device—the end notes are hyperlinked, and you can easily look up words as you read).

Still: Two online resources that might be useful are “Several More and Less Helpful Things for the Person Reading Infinite Jest,” which offers a glossary and a few other unobtrusive documents, and “Infinite Jest: A Scene-By-Scene Guide” which is not a guide at all, but rather a brief series of synopses of each scene in the novel, organized by page number and year; my sense is that this guide would be helpful to readers attempting to delineate the novel’s nonlinear chronology—however, I’d advise against peeking ahead. After you read you may wish to search for a plot diagram of the novel, of which there are several. But I’d wait until after.

An incomplete list of motifs readers new to Infinite Jest may wish to attend to

The big advantage (and pleasure) of rereading Infinite Jest is that the rereader may come to understand the plot anew; IJ is richer and denser the second go around, its themes showing brighter as its formal construction clarifies. The rereader is free to attend to the imagery and motifs of the novel more intensely than a first-time reader, who must suss out a byzantine plot propelled by a plethora of characters.

Therefore, readers new to IJ may find it helpful to attend from the outset to some of the novel’s repeated images, words, and phrases. Tracking motifs will help to clarify not only the novel’s themes and “messages,” but also its plot. I’ve listed just a few of these motifs below, leaving out the obvious ones like entertainment, drugs, tennis (and, more generally, sports and games), and death. The list is in no way definitive or analytic, nor do I present it as an expert; rather, it’s my hope that this short list might help a reader or two get more out of a first reading.

Heads

Cages

Faces

Masks

Teeth

Cycles

Maps

Waste

Infants

Pain

Deformities

Subjects

Objects

One final note

Infinite Jest is a rhetorical/aesthetic experience, not a plot.

[Ed. note: Biblioklept first posted a version of this note in the summer of 2015. Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of Infinite Jest’s publication. Wallace’s novel remains underread by overtalkers].

Mass-market Monday | Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada

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Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed, 1976. Avon Bard Books (1977). Cover art by Andrew Rhodes; no designer credited. 192 pages.

Reed’s Flight to Canada is one of my Best Books of 1976? round up of books published fifty years ago.

From my 2020 review of the novel:

Flight to Canada features a number of intersecting plots. One of these plots follows the ostensible protagonist of the novel, former slave Raven Quickskill, who escapes the Swille plantation in Virginia. Along with two other former slaves of the Swille plantation, Quickskill makes his way far north to “Emancipation City” where he composes a poem called “Flight to Canada,” which expresses his desire to escape America completely. The aristocratic (and Sadean) Arthur Swille simply cannot let “his property run off with himself,” and sends trackers to find Quickskill and the other escapees, Emancipation Proclamation be damned. On the run from trackers, Quickskill jumps from misadventure to misadventure, eventually reconnecting his old flame, an Indian dancer named Quaw Quaw (as well as her husband, the pirate Yankee Jack). Back at Swille’s plantation Swine’rd, several plots twist around, including a visit by Old Abe Lincoln, a sadistic episode between Lady Swille and her attendant Mammy Barracuda, and the day-to-day rituals of Uncle Robin, a seemingly-compliant “Uncle Tom” figure who turns out to be Reed’s real hero in the end.

ReMass-market Monday | Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo

Best Books of 1976?

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Previously:

Best Books of 1972?

Best Books of 1973?

Best Books of 1974?

Best Books of 1975?

Not-really-the-rules recap:

I will focus primarily on novels here, or books of a novelistic/artistic scope.

I will include books published in English in 1976, including translations published in English for the first time.

The New York Times Best Seller list for fiction in 1976 was dominated by Agatha Christie, Gore Vidal, and Leon Uris. Christie’s 1975 novel Curtain ruled winter and early spring, with her posthumous 1976 novel Sleeping Murder topping the charts in November and December. Vidal’s historical novel 1876 and Uris’s Trinity split the rest of the year. While Alex Haley’s Roots topped the nonfiction Best Seller list for only a few weeks in 1976, it’s the bestseller title of the year with the most cultural staying power. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s The Final Days, their follow up to 1974’s All the President’s Men was a bestseller in the spring and summer (and one of many, many Watergate books of this era). Gail Sheehy’s “road map to adult life” Passages was popular in the fall.

But sales charts ain’t literature.

Better to regard the New York Times Book Review’s end-of-year round up, “1976: A Selection of Noteworthy Titles.” It begins with a heavy dose of literary biographies, memoirs, autobiographies, and collections of letters. These include Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind, Lucille Clifton’s memoir Generations, Patrick McCarthy’s bio Celine, Charles Higham’s The Adventures of Conan Doyle, and Lillian Hellman’s third memoir Scoundrel Time. 

Also of note in the NYT list are Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and Britt Britton’s collection of author Self-Portraits (the article is peppered with some of the portraits).

The Book Review piece also notes collections of letters by Sylvia Plath, E.B. White, and Virginia Woolf, as well as more diaries of Anaïs Nin. There are multiple memoirs of Hemingway (one by his son and one by his last wife) and David Heyman’s Ezra Pound biography. The list of literary bios and memoirs conveys the beginnings of a strange autopsy of the Modernist past giving way to something new.

Here are some of the fiction titles the New York Times Book Review includes in its “Selection of Noteworthy Titles” that I thought more noteworthy than other titles included:

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, John Steinbeck

The Autumn of the Patriarch Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

The Easter Parade, Richard Yates

Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed

The Franchiser, Stanley Elkin

Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood

Lucinella, Lore Segal

Meridian, Alice Walker

Ratner’s Star, Don DeLillo

Orsinian Tales, Ursula K. Le Guin

Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut

Speedboat, Renata Adler

The Takeover, Muriel Spark

Travesty, John Hawkes

Frog and Toad All Year, Arnold Lobel

Children of Dune, Frank Herbert

The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe

Triton, Samuel R. Delany

I’ll do some more with that list in a second. But for now–

One of the best sections of the NYT Book Review’s year-end recap is “Author’s Authors,” in which they ask various writers to pick their three favorite reads of 1976. John Cheever picks John Updike’s Picked Up Pieces (1975). Bernard Malamud picks García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch. Vladimir Nabokov, always humble selects his own manuscript for The Original of Laura (it remained unpublished until 2009).

