A(nother) completely subjective and thoroughly unnecessary ranking of Thomas Pynchon’s novels

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In 2018—six years ago—on Thomas Pynchon’s 81st birthday, I put together a thoroughly unnecessary ranking of his eight novels. I’m somewhat ashamed of the post, as I included two novels I had abandoned a few times—Vineland and Bleeding Edge. Three years ago, on Pynchon’s 84th birthday, I wrote a few sentences on each of Pynchon’s novels, having, at that point, made my way through all of them. The first post, perhaps because it contains the word “ranking” in its title gets far more traffic to this day than the more thoughtful and finished post from 2021. Indeed, the “ranking” post regularly shows up in the top ten percentile of my weekly and monthly stats on Biblioklept, which, I guess, has bothered me enough to write this (thoroughly unnecessary still) “ranking.”

I know that if I were to approach Pynchon’s eight novels on eight different days, I’d likely end up with a consistent #1, #2, #3, and #8—but the other spots would shift depending on my memory or fancy or whatever spell I’d fallen under, chemical, metaphysical or otherwise. But here’s the list I came up with today.

8. Vineland (1990)

In my 2018 post (where I ranked Vineland at number 7) I noted that “Vineland seems to have a strange status for Pynchon cultists—its a cult novel in an oeuvre of cult novels,” and I’ve found that intuition confirmed over the years. I stick by my assertion in my 2021 post in which I asserted that “Vineland is ultimately depressing and easily my least-favorite Pynchon novel, but it does have some exquisite prose moments.” I’m sure I’ll revisit it before seeing Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation though.

7. Inherent Vice (2009)

Speaking of Paul Thomas Anderson—I think I like his film adaptation of Inherent Vice more than I like the novel. And I love Inherent Vice. But I think PTA provides an emotional ballast that gives the narrative a center that’s missing from Pynchon’s novel (which is, likely, the point, or at least the byproduct of Pynchon’s shaggy dogging it). (I originally ranked Inherent Vice at number 6).

6. Bleeding Edge (2013)

So I finally found my way into Bleeding Edge in the earliest weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown. I’d stuck the book at the bottom of my 2018 list. I’m not really sure why I stalled out on—maybe it feels the closest to my own timeline of any Pynchon novel. Anyway, it’s one I want to revisit again soon. I riffed on it some in 2020, writing “Pynchon captures a time in America during which I was, at least theoretically, becoming an adult (a becoming which may or may not have happened yet). Reading Bleeding Edge helped evoke all the weirdness the 2000s were about to lay out for us. It made me angry again, or reminded me of the anger that I’d sustain for most of the decade. It reminded me of our huge ideological failure after 9/11, an ideological failure we are watching somehow fail even more today.  But I also loved the novel’s unexpectedly sweet domestic plot, and found a kind of solace even in its affirmation of family, even as its final image pointed to the kind of radical inconclusiveness at the heart of being a parent.”

5. V. (1963)

So from here on out my rankings are identical to my stupid 2018 list, with that big caveat that I would easily swap, say, V. and 49 here. I’ll repeat my endorsement that “V. makes a good starting place for anyone new to Pynchon” and recommend that anyone interested in Pynchon but daunted by the scope check out the book from their library and read the ninth chapter, the story of of Kurt Mondaugen.

4. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

The Crying of Lot 49 is probably a better novel than V. but I think I like V. better. 49 is very funny and showcases Pynchon’s tonality of paranoia/hope wrapped up in zaniness/horror. It’s an excellent sophomore novel, but also dense, claustrophobic even. I guess I like the Pynchon sprawl a bit better.

3. Against the Day  (2006)

Speaking of sprawl: Against the Day is Pynchon’s biggest novel, just fat and giddy and overstuffed with goodies. I think this novel would make an excellent American history textbook. Its thesis: resist the military-industrial-entertainment-complex. Start here!

2. Mason & Dixon (1997)

A measurement of the world and a story about friendship. It would be Pynchon’s best novel if he hadn’t written—

1. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

The best book. I reread it earlier this summer and it’s roomier and stranger and more rewarding each time.

Charles Burns’s Final Cut (Book acquired, 23 July 2024)

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I’m excited about this one. Charles Burns’s novel Final Cut is out in late September. I’ll have a review around that time. For now, here’s publisher Pantheon’s blurb:

Riff on July 2024 reading, etc.

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I experienced the middle weeks of July 2024 as simultaneously rapid and static. Doldrums should never be so frenetic. If this decade were a novel I would’ve put it down several chapters back. I try not to obsess over things I cannot control. I try to get away from screens. I try to go outside, but the feels like heat index here in north Florida goes over a hundred and five every day. (At least it’s raining again and nothing is on fire.) So I try to read more (and actually write more).

This July I read some great stuff.

I finished Katherine Dunn’s first novel Attic a couple of days ago. The book is seriously fucked up—like William Burroughs-Kathy Acker fucked up—an abject rant from a woman in prison in the mode of Ginsberg’s Howl. The narrator seems to be an autofictional version of Dunn herself, which is perhaps why Eric Rosenblum, in his 2022 New Yorker review described it as “largely a realist work in which Dunn emphasizes the trauma of her protagonist’s childhood.” Rosenblum uses the term realism two other times to describe Attic and refers to it at one point as a work of magical realism. If Attic is realism then so is Blood and Guts in High School. I need to read her second and third novels (Truck, 1971 and the posthumous Toad) and then go back and reread Geek Love, which I remember as being Gothic and gross but also whimsical. (I don’t sniff any whimsy in Attic.)

There are eight stories in Oğuz Atay’s story collection Waiting for the Fear (in translation by Ralph Hubbell); I’ve read the first five this summer, including the long title story, which is especially good, as is the opener “Man in a White Overcoat.” Atay’s heroes (I use the term loosely) find their antecedents in Kafka’s weirdos. Or Paul Bowles. Or Jane Bowles. I should have a proper review up near the end of October when NYRB publishes Waiting for the Fear.

I had picked up Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel American Abductions earlier this summer and finally started it a few nights ago after finishing Attic. Each chapter is a run-on sentence that has made me want to keep reading and reading, running on with it. The novel is, at least so far, both challenging and entertaining; it is not difficult, exactly, but rather engrossing. Sometimes I’ll find myself a bit lost in the layered consciousnesses, layers (layerings) of speech in Cárdenas’s sentences—especially when I find myself startled by an image or a joke or idea—and then I’ll wade backwards again and pick up the rhythm and keep going. The plot? I’ll steal from the Dalkey Archive’s blurb: “American Abductions opens in a near-future United States whose omnipresence of data-harvesting and algorithms has enabled the mass incarceration and deportation of Latin Americans—regardless of citizenship.” But that’s not really the plot; I mean, this isn’t a third-person dystopian world-building YA thing. The novel, at least its first half, is about a family, daughters Ada and Eva and their father Antonio, a novelist who was abducted by the titular abductors (the Pale Americans!). It’s also about writing, how we construct memory in a surveillance state, and, I suppose, love.

I reviewed Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s latest novel The Son of Man (in translation by Frank Wynne) in the middle of July, although I think I probably read it in late June. In my review I suggested that The Son of Man “is ultimately a novel about the atavistic transmission of violence from generation to generation.” I also highly recommended it.

I went on a big Antoine Volodine binge a couple of years ago which stalled out before I got to (what I believe is) his longest novel in English translation, Radiant Terminus. I finally started into it a few weeks ago (in translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman), and I think it might be Volodine’s best work. In my longish review, I declared Radiant Terminus “an astounding novel, a work that will haunt any reader willing to tune into its strange vibrations and haunted frequencies. Very highly recommended.” I think it’s a perfect starting place for anyone interested in Volodine’s so-called post-exotic project.