William H. Gass selects buddies William Gaddis (J R, 1975) and Stanley Elkin (The Franchiser); I’ll pick up Craig Nova’s 1975 novel The Geek on his recommendation. I’ll also be on the look out for one of Ishmael Reed’s recommendations: Dangerous Music (1975) by Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn. He also recommends one of the many, many Watergate books of the era, Blind Ambition by John Dean and Shouting! by Joyce Carol Thomas. As far as I can tell, Shouting! wasn’t published until 2007.

By far the best entry belongs to John Updike though:

John Updike THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF GLASS by J.D. Salinger THE EARL BUTZ JOKE BOOK edited by Gerald Ford VOLUME X (GARRISON TO HALIBUT) OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITTANICA. I thought the Salinger well worth waiting for, the Butz one of the best volumes to issue from the Government presses in recent years, and Volume Ten, though rather severely treated in the New York Review of Books, the most amusing and varied yet in its series.

Shitposting in the Times in the late seventies. Gotta love it.

In her “Author’s Authors” write up, the novelist Lois Gold makes the only mention of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire in the NYTBR piece. Rice’s seminal postmodernist vampire romance currently sits at #1 on Goodreads list of most popular books published in 1976, a testament to its populist staying power. Other notable books on the Goodreads list that were absent from the lofty NTYBR’s contemporary coverage include Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, David Seltzer’s The Omen, Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Marian Engel’s Bear, Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster, Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes, Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Demon, Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout, Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration, and many, many more. I’ll do more with that list momentarily, but next —

–prizes!

Saul Bellow won both the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature (“for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work”) and the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, specifically for his 1975 novel Humboldt’s Gift.

David Saville’s novel Saville was awarded the 1976 Booker Prize. The shortlist consisted of An Instant in the Wind by André Brink, Rising by R. C. Hutchinson, The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore, King Fisher Lives by Julian Rathbone, and The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor. 

The 1977 National Book Award winner for fiction was Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird. Runners-up were Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver, Orsinian Tales by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris, and A Fine Romance by Cynthia Propper Seton. 

The 1976 National Book Critics Circle award for best fiction went to John Gardner’s October Light.  Finalists were Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Valdimir Nabokov’s Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, Cynthia Ozick’s Bloodshed and Three Novellas, and The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. Haley’s Roots was runner up to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. 

The Nebula Awards for fiction published in 1976 gave first place to Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Notable finalists included Marta Randall’s Islands, Delany’s Triton and Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm.

I have read many but hardly all the books mentioned in this post. But this is my blog, so here are my picks for the best books of 1976:

The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

Bear, Marian Engel 

A Feast of Snakes, Harry Crews

Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed

The Franchiser, Stanley Elkin

Orsinian Tales, Ursula K. Le Guin

Lucinella, Lore Segal

Ratner’s Star, Don DeLillo

Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut

Speedboat, Renata Adler

A few sentences on every book I read or reread in 2025

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☉ indicates a reread.

☆ indicates an outstanding read.

In some cases, I’ve self-plagiarized some descriptions and evaluations from my social media and blog posts.

I have not included books that I did not finish or abandoned.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Werner Herzog☆

I got a paperback copy of Herzog’s memoir for Christmas last year but ended up listening to him read the audiobook on my commute for a week or two. Every Man for Himself was one of four memoirs as-read-by-the-author I listened to this year. The other three: The Friedkin Connection by William Friedkin; The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case; Rumors of My Demise by Evan Dando. I enjoyed all four memoirs and maybe as I go through this post I’ll pull a few common threads. Herzog’s memoir is bonkers, better than fiction. It really is one of those deals where a paragraph starts one way and a few sentences later you’re in a totally different place.

Dispatches from the District Committee, Vladimir Sorokov (translation by Max Lawton; illustrations by Gregory Klassen)

An absolutely vile book. I loved it.

Raised by Ghosts, Briana Loewinsohn

Loewinsohn’s love letter to the latchkey nineties hit me hard. I reviewed it here.

Nazi Literature in the Americas, Roberto Bolaño (translation by Chris Andrews)☉

I think I was trying to get through the beginning of a novel by an “alt” midlist author when I realized I’d rather read something I loved. Or maybe there was something else in the air in late January. The notes on the draft for this post are cryptic.

Feminine Wiles, Jane Bowles

A slim lil guy, a nice reprieve from current events in January, a reminder that sanity is precarious.

Interstate, Stephen Dixon☆

From my review: “It upset me deeply, reading Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate. It fucked me up a little bit, and then a little bit more, addicted to reading it as I was over two weeks in a new year.”

Remedios Varo: El hilo invisible, Jose Antonio Gil and Magnolia Rivera

A lot of Varo’s pictures, but also a lot of Spanish. I was trying hard at the time (to read Spanish). I used my iPhone to translate a lot.

Borgia, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Milo Manara 

Indian Summer, Milo Manara and Hugo Platt

Caravaggio, Milo Manara

A nice little run there, I seem to recall. Borgia was the best.

Occupancy 250: The Stories of Einstein A Go-Go

The Einstein A Go-Go was an all-ages music club at Jacksonville Beach that was a massive part of my teenage years. I saw so many amazing bands there over four or five years (including Luna, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Man or Astroman, Sebadoh, Polvo, Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, and so many more), met so many cool people, and even played there with my band a time or two or five. And if I was too late (that is, too young) to see acts like Nirvana, The Replacements, 10,000 Maniacs, The Cranberries, and Soundgarden there at the the end of the eighties and beginning of the nineties, it feels pretty swell to see my band’s name on the back of Occupancy 250 right there in the mix, as well as flyers and photos. Occupancy 250 is like the yearbook we never got when the club had to shut its doors in ’97 in the name of beachfront development. What a gift it was. A few months ago we went to a reunion event, featuring bands like The Cadets and Emperor X. I’ve never been to a high school reunion, but I know that this was better.

Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez (translation by Gregory Rabassa)☆

Loved it. A discussion with a colleague after, a Spanish instructor, led to my reading Cela, Peri Rossi, and Rulfo.

The Hive, Camilo José Cela (translation by Anthony Kerrigan)

Pascual Duarte, Camilo José Cela (translation by Anthony Kerrigan)

I liked them both but liked Pascal Duarte more than La colmena. I would love to read Cela’s 1988 novel Cristo versus Arizona if I could get my pink little hands on an English-language copy.