Denis Johnson’s The Stars at Noon was one of two novels I revisited via audiobook this month (the other is Portis’s Gringos, which we’ll get to in a moment). I honestly didn’t remember much about The Stars at Noon other than its premise and the fact that its narrator was an alcoholic journalist-cum-prostitute in Nicaragua. It hadn’t made the same impression on me as other Johnson novels had when I went through a big Johnson jag in the late nineties and early 2000s, and I think that assessment was correct—it’s simply not as strong as Angels, Fiskadoro, or Jesus’ Son. As an audiobook though I enjoyed it, especially in Will Patton’s reading. (His narration of Johnson’s perfect novella Train Dreams is the perfect audiobook.) I guess the audiobook came out in conjunction with Claire Denis’ 2022 adaptation of the film, which I still haven’t seen.

The collection of Remedios Varo’s writings On Homo rodans and Other Writings is another book I read earlier in the summer but didn’t write about until July. I was fortunate enough to get a long interview with the translator, Margaret Carson, and I think the result is one of the better things Biblioklept has published this year.

I picked up Dinah Brooke’s “lost” novel Lord Jim at Home in late June, and then read it in something of a sweat over a few days. In my review, I wrote that

Lord Jim at Home is squalid and startling and nastily horrific. It is abject, lurid, violent, and dark. It is also sad, absurd, mythic, often very funny, and somehow very, very real for all its strangeness. The novels I would most liken Lord Jim at Home to, at least in terms of the aesthetic and emotional experience of reading it, are Ann Quin’s Berg, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and James Joyce’s Portrait (as well as bits of Ulysses).

Gringos is the other book I “reread” via audiobook this July. Charles Portis wrote five novels and all of them are perfect—but I think Gringos might be my favorite. David Aaron Baker’s reading of the novel is excellent. He conveys the dry humor of narrator Jimmy Burns as well as the cynical sweet pathos at the core of Portis’s last novel. Highly recommended.

So well I guess July is over; the kids will be back in school again soon, and so will I. The air here will remain swamp thick, humidity that starts cooking you the minute you venture out of the desiccating AC that licensed growth on this weird peninsula. It might let up by November. Maybe because I’ve spent my entire adult career as a teacher I have always thought of August as the end of the year, not December. And some years I feel melancholy at this end, this pivot away from freer hours. But writing this on the last day of July, I think I want a return to routine, to something I can think of as a return to normalcy, the kind of normalcy that makes me appreciate the weird fucked up oddball novels that I do so love to hang out inside of.

Mass-market Monday | Philip K. Dick’s A Maze of Death

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A Maze of Death, Philip K. Dick. Dawn Books, first Daw printing (1983). Cover art by Bob Pepper. 191 pages.

In my review of Philip K. Dick’s 1970 novel, I wrote that A Maze of Death is

…a mishmash of metaphysical mumbo jumbo, filtered through touches of space opera and good old fashioned haunted housery. A Maze of Death is a messy space horror that threatens to leave its readers unsatisfied right up until the final moments wherein it rings its sad coda, a reverberation that nullifies all its previous twists and turns in a soothing wash of emptiness. Not the best starting place for PKD, but I’m very glad I read it.

On top of stolen books behind the Life Magazine picture of Bertrand Russell like a baby eagle | From Katherine Dunn’s first novel Attic

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In the five-and-dime can’t see over the counters with her—see
the red thimble—plastic knobby—just fits—put it on and tap things with it—lips and teeth and wish I had two to click against each other—wander out with her—why where did you get that you little thief march right back in there and give it to the man and apologize—penny thimble—I didn’t even notice I’d taken it—big noise and hits—the shame…

Drugstore book racks—need a book a day at least—three thin ones—too far to the library—heavy—always overdue—little ladies in pale green uniforms inventory hair spray—perfume—Kotex while I’m putting books in my purse—in my armpits—Agatha Christie—Nero Wolfe—James Bond—candy bars in pockets—have to lay off M & Ms—they rattle too much—an extra eyebrow pencil up my sweater sleeve and buy a deodorant—go out to the car and drop the stuff—back into the supermarket for cookies and cigarettes and chocolate-covered cherries—buy milk and then tool back home to turn the heat up and sit with the rain outside—with my feet up reading trash—eating trash—drinking milk straight from the carton only pouring it into a glass when I want to dunk cookies in it…