The Friedkin Connection, William Friedkin☆

I think that Spotfiy suggested that I listen to Friedkin’s memoir after I finished the Herzog memory; in any case, there was a lot of overlap. Like Herzog, Friedkin had no idea how to make a film and never really developed a baseline beyond, Doing the thing for real and filming it, whatever the thing was. Going to make a film where a criminal is going to counterfeit US currency? Better teach Willem Dafoe how to, I don’t know, counterfeit money and just film that instead of, like, getting a props department involved. (Weird overlap: both Friedkin and Herzog laud Michael Shannon as the greatest actor of his generation.)

I loved this memoir. It starts, if I recall correctly, with Friedkin admitting that he threw away a sketch by Basquiat and an offer from Prince. It ends with Friedkin telling his wife, legendary producer Sherry Lansing, to pass on Forrest Gump. Amazing stuff.

The Ship of Fools, Cristina Peri Rossi (translation by Psiche Hughes)☆ 

I loved it.

Monsieur Teste, Paul Valéry (translation by Charlotte Mandell) 

I hated it.

Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo (translation by Douglas J. Weatherford

I liked it!

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy☉ 

I guess I fall into rereading this all the time.

Tongues, Anders Nilsen☆ 

screenshot-2018-08-31-at-4-34-20-pm

Amazing stuff.

Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham

I probably would’ve read Day of the Triffids a dozen times as a kid instead of, like, Joan D. Vinge’s novelization of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, if there had been a copy in the lending library in Tabubil. Anyway, I’m glad I got to it when I did.

Frog, Stephen Dixon☆ 

Above, I wrote I have not included books that I did not finish or abandoned; look, I didn’t finish Frog, but in some ways it’s the most important book — or rather, most important, reading experience — for me this year.

An old great friend mailed me his copy back in March. I read and loved a hefty chunk of Frog, a long book, but abandoned it when another great old friend died unexpectedly in early May. I was deep into it but there was no comfort in it, in Frog.

And so then well I just read or reread a bunch of John le Carré novels.

Call for the Dead, John le Carré

A Murder of Quality, John le Carré☆ 

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré

The Looking Glass War, John le Carré

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré☉☆ 

Was a blur, thank you to Mr. Le Carré’s ghost. A Murder of Quality was my favorite (I think). (I was a fucking mess and these books really helped me.)

The Woman with Fifty Faces: Maria Lani and the Greatest Art Heist That Never Was, by Jon Lackman and Zack Pinson.☆ 

I read it all in one sitting. Loved it.

The Bus 3, Paul Kirchner

I reviewed it here.

Portalmania, Debbie Urbanski

In my review, I wrote that, “Debbie Urbanski’s new collection Portalmania is a metatextual tangle of science fiction, fantasy, and horror where portals don’t offer escape so much as expose the fractures beneath family, love, and identity.”

Dreamsnake, Voya McIntrye

I liked it!

The Stone Door, Leonore Carrington

Wrestled with this dude a lot and it beat me. I thought it would twist one way and it did another thing. Ended up reading it twice in the summer and I guess I’ll read it again.

The Great Mortality, John Kelly

Kelly’s Black Death chronicle was a comfort read this summer.

Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group, Rebecca Grandsen

Skip my review of Grandsen’ poetic post-apocalyptic miniature epic and just buy it and read it.

Macunaíma, Mário de Andrade (translation by Katrina Dodson)☆ 

I am so glad my guy at the bookstore sold me on this one. A synthesis of Brazilian folklore with high and low modernism (eh, Modernism?).

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

A corny book a colleague recommended. I’m happy that someone I know IRL wants me to read a book and talk about it with them.

Unkempt Thoughts, translation by Jacek Galazka (translation by Jacek Galazka)

More Unkempt Thoughts Stanislaw J. Lec (translation by Jacek Galazka)

Aphorisms.

The Frog in the Throat, Markus Werner (translation by Michael Hofmann)☆ 

I gave the guy who gave me the Julian Barnes this novel; he didn’t like it!

I loved it. In my review of The Frog in the Throat. I noted that “you could throw a small dart in this short book and find a nice line” its protagonist. I included a lot of those pithy gems in the review if you want a sample.

Counternarratives, John Keene☆ 

Amazing stuff. I was halfway through when I realized that Keene wrote the intro to my edition of Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma. My favorite piece in the collection reads like a riff on Melville’s Benito Cereno with strong Gothic undertones.

Mevlido’s Dreams, Antoine Volodine (translation by Gina M. Stamm)☆ 

A bleak, dystopian noir novel set several centuries in a ruined city-state wherein Mevlido’s fragmented consciousness becomes a vessel for Volodine’s haunting post-exotic vision of history, language, and apocalypse. Loved it! My review.

Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon☆ 

The highlight of 2025 in reading was a new late Pynchon novel. It might not have been the best novel I read this year, but it was my favorite reading experience. I ended up reading it twice, running a series of posts I called Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Shadow Ticket. At the end of those notes, I wrote:

“I should probably distill my thoughts on Shadow Ticket into a compact, “proper” review, but I’ve sat with the novel now for two months, reading it twice, and really, really enjoying it. I never expected to get another Pynchon novel; it’s a gift. I loved its goofy Gothicism; I loved its noir-as-red-herring-genre-swap conceit; I loved even its worst puns (even “sofa so good”). I loved that Pynchon loves these characters, even the ones he might not have had the time or energy to fully flesh out — this is a book that, breezy as it reads, feels like a denser, thicker affair. And even if he gives us doom on the horizon in the impending horrors of genocide and atomic death, Pynchon ends with the hopeful image of two kids chasing sunsets. Great stuff.”

Black Arms to Hold You Up, Ben Passmore

Sports Is Hell, Ben Passmore

Subtitled A History of Black Resistance, Passmore’s comic is more fun than you would think a book about fighting a racist state should be. I still owe it a proper review. It made me go back and read Passmore’s Sports Is Hell, which is kinda like the NFL x Walter Hill’s The Warriors x George Herriman’s Krazy Kat.

The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, Neko Case

Of the four memoirs I listened to this year, musician Neko Case’s is the most artfully written, packing in bursts of sensory images that pivot cannily to evoke very specific memories that connect the reader to the storyteller. The memoir is heavy on Case’s childhood and adolescence and purposefully avoids a direct accounting of her musical career. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot about music in here — there is (life on the road, songwriting, a nice section on her tenor guitar) — but Case seems to avoid going into too much detail about interpersonal relationships with other musicians. She also seems to want to apologize for some past behaviors, but the apologetic language is indirect and even cagey (Evan Dando’s memoir is a massive contrast here — the dude dishes deep, but is also frank and clear and specific about all the bad mean shit he did to people when he was younger).