Girls League Cake Sale—high school cakes by girls in coordinated sweaters and skirts—ribbons holding their hair—dozens of pairs of shoes—their proud bras and girdles mocking my brother’s cast-off tee shirts in the locker room—they study typing with old Birdsing and wear ribbons in their hair—bake cakes for the cake sale from scratch with boiled frosting that slump in the middle and cave on the side—patch it up with frosting and candy drops—hide them on mother’s best cake plates behind screens in the cafeteria—I ducking class as usual—hiding stink bombs behind the encyclopedias in the library—sneaking through the halls with my five-button Levi’s swishing between my legs a cake under each arm—stacking them carefully in my locker on top of stolen books behind the Life Magazine picture of Bertrand Russell like a baby eagle his fierce fuzzy face on the scrawny neck—hide for the rest of the afternoon in the conference rooms in the library listening to Jake in his chemistry room gas mask searching for the stink bombs and cursing—thinking of him fumbling with the pear-assed librarian from the grade school—all the time rehearsing my lines for if I’m caught—when the final bell rings parading down to the boys’ locker room with a dozen cakes on a book cart to wait for the wrestling team to finish weighing in and come out famished after a month of making weight…

From Katherine Dunn’s first novel Attic. 

Horrors and oneiric aberrations | On Antoine Volodine’s post-exotic novel Radiant Terminus

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Antoine Volodine’s novel Radiant Terminus is a 500-page post-apocalyptic, post-modernist, post-exotic epic that destabilizes notions of life and death itself. Radiant Terminus is somehow simultaneously fat and bare, vibrant and etiolated, cunning and naive. The prose, in Jeffrey Zuckerman’s English translation, shifts from lucid, plain syntax to poetical flights of invention. Volodine’s novel is likely unlike anything you’ve read before—unless you’ve read Volodine.

Radiant Terminus begins with its hero Kronauer fleeing into an irradiated wasteland. Kronauer and two of his comrades are escaping from the Orbise, the capital of the Second Soviet Union, which has been invaded by dog-headed fascists. World-wide Marxism-Leninism has fallen, and the stability of nuclear-powered self-sufficiency has collapsed into the apocalyptic promise of a “world that nuclear accidents had made unlivable for ten millennia to come.” The world is indeed increasingly unlivable, but it also has become, we will find, a place for the undying as well. “Hell is on the surface, it’s here,” one character flatly remarks, adding, “No need to dive into the core.”

But Kronauer will have to dive into the core, at least metaphorically. When one of his comrades, succumbing to radiation poison, can no longer move, Kronauer seeks help, crossing the steppe and bravely venturing into the dark forest. Born in the sanctity of the Orbise, Kronauer had been schooled to focus “on the future of Communes for workers and countrymen. His view of the world was illuminated by proletarian morality: self-sacrifice, altruism, and confrontation.” He is driven to save his comrade, but we know from the outset that hopes are slim.

What matters here is Kronauer’s essential idealism. By the end of the novel, Kronauer will suffer, wondering if he will eventually abandon the principles that underwrite his sense of self. He worries that he will eventually slip into a “total regression to primitive hunting, intelligence sidelined for instincts, and, especially, deep down, an irrepressible desire to kill, to slaughter, and to hurt, even if he couldn’t remember anymore what had brought about this nightmare.”

We enter Radiant Terminus in the midst of a nightmare that somehow only intensifies. Kronauer finds his way to what might be the prospect of aid for his comrade, the titular Radiant Terminus, a collective farm that is somehow self-sustaining despite the ever-present specter of irradiated death. Not only is Radiant Terminus out of sync with the physical reality of the post-apocalyptic world, its principles don’t fully square with the tenets of the Second Soviet Union that have guided Kronauer’s mindset:

Radiant Terminus functioned on ideological principles that didn’t match up to the collectivist norms of the Orbise, but, as far as the allocation of goods went, the end result was the same. Disdain for property was, as had been the case throughout the Second Soviet Union, commonplace in the Levanidovo. It was a place where the Party had been extinguished, where the Party no longer existed, but where the idea of reestablishing capitalism and the bourgeoisie hadn’t occurred to anyone, and besides it had to be asked just what this thing called capitalism would have looked like at Radiant Terminus, and what bourgeoisie could be called upon to oppress the working class…

We come to understand, elliptically enough, that Radiant Terminus’s apparent prosperity (or at least sustainability) is purchased in large part via sacrifices made to the village’s old nuclear reactor core, which has melted down and is kept locked away. The core is a kind of doorway to hell. The citizens of Radiant Terminus offer it gifts from the old world:

Every month, indeed, the core was fed. The heavy cover for the well was opened, and some of the bric-a-brac collected over the last season or two was knocked over the edge; just to show that people weren’t panicking and weren’t afraid of pathetic radionuclides. Tables and chairs, television sets, the tarry carcasses of cows and cowherds, tractor motors, charred schoolteachers who had been forgotten in their classrooms during the critical period, computers, remains of phosphorescent crows, moles, does, wolves, squirrels, clothes that looked perfect but had only to be shaken to set off a haze of sparks, inflated toothpaste tubes filled with constantly simmering toothpaste, albino dogs and cats, clusters of iron that continued to rumble with an inner fire, new combine harvesters that hadn’t yet been broken in and which gleamed at midnight as if they were lying in full sunlight, garden forks, hoes, axes, debarkers, accordions that spat out more gamma rays than folkloric melodies, pinewood planks that looked like ebony planks, Stakhanovites in their Sunday best with their hands mummified around their diplomas, forgotten when the event halls were evacuated. The ledgers with their pages turning day and night. Cash-register money, the copper coins clinking and shifting without anyone nearby. These were the sorts of things thrown into the void.

The Gramma Udgul was the one to handle the maneuver

We come to understand the Gramma Udgul as priestess-witch archetype; “condemned to immortality from her first interactions with nuclear reactor cores” she is both immune to the ravages of radiation and cursed by it. The Gramma Udgul has her counterpoint in Solovyei, the dominant antagonist of Radiant Terminus.

Solovyei is the “president” of Radiant Terminus, but his role is something closer to an archduke synthesized with an insane wizard. Like the Gramma Udgul, Solovyei is immortal (indeed, a century earlier, the pair were husband and wife). Solovyei rules greedily over Radiant Terminus, and warns Kronauer to stay away from his three daughters. He is an inverted King Lear; mad, yes, but also deeply capable and cunning. Solovyei seems to find metaphysical sustenance in trips to Radiant Terminus’s nuclear core, emerging from time spent there “sizzling and blackened, weighed down with radiation and opaque poems.”

The development of Solovyei as a controlling intelligence—and Kronauer’s ideological resistance to his monomania as well as his three daughters’ battle against his invasive will—forms the main plot, such as it is, of Radiant Terminus. Solovyei is the author of the “horrors and oneiric aberrations” that haunt the characters and landscape that he is both collapsing center and impossible margin of. “It was hard to determine whether he was a mutant bird, a gigantic sorcerer, or a rich farmer from Soviet or Tolstoyan times,” the narrator declares at one point.