Neko Case’s magnificent singing voice translates well to reading her memoir. She’s really good at reading it — expressive without being hammy, subtle, artful. I would love to hear her read other audiobooks, but I’m also happy for her to keep her focus on making music and playing live.

The King in Yellow, Robert Chambers☉

I played this silly fun indie game called The Baby in Yellow which led me to reread The King in the Yellow for the first time since I went nuts over True Detective (the first season). The first two stories were much stronger than I remembered — much weirder.

Acid Temple Ball, Mary Sativa

A Satyr’s Romance, Barry N. Malzberg

Flesh and Blood, Anna Winter

I spent some of the year browsing through a copy of the Maurice Girodias edited volume The Olympia Reader. That edition offers excerpts from Olympia Press’s more “respectable” authors, like William Burroughs, Chester Himes, Henry Miller, Jean Genet etc. I downloaded a bunch of trashier Olympia titles and ended up reading these three. They were all pretty bad but also fun. Acid Temple Ball is like a sex-positive Go Ask Alice; both A Satyr’s Romance and Flesh and Blood are well-beyond “problematic” in their depictions of sexual relationships.

The Pisstown Chaos, David Ohle☆ 

In my golden-hued review, I called The Pisstown Chaos “a foul, abject, hilarious, zany vaudeville act, a satire of post-apocalyptic literature, an extended riff on American hucksterism. It’s very funny and will make most readers queasy.”

The Changeling, Joy Williams

Joy Williams is one of my favorite writers, but I’ll admit I was disappointed in her second novel, 1978’s The Changeling. I loved how dark and weird and oppressive it was, but soon tired of spending time in the rattled consciousness of its alcoholic hero, Pearl. When Williams explores beyond Pearl, the novel hints at weird Gothic cult island shit that is super-intriguing — but we always have to retreat back to our depressed, insane hero.

The Folded Clock, Gerhard Rühm (translation by Alexander Booth)

A collection of “number poems, comprising typewriter ideograms, typed concrete poetry, collages of everyday paper ephemera and scraps, and a wide variety of literary forms where the visual pattern created on the page underpins the thematic meaning,” as publisher Twisted Spoon puts it. A fascinating and frustrating read that hearkens back to the good ole days of the avant garde.

Rumors of My Demise, Evan Dando

In a review at the Guardian of Evan Dando’s memoir Rumors of My Demise, Alexis Petridis writes that the Lemonheads leader “sounds insufferable, but weirdly, he doesn’t come across that way.” Dando doesn’t try to deny, deflect, or otherwise shade his life. He’s upfront about his privileged background, his good looks, and his love of the rock star lifestyle. He’s also, as he always was, very upfront about the drugs. I was in eighth grade when It’s a Shame about Ray came out. I loved it. I loved the follow up album, Come on Feel the Lemonheads even more. I am, I suppose, the target audience for this book, and I found it very satisfying. I also think listening to Dando read it is really remarkable. He’s charming and affable, but he doesn’t seem comfortable reading out loud (you can hear it, for example, in an awkward pause when he has to change the page during the middle of a sentence). It’s also remarkably honest, and culminates in a series of apologies to many of the people he’d hurt when he was younger (“If I could go back in time and give a bit of advice to myself, I’d say ‘Evan, don’t be such a dick.’”)

My best friend Nick, who died this May, was a bigger Lemonheads fan than I was. I think he would have loved Rumors of My Demise and I thought about him all the time while I was listening to it, wanting to text him, Hey, you’re gonna love this story about Dando drinking Fanta Orange and Absolut with Keith Richards or, Man, Dando really has a score to settle with Courtney Love, or Dando’s some kind of disaster magnet — he lived right by the Twin Towers and was home on 9/11, he was in L.A. during the King riots, in Paris when Diana died, on Martha’s Vineyard when JFK Jr. crashed…or, Man, Dando seems to have finally quit heroin, good for him. I didn’t get to text those things so I’m writing them here.

Happy New Year to you and yours.

Let me tell you about the nap

Edwin TurnerLeave a comment

2025 was in several ways one of the more fucked up and challenging years of my life. (This sentiment might be familiar to you and yours and many others.) But it was the year I finally learned to take a nap, thanks in part to an anecdote shared by the late novelist Philip Roth.

I have always been jealous of folks who can sleep on planes, in cars, on buses and far more jealous of people who can, like, choose to take a nap. I have envied people like my wife or my daughter or son or brother, who can just, like, conk out for twenty minutes and arise revived. It’s hard enough for me to fall asleep for six or seven or eight hours. As a child I remember reading that Napoleon Bonaparte was very good at taking cat naps, particularly before battles. I don’t know why but this factoid, true or false, made a huge impression on me as a kid. Napping has always seemed like a hidden key to focusing one’s energies.

I couldn’t nap but I was great at staying up for days at a time, particularly in my twenties. I also learned how to make my mind stop, to shut the whole thing down, but that wasn’t napping; it was passing out. None of this was or is healthy behavior.

Late last year a good friend of mine told me he’d picked up most of Philip Roth’s novels at an estate sale or a garage sale or some such. He’d been zipping through them and What do you think of Roth? he asked and I replied something like, I tried — it was Portnoy’s Complaint which I lifted from the Barnes & Noble when I was fifteen and then a few years later the first fifty pages of American Pastoral and all of The Human Stain and then giving up on The Plot Against America. And that was more or less it.

But maybe a year or two before this friend recommended my trying Roth, I’d read on the goddamned website Twitter an excerpt from a Philip Roth interview that stuck with me, primarily because of my desire to become a napper. It was a little screenshot, an excerpt from a 2013 puff piece with NPR celebrating Roth’s becoming an octogenarian. Here is the nap nugget:

Now that he’s not working every day, though, Roth says he’s savoring a gentler pleasure: naps. “Let me tell you about the nap,” he laughs. “It’s absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man, and he said to me, I was maybe 9, and he said to me, ‘Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off, put a blanket on you, and you’re going to sleep better.’ Well, as with everything, he was right. … Then the best part of it is that when you wake up, for the first 15 seconds, you have no idea where you are. You’re just alive. That’s all you know. And it’s bliss, it’s absolute bliss.”

My friend’s recommendation to return to Roth recalled this bit of advice and I started to practice it this year, now in my late forties. It has worked for me (or maybe my body has just gotten so old that all the cells and systems and such have agreed to allow consciousness to pause for twenty minutes on a Thursday afternoon). I think Roth’s dad’s advice works because it involves a commitment to the nap. Natural nappers like my lovely wife can shut it down on a couch with the second half of Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 adaptation of Little Women on the teevee, or drift off for a postprandial half-time siesta like an uncle after some ham and turkey and Pinot noir. Natural nappers are blessed; some of us have to work for it though.

I’ve added a few moves to Roth’s simple repertoire — shutting the door, closing the blinds, putting my phone in a different room. The hardest bit though, at first, was consciousness itself, some parcel of images and words and sounds intervening in blips in my mind’s eye when I tried to shut it all down. I remember as a kid being told to count sheep, or count numbers, to visualize the sheep or the numbers.

This bad count the sheep advice led me to realize that my mind stacks images on each other; or, not really stacks images so much as holds images — that when I’m not focused on external sensory input, like, when I’m supposed to be turning off, going to sleep, my mind’s eye (for lack of a better metaphor) has decided to rustle through my imagination and memory to layer visual (and to a much lesser extent, auditory) sensations in thick bundles. My trick this year has been to relax into the image bundle without attempting to make it cohere; I try to feel the blanket on my skin. I think I’ve gotten better at breathing, too.

I like napping. I have taken it up as a midlife hobby. It has made my life better in exactly the kind of way I had hoped it would — a small, minor, gift I thought would never be mine. Maybe I’ll even reach that bliss Roth mentions. But I’m fine without it.

Sunsets to chase | Notes on Ch. 39, the last chapter of Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket

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Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.

Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.

Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.

Notes on Chapters 19-20 | The needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact.

Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.

Notes on Chapters 24-26 | Idiots get respect out here, they’re believed to be in touch with invisible forces.

Notes on Chapters 27-29 | We’re in for some dark ages, kid.

Notes on Chapters 30-32 | Some occult switchwork.

Notes on Chapters 33-34 | The dead ride fast.

Notes on Chapters 35-36 | Ghost city.

Notes on Chapters 37-38 | Our racket happens to be exile.

The last chapter of Shadow Ticket has three movements: one for Bruno, the novel’s erstwhile villain; one for Hicks, its anti-hero finding his way to becoming a hero; and one for Hicks’s young protege Skeet, who’s been sidelined Stateside and not present in the novel’s second, European half.

We begin the finale on the phantom submarine the Vampire Squid, “Somewhere out beyond the western edge of the Old World.” Shadow Ticket will end with the promise of a new edge of the New World.

Bruno Airmont, one-time dairy gangster, believes he’s headed home. The sub encounters a bizarre behemoth, “a statue hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman draped in military gear less ceremonial than suited to action in the field [wearing] an openwork visor of some darkly corroded metal protecting, some say hiding, her identity.” The full description of this statue is beautiful and strange, and culminates with the melancholic note that her visage recalls “somebody we knew once a long time ago.” 

“Statue of Liberty,” guesses Bruno, which, okay. I mean, that’s a reasonable guess I guess.

The image Pynchon conjures of a surreal, armed Lady Liberty recalls the opening of Franz Kafka’s unfinished first novel Amerika, which begins with its hero entering the New York Harbor and encountering “the Statue of Liberty, which he had been observing for some time, as if in a sudden burst of sunlight. The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds” (trans. Mark Harman).

In the Pynchonverse, “It’s the U.S. but not exactly the one you left. There’s exile and there’s exile” for Bruno: “There is no Statue of Liberty, Bruno, no such thing, not where you’re going.”

Bruno’s episode–and the Vampire Squid’s—ends with a Dickinson dash: “Whatever counter-domain of exile this is they have wandered into, they will be headed not back into any sunrise but west, toward a frontier as yet only suspected, as the days sweep over them—”

The Vampire Squid is another bilocated ghost ship, like the Stupendica on which Hicks voyaged to Europe. In Against the Day, the Stupendica splits into two ships — its shadow double the Emperor Maximilian is off to war. Recall that the Vampire Squid is a reformed U-boat, set out on a “new career of nonbelligerence.” Shadow Ticket might be cynical about redemption, but it also posits second chances — even if those chances take the quester into unknown counter-domains of exile.

Ch. 39’s second movement is a scant few lines. Hicks, exiled to Europe, panics a bit and realizes “that what he thought mattered to him is now foreclosed.” Terike pulls up on her bike, teaches him the Hungarian phrase csókolj meg, and our boy is on another adventure, another romance. It’s a nice conclusion for Hicks — who, it’s worth noting, has not committed a single act of violence in the novel.

The real conclusion of Shadow Ticket is epistolary, a letter to “Hicksie” from his old pal Skeet Wheeler. Skeet’s “On the hop,” staying clear of “Paddy wagons, dogcatcher nets, arrest warrants, the works,” lamenting that there are “Not so many places to hide as there were.” Here again is a theme of Shadow Ticket: there’s only freedom on foot, on the run, on the hop. To escape the net, Skeet plans to head West with Zinnia, the gal who gave him a glow-in-the-dark watch back in Chapter 1: “There’s supposed to be plenty of work out on the Coast.” That would be the West Coast of course.

Skeet offers a wrap-up of the Wisconsin cast of Shadow Ticket, including Against the Day’s hero Lew Basnight, who agrees to give Skeet and “Zin the fare out to California.” Basnight advises the young couple in a mode that’s not so much benediction as it is ominous prophecy, warning of “forks in the road, close shaves, mistakes he wished he didn’t make.”

Basnight warns Skeet of California’s American promises: “Eternal youth, big Hollywood playpen, whatsoever—but someday they’ll lose that innocence. They’ll find out.”

“Maybe they’ll keep finding new ways to be innocent,” rejoins Skeet, to which Basnight replies: “Better if somebody tells you now—innocent and not guilty ain’t always the same.”

Skeet concedes he’s not sure what that riddle means, but figures he’ll solve it in time; for now, he writes to Hicks, it’s “Time to put them street kiddie days behind me.” Time to grow up, or at least to make a motion towards it.