“This necromancer of the steppes,” Kronauer calls Solovyei, and then goes on to try to find language for the metaphysical:

This awful kolkhoz matchmaker, this reviver of cadavers, this horrible shadow, this giant impervious to radiation, this shamanic authority from nowhere, this president of nothing, this vampire in the form of a kulak, this strange man sitting on a stool, this abuser, this dominating man, this sleazy man, this unsettling man, this nuclear-reactor creature, this godless and lordless hypnotizer, this manipulator…

One of the key plot points of Radiant Terminus is that Solovyei can literally resurrect the dead, but cannot reanimate them back to what we would understand as true life:

….we all became bodies inhabited by Solovyei. Who knows whether this magic muzhik hasn’t taken advantage of us being dead, and if we aren’t all puppets within a theater where the manager, the actors, and the audience are all one and the same person

Some of Volodine’s chapters seem to inhabit Solovyei’s consciousness, a space that’s somehow both murky and sharp, an intelligence feasting on the agencies of other human beings:

Our best marionettes, I say. Him or me, doesn’t matter. When he’s stuck I keep going. Zombies, deep shadows, devoted servants. The dead stuck forever in the Bardo. Dead come from the dead. Wives come from unknown mothers. Henchmen. Best puppets and best dolls.

Every character who survives in the pages of Radiant Terminus seems to be susceptible to Solovyei’s oneiric horrors. He is the dream police, the puppet master — “Who’s he?” a minor character asks. The answer: “We don’t know…But we do know that he does with us whatever he wants. We’re in his hell.”

Solovyei’s daughters are the most sympathetic of his vampiric victims. These women, forced into the same unasked-for immortality as their father, find themselves repeatedly invaded by Solovyei, who haunts their dreams and walks around in their minds. One daughter sees herself “a creature imagined, possessed, and brought to life by Solovyei. A daughter of Solovyei, a daughter for Solovyei. A female annex in Solovyei’s life: nothing more than that.” They initiate their own eruptions of opposition: violence, suicidal rejection. Writing.

Near the end of Radiant Terminus, the narrator describes the novels of Hannko Vogulian, Solovyei’s eldest daughter:

In effect, they depicted the same twilit suffering of everyone, a magical but hopeless ordinariness, organic and political deterioration, infinite yet unwished-for resistance to death, perennial uncertainty about reality, or a penal progression of thought, penal, wounded, and insane.

We have here an internal description of the novel Radiant Terminus itself. Indeed, Radiant Terminus is always self-describing and always self-deconstructing: “Everything is in the same place, as in some kind of book, if you want to go to the trouble of thinking about it. That’s the ambiguity of ubiquity and achronia,” the narrator muses. When the narrator throws out the sentence, “These are complete works for no audience,” it almost feels like an inside joke. And Volodine can’t resist metanarrative descriptions of his own so-called post-exotic project:

If a post-exotic writer had been present at the scene, he would have certainly described it according to the techniques of magical socialist realism, with flights of lyricism, drops of sweat, and the proletarian exaltation that were part of the genre. It would have been a propagandist epic with reflections on the individual’s endurance in service to the collective.

Volodine’s Radiant Terminus works in all these modes while simultaneously subverting them. The result is an astounding novel, a work that will haunt any reader willing to tune into its strange vibrations and haunted frequencies. Very highly recommended.

A review of Dinah Brooke’s excellent cult novel Lord Jim at Home

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Dinah Brooke’s 1973 novel Lord Jim at Home had been out of print for five decades — and had never gotten a U.S. release — until McNally Editions republished in 2023 with a new foreword by the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh. I always save forewords until after I’ve finished a novel, so I missed Moshfegh’s implicit advice to go into Lord Jim at Home cold. She notes that the recommendation she received to read it “came with no introduction,” and that “I wouldn’t have wanted the effect of the novel to be mitigated in any way, so I’m reluctant to introduce it now.”

I am not reluctant to write about Brooke’s novel because I am so enthusiastic about it and I think those with tastes in literature similar to my own will find something fascinating in its plot and prose. However, l agree with Moshfegh’s advice that Lord Jim at Home is best experienced free from as much mitigating context as possible. I had never heard of the novel before lifting it from a bookseller’s shelf, attracted by the striking cover; I flipped it over to read a blurb parsed from Moshfegh’s foreword attesting that Brooke’s novel “was an instrument of torture. It’s that good.” The inside flap informed me that reviews upon its publication “described it as ‘squalid and startling,’ ‘nastily horrific,’ and a ‘monstrous parody’ of upper-middle class English life.” I was sold.

Lord Jim at Home is squalid and startling and nastily horrific. It is abject, lurid, violent, and dark. It is also sad, absurd, mythic, often very funny, and somehow very, very real for all its strangeness. The novels I would most liken Lord Jim at Home to, at least in terms of the aesthetic and emotional experience of reading it, are Ann Quin’s Berg, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and James Joyce’s Portrait (as well as bits of Ulysses). (I have not read Conrad’s Lord Jim, which Brooke has taken as something of a precursor text for Lord Jim at Home.)

After finishing Lord Jim at Home, I read it again by accident. At first I intended to take a few notes for a possible review, but after the first few pages I just kept reading. On a second reading, Brooke’s novel was just as strange—maybe even stranger—even if I was able to read it much more quickly, finding myself quicker to tune into the novel’s competing (and complementary) narrative registers. I found it far more precise, too, in the rhetorical development of its themes; Brooke’s styles and tones shift to capture the different ages of its hero. The novel begins in a mythical, archetypal mode and works its way through various registers, exploring the tropes of schoolboy novels, romances, war stories, adventure tales,  modernism, realism, and journalism. But despite its shifting modes, Lord Jim at Home is not a parodic pastiche. Rather, at its core, Lord Jim at Home skewers how aesthetic modes—primarily those derived from notions of class and manners—cover over abject cruelty. As Moshfegh puts it in her forward, Lord Jim at Home is “an accurate portrayal of how fucked-up people behave, artfully conveyed in a way that nice people are too polite to admit they understand.”

I’ve tried to be clear that I think it’s best to come to Lord Jim at Home without too much context—it’s best to just go with the novel’s strangeness. Below, however, I offer a more detailed discussion of the novel, its language, and some elements of the plot for those so inclined.

Answer, 2014 by Henrietta Harris

Continue reading “A review of Dinah Brooke’s excellent cult novel Lord Jim at Home” →

Mass-market Monday | Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes

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A Feast of Snakes, Harry Crews. Ballantine Books, first edition, first printing (1978). No cover artist credited. 165 pages.

While the cover designer and artist aren’t credited, there is a signature on the back which I believe is “Gentile.” If anyone has a guess as to the artist’s full name I’d be happy to hear it.

From the novel: not quite a recipe for snakes:

When they got to his purple double-wide, Joe Lon skinned snakes in a frenzy. He picked up the snakes by the tails as he dipped them out of the metal drums and swung them around and around his head and then popped them like a cowwhip, which caused their heads to explode. Then he nailed them up on a board in the pen and skinned them out with a pair of wire pliers. Elfie was standing in the door of the trailer behind them with a baby on her hip. Full of beer and fascinated with what Joe Lon could feel—or thought he could—the weight of her gaze on his back while he popped and skinned the snakes. He finally turned and looked at her, pulling his lips back from his teeth in a smile that only shamed him.

He called across the yard to her. “Thought we’d cook up some snake and stuff, darlin, have ourselves a feast.”

Her face brightened in the door and she said: “Course we can, Joe Lon, honey.”

Elfie brought him a pan and Joe Lon cut the snakes into half-inch steaks. Duffy turned to Elfie and said: “My name is Duffy Deeter and this is something fine. Want to tell me how you cook up snakes?”

Elfie smiled, trying not to show her teeth. “It’s lots of ways. Way I do mostly is I soak’m in vinegar about ten minutes, drain’m off good, and sprinkle me a little Looseanner redhot on’m, roll’m in flour, and fry’m is the way I mostly do.”