The novel ends with Skeet en route to California via the Santa Fe Chief: “Right now, we’ve got a couple of sunsets to chase.” Like the crew of the Vampire Squid, Skeet and Zin are headed “not back into any sunrise but west, toward a frontier as yet only suspected.” 

And while Pynchon’s conclusion follows a signal trope of US American literature — namely the promise of a new start Out West — I think there’s more here than the urge that Huck expresses at the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when he promises to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” to avoid the “sivilizin'” domesticity represented by Aunt Sally. Skeet’s Westward movement isn’t pure escapism or the fantasy of Manifest Destiny. It isn’t a rejection of domestic responsibility in lieu of a new frontier but rather a utopian dream of “finding new ways to be innocent,” even as he puts those “kiddie days behind.”

Lew Basnight, veteran of Against the Day‘s fantasia/nightmare of nineteenth-century history, provides a tempering wisdom to cool Skeet’s American Dream: “innocent and not guilty ain’t always the same.” Perhaps, like the narrator back in Ch. 35 documenting Hicks and Daphne’s last encounter, Basnight understands that the characters in Shadow Ticket are floating “in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree” before the horrors of WWII. Again, Shadow Ticket is a dance number, a chronological breeze floating between Pynchon’s titans Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow.

For me, the ending is sweet and then bittersweet and then bitter and then sweet again. We know Hicks will likely never see Skeet again — but he might. We know that this is probably Pynchon’s last novel — but maybe it isn’t.

And we know that Zoyd Wheeler is the hero of Pynchon’s California novel Vineland, and we know that Skeet’s last name is Wheeler. My presumption is that Skeet and Zinnia are Zoyd’s parents, and I presume it because I like to think that the Pynchonverse, although large and containing multitudes (and bilocations of every stripe) is somehow cozily discrete.

I should probably distill my thoughts on Shadow Ticket into a compact, “proper” review, but I’ve sat with the novel now for two months, reading it twice, and really, really enjoying it. I never expected to get another Pynchon novel; it’s a gift. I loved its goofy Gothicism; I loved its noir-as-red-herring-genre-swap conceit; I loved even its worst puns (even “sofa so good”). I loved that Pynchon loves these characters, even the ones he might not have had the time or energy to fully flesh out — this is a book that, breezy as it reads, feels like a denser, thicker affair. And even if he gives us doom on the horizon in the impending horrors of genocide and atomic death, Pynchon ends with the hopeful image of two kids chasing sunsets. Great stuff.

Our racket happens to be exile | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 37-38

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Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.

Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.

Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.

Notes on Chapters 19-20 | The needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact.

Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.

Notes on Chapters 24-26 | Idiots get respect out here, they’re believed to be in touch with invisible forces.

Notes on Chapters 27-29 | We’re in for some dark ages, kid.

Notes on Chapters 30-32 | Some occult switchwork.

Notes on Chapters 33-34 | The dead ride fast.

Notes on Chapters 35-36 | Ghost city.

Illustration of Vampyroteuthis infernalis from Deutschen Tiefsee-Expedition, 1898-1899 by Carl Chun

Chapter 37: Shadow Ticket continues its wrap-up. Hicks punches another old ticket, not-exactly-solving the mystery of missing Stuffy Keegan (who disappeared way back in Ch. 8 on a U-13 submarine — a submarine that not everyone can see — into the icy depths of Lake Michigan.)

Hicks meets Stuffy at “the old Whitehead factory, where the torpedo as we have come to know it was invented.” The Whitehead Torpedo Works, based in Fiume/Rijeka  invented and developed the self-propelled torpedo in the 1860s. After WWI the company (under different subsidiary names) manufactured motorcycles and then hand grenades — bikes and pineapples, in the parlance of Shadow Ticket. There are a lot of bombs and biwheels in this novel.

The Whitehead Torpedo Works is another of Shadow Ticket’s Gothic spots, “fallen into ruin [and] said to be haunted by the ghosts of submarines long dismantled.” The phantom submarine that Stuffy crews is supernatural, natch, and a totem of the bigger thesis that Pynchon underlines throughout his latest novel: It’s never too late to redeem yourself. A war machine might repurpose itself, friendly ghost, into a rescue ship (or at minimum, a do-no-harm ship).

Whitehead torpedo’s illustrated profile, 1898

Stuffy introduces Hicks to the submarine’s skipper, Ernst Hauffnitz a veteran of the Great War responsible for “no casualty count that I know of, idiot’s luck no doubt.” The idiot, the fool, is blessed in Pynchon’s oeuvre, and in Shadow Ticket especially. And the idiot-who-does-no-harm is especially blessed. Let’s consider Hicks’s past as a strikebreaker, which we learn about back in Ch. 4, in a pivotal encounter when the big gorilla goes to whack a  “truculent little Bolshevik” with a “lead-filled beavertail sap” that would’ve surely killed the poor fella. Hicks’s blackjack disappears — “asported,” in the novel’s paranormal lingo. It sets him on a non-violent path (whether he sees or chooses this path or not).

For skipper Ernst Hauffnitz, doubts about the merits of war — by which I think we should say, doubts about using technology and innovation in the service of violence and undue death — began when “Max Valentiner torpedoed and sank SS Persia in the Mediterranean, killing 343 civilians in direct violation of Chancellery orders to spare passengers and rescue survivors.”

Those doubts increased when post-WWI orders to bring his submarine “to be broken up pursuant to Article 122 of the Trianon dictate“ led Captain Hauffnitz to suicidal feelings — but he converts that despair into hope, and sets out on a “new career of nonbelligerence.”

That new do-no-harm career includes helping out the Al Capone of Cheez, Bruno Airmont, “Who is about to be taken, as we speak, off on an undersea voyage of uncertain extent.” The International Cheese Syndicate — InChSyn — is after Bruno who’s taken off with their cash and their secrets. The submariners, now in “the search and rescue line” aim to see that “Mr. Airmont is safely relocated where he can neither commit nor incur further harm.”

Captain Hauffnitz continues: “You might consider us an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time, forever on the move, a patch of Fiume as it once was, immune to time, surviving all these years in the deep refuge of the sea…” On the move is the move of Shadow Ticket, one of its grand themes summed up by Stuffy Keegan back in Ch. 20: “as long as you can stay on the run, that’s the only time you’re really free.”

The episode concludes with reference to the “Valdivia Expedition of 1898–99, which brought up into the daylight a pitch-black critter known as the Vampire Squid, by whose name, these days, the U-13 has since come to be known.” More Gothic tinges!

We transition to the parting farewells of Bruno and Daphne; Daphne’s secured her father’s passage with a mariner named Drago. Papa Bruno gives his “li’l midnight pumpkin” a parting gift — “Better than money…It’s information” on the machinations of the InChSyn. Their last moments end with Bruno looking down at his watch, a “Rolex Oyster Perpetual he does not seem to recognize, as if thanks to the psychical ambience he’s been in all evening it has just apported onto his wrist.” 

It’s an odd reference, Bruno’s phantom Rolex, but it also fits with the novel’s theme of time as well as the motif of timepieces. Way back in Ch. 1, Skeet Wheeler shows off his new watch to Hicks: “Hamilton, glows in the dark too.” We’ll get a reference to that timepiece in the last paragraphs of the novel.

Bruno doesn’t make it too far on Drago’s escape boat before Hauffnitz’s crew intervenes. He’s on their sub in no time, wondering if he’s imprisoned in his “not uncomfortable cabin” — “Is this the brig I’m in, he wonders. No, submarines don’t have brigs, they are brigs.”

Stuffy starts to explain the situation to Bruno; the Cheez Gangster at first believes that the crew of the Vampire Squid intend to turn him over to the InChSyn. But as we saw earlier in the chapter, their goal is to add to a world of do no harm. 

Stuffy tries to hip Bruno to his new life: “See, there’s a difference between the Al Capone of Cheese and the AC of C in Exile. One sooner or later gets the paving-material overcoat. The other goes where he’ll do no harm. Our racket happens to be exile.”

“Milk belonging to John Albrecht is poured out on Sept. 16, 1933, by insurgent members of the Pure Milk Association seeking to force higher prices.” Chicago Tribune.

The chapter ends with Stuffy hipping Bruno to the 1933 Wisconsin milk strikes:

Seems revolution has broken out in the U.S., beginning in Wisconsin as a strike over the price per hundredweight that dairy farmers were demanding for milk, spreading across the region and soon the nation. Milk shipments hijacked and dumped at trackside, trees felled across roadways and set aflame to stop motor delivery, all-night sentinels, crossroads pickets, roundups, ambushes, bayonet charges, gunfire, casualties military and civilian.

It’s easy to dismiss Pynchon’s evocation of American zaniness as goofy, silly, unserious — but that would require (the very easy threshold of) not actually really reading Pynchon, a writer whose works stand clearly on the side of organized labor as well as on the peace-anarchy dimension of do no harm. The notion of “milk strikes” and a gangster cheese magnate might seem wacky, but Pynchon’s narrator points us towards the wallet, the stomach, the soul. There’s something comforting in the idea of Midwestern dairy workers going hard as a motherfucker and taking collective action to resist exploitation a century ago.

“Men lay out obstacles for milk delivery trucks along the Wisconsin-Illinois state line at Route 41 during the milk strike in January 1934. More than 18,000 farmers were demanding a fair price for their milk.” Chicago Tribune.

Chapter 38: Who should Hicks run into on the Korzo but one-time mob-enforcer Dippy Chazz Foditto, recently deported from the USA but nevertheless “just signed on to a scheme hatched and run by U.S. ruling-class elements who are betting that the island of Sicily will be a strategic factor in the next war.” Dippy will help to establish “a local anti-Fascist guerrilla force, trained, armed, and ready to roll.” Again, we’re ramping up to WW2. Dippy Chazz brings news from the West: Hicks’s old flame April is now married to the head crimeboss Milwaukee, and pregnant to boot. Hicks is exiled: “Take the tip, is all, it’s over for you in M’waukee, Hicks, Chicago too.”

The chapter ends on a sad note, with Hicks, “in the dawn hours of the first day of a post-American life…dials a number without thinking much about it till later, when he remembers it’s a TRIangle exchange number in Chicago, same as Al Capone’s mother has.” We can recall from Ch. 4 that Hicks’s mother Grace abandoned him to run away with an elephant trainer. He has a conversation with a person — his mother? Capone’s? just a person? — that ends with the sad image of trying to find “just a glimpse of something blowing away into the night, something it’s already too late to chase in this windbeaten emptiness taking possession of his heart…”

Ghost city | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 35-36

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Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.

Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.

Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.

Notes on Chapters 19-20 | The needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact.

Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.

Notes on Chapters 24-26 | Idiots get respect out here, they’re believed to be in touch with invisible forces.

Notes on Chapters 27-29 | We’re in for some dark ages, kid.

Notes on Chapters 30-32 | Some occult switchwork.

Notes on Chapters 33-34 | The dead ride fast.

Chapter 35 commences in “Fiume…a tattered ghost city with a sordid history of secret treaties and sellouts, edging its way through what the Fascist Italian regime calls Year Ten, continuing to collapse in on itself, unlikely to be redeemed.” 

There’s a lot there, as in most of Shadow Ticket’s sentences. The Italian fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio marched on Fiume in 1919, claiming it post-WWI in defiance of its “Free City” status. Like the Esperanto that runs through Shadow Ticket, utopian ideals won’t last long.

The spectral language invoking an unredeemed ghost city is a theme Pynchon explored throughout Gravity’s Rainbow, the first section of which, in particular, details a preterite, apocalyptic London. I think what’s notable here is again the sense of a pretender’s “utopian intellectualism” — the fascist force’s Anno X — which tries to stabilize a dehumanizing pursuit of power within the context of the humanities. It’s a ghost town, bound for collapse, bad for the soul.

The narrator notes that Fiume was once “a major port of embarkation for the New World, bright and bustling.” What’s more utopian than a capital-en-capital double-you New World? Shadow Ticket is all about movement, particularly west-east movement, with the bilocated east-west corollary (coreality?) built in. Indeed, Pynchon will end the novel a la Huckleberry Finn with Hicks’ protege Skeet Wheeler following Huck’s move to “light out for the Territory.” But I’m jumping ahead. The bigger Thing to note here, I think is that the New World is not so new anymore. Frontiers are going to be stranger, more combustible, going forward.