“Proposal” — Denis Johnson

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“Proposal”

by

Denis Johnson

The early inhabitants of this continent
passed through a valley of ice two miles deep
to get here, passed from creature to creature
eating them, throwing away the small bones
and fornicating under nameless stars
in a waste so cold that diseases couldn’t
live in it. Three hundred million
animals they slaughtered in the space of two centuries,
moving from the Bering isthmus to the core
of squalid Amazonian voodoo, one
murder at a time; and although in the modern hour
the churches’ mouths are smeared with us
and all manner of pleading goes up from our hearts,
I don’t think they thought the dark and terrible
swallowing gullet could be prayed to.
I don’t think they found the smell of baking
amid friends in a warm kitchen anything to be revered.
I think some of them had to chew the food
for the old ones after they’d lost all their teeth,
and that their expressions
were like those we see on the faces
of the victims of traffic accidents today.
I think they threw their spears with a sense of utter loss,
as if they, their weapons, and the enormous animals
they pursued were all going to disappear.
As we can see, they were right. And they were us.
That’s what makes it hard for me now to choose one thing
over all the others; and yet surrounded by the aroma
of this Mexican baking and flowery incense
with the kitchen as yellow as the middle
of the sun, telling your usually smart-mouthed
urchin child about the early inhabitants
of this continent who are dead, I figure
I’ll marry myself to you and take my chances,
stepping onto the rock
which is a whale, the ship which is about to set sail
and sink
in the danger that carries us like a mother.

Katherine Dunn’s Attic (Book acquired, 18 July 2024)

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Picked up a copy of Katherine Dunn’s 1970 debut novel Attic this afternoon. From Eric Rosenblum’s 2022 survey of Dunn’s work in The New Yorker:

At Reed, Dunn began work on “Attic,” her first novel, a fictionalization of a stint in a Kansas City jailhouse when she was eighteen and was arrested for trying to cash a fraudulent check.

In “Attic,” Dunn introduced an early version of the sinister magic realism she would later make famous in “Geek Love.” The book’s narrator, K. Dunn, describes a carrousel [sic] in which, to gain entry, young boys have to shoot arrows into their mothers’ vaginas and young girls have to throw hoops over their father’s erections. “If they don’t make it in four tries they can’t ride the merry-go-round so the Mommies spread their legs wider and wider and the Daddies sweat to rub up a good one.” But the book is largely a realist work in which Dunn emphasizes the trauma of her protagonist’s childhood. “Attic” is filled with potent flashbacks about K. Dunn’s mother shaming her, like this one: “. . . she looked at me very closely there and said you’ve been playing with yourself again haven’t you . . . and she said show me show me how you do it and I just lay there and she got angry and she said if a bitch dog did that they’d have to kill her . . . and I couldn’t help it I started to cry . . .” K. Dunn experiences some liberation in prison, where no one cares if she masturbates, but is thrust back into shame after she agrees to pleasure a male benefactor who helps get her out. Some of the book’s best parts read like a neurotic’s guide to prison life, in which Dunn uses what she learned from Thoreau to describe the vagaries of sharing a toilet with a cellmate. “I could piss over her piss but I can’t piss over her shit, much less shit over it and have them mix. It would be terrible if mine came out lighter or darker than hers—you could tell whose they were. Even worse if they were the same.”

A review of The Son of Man, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s novel of atavistic inter-generational violence

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Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s latest novel The Son of Man takes place almost entirely over a three seasons in a dilapidated manor somewhere in rural France, sometime near the end of the 20th century. The plot is deceptively simple: A father returns to his young wife and nine-year-old son after a six-year absence, only to immediately drag them away to his remote childhood home, a place in the mountains called Les Roches. The father desires to refurbish the ancestral manse and restore his family. Complicating matters is the mother’s new pregnancy and frequent migraines and the son’s ambivalence about his relationship with his long-absent father. As the slim novel progresses, the oppressive isolation the mother and son endure tips over into dread and then horror. The Son of Man is ultimately a novel about the atavistic transmission of violence from generation to generation.

Del Amo’s writing, conveyed in Frank Wynne’s limpid translation, is precise and cinematic. Del Amo gives us phenomena and response to that phenomena, but