I’ve focused too much on setting: Our man in Fiume is Daphne Airmont, hunting Papa Cheez. She picks up a pair of Morčić, “earrings representing a black Moor’s head in a fancy white turban,” as well as a new tune, “Daleko m’ê moj Split,” (“My Split Is Far Away from Me” — here, a reference to the singer’s hometown).

A few nights later Daphne is singing this tune “at a sympathetic room in a roadhouse on the Yugoslavian side of the line, where neighborhood musicians like to get together, tonight a C-melody sax, banjo-uke, trombone, piano, an underlying beat from snare brushes and woodblock” — I let the sentence ride out because just because (lots of ukes in Shadow Ticket, yet not a single snood). In the middle of the song, Daphne’s “joined out of somewhere by a clarinet, all too immediately recognizable as who else but Hop Wingdale.” Before the erstwhile couple retreats to more private environs to catch up, Hop “reaches for a highball glass, where he’s been keeping a couple of reeds soaking in slivovitz, drinks what’s there, pours in more.” I agree with Daphne (“That’s disgusting!”), but maybe the Drunk Pynchon blog will disagree if they ever get around to “clarinet reeds soaked in slivovitz.”

I can’t help myself: Here’s Pynchon’s mise en scène one-sentence-paragraph for the Daphne-Hop intimate reunion, in which she will find out that he’s actually a spy:

“A busy echoing interior comfortably dim with all-night cigarette and kitchen smoke, young runners who never fall asleep in and out bringing seafood fresh from the Adriatic, a continuous wind outside, down from the high limestone, a theremin of uneasiness, sliding around a narrow band of notes, in which it’s said you may come to hear repeated melodies, themes and variations, which is when you know you’re going bughouse, with only a very short period of grace to try and escape before it no longer matters.”

Pynchon is an underrated prose stylist. The rhythm here might not work for all folks, but it sings to me. There’s obviously a bustling noir quality to the cramped kitchen scene, which Pynchon drapes in mystical paranoia: the Adriatic wind (and “wind” by the by, is a byword in Against the Day, a physical yet invisible force) — the Adriatic wind becomes “a theremin of uneasiness,” a phrase that recalls “the Sombrero of Uneasiness” that makes “a chill creep across Hicks’s scalp” back in Ch. 10, back in Wisconsin, back at the Nazi bowling alley. (There was also a nod to the theremin back in Ch. 24, at the Club Hypotenuse.) The last little bit of the paragraph is a parable for paranoids perhaps — when we “hear repeated melodies, themes and variations,” we know we’re “going bughouse.”

There’s a bit of business at the end of the Daphne-Hop episode that again points to Shadow Ticket’s underinflated bagginess — I’ve pointed out in these riffs that this is a much bigger novel in my imagination, a fat wedge between between Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow. The narrator mentions that Daphne’s supposed-one-time-not-really-fiance “G. Rodney Flaunch has recently published How to Lose a Million and a Half and Bounce Back Smiling,” opening a potential skewering of the kind of self-helpery bullshit that grifters continue to grift on as we breathe, this very minute. It’s a blip of a bit, reminding us that Daphne is far from home (as “Daleko m’ê moj Split” has already underscored), and if it’s underdeveloped, well, William Gaddis took Carnegie to task in The Recognitions (and elsewhere).

The wrapping-things-up-too-quickly motif continues as Hicks and Daphne reunite. Daphne’s headed back home; Hicks is not. She lets him off “that Chippewa hook”; no more life debt for Hicks. Our hero asks her to convey a message to April Randazzo, who is not mentioned by name, but rather alluded to as a “grown woman, married, family to raise” — the kiddie stuff is done. It’s time to grow up. The narrator infuses their stilted, terse parting with a flood of emotion:

“What one of them should have been saying was ‘We’re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree. If anybody’s around to remember. Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark…'”

The break is of course the moments between the two big wars, situated as the break between Modernity and what comes after — the atom bomb and all that.

Pynchon’s narrator then domesticates the issue in his hypothetical dialogue: “Stay, or go. Two fates beginning to diverge—back to the U.S., marry, raise a family, assemble a life you can persuade yourself is free from fear, as meanwhile, over here, the other outcome continues to unfold, to roll in dark as the end of time.” Here again is the novel’s theme of bilocation, of imagining two lives; shadow/form.

It gets darker of course, as the Second World War deserves: “Those you could have saved, could’ve shifted at least somehow onto a safer stretch of track, are one by one robbed, beaten, killed, seized and taken away into the nameless, the unrecoverable.” Hicks won’t go back east, back home to the New World. Can he rise to this challenge? Can he divert some souls to a safer stretch of track and earn a crumb of redemption?

Chapter 36 is a mess.

It is a mess because it attempts to tie up loose ends; that is the wrong metaphor, tie up loose ends — in any case a cavalcade of featured players, guest stars, and even extras show up here (in Fiume, natch), to reconfigure in new teams for the coming war. We get Hicks and Terike and Ace Lomax and Porfirio del Vasto and Zoltán von Kiss and Egon Praediger (“nose merrily aglow,” the fucking cokehead).

Anyway, they’re all in Fiume, convening at Bruno Airmont’s villa, which “dates from just after the War, when d’Annunzio’s republic was young and Fiume had a reputation as a party town, fun-seekers converging from all over, whoopee of many persuasions, wide-open to nudists, vegetarians, coke snorters, tricksters, pirates and runners of contraband, orgy-goers, fighters of after-dark hand-grenade duels, astounders of the bourgeoisie…” Pynchon twins this list with new revelers at the villa, now a scene for “night owls, freeloaders, accidental walk-ins, practitioners of esoteric arts, fearers of the dark, compulsive socializers, secret police, jewel thieves, firefly girls, drug dealers, cigarette-factory workers, tobacco smugglers…” Old boy loves lists! (What is a “firefly girl”?)

The noisy, buzzing chapter ends with Hop Wingdale offering Ace Lomax (along with “that Czechoslovakian robot” Zdeněk) a job “Escorting Jews to safety, one at a time or in truckloads.” Ace was once hired muscle — like Hicks, who started his “career” as a strikebreaker. But in Shadow Ticket we see the possibility for his changing sides. Redemption is possible. As the psychic Zoltán von Kiss suggests in  Ch. 22: “even the most hopelessly ill-imagined lamp deserves to belong somewhere, to have been awaited, to enact some return, to stand watch on some table, in some corner, as a place-keeper, a marker, a promise of redemption.” 

This novel believes in the promise of redemption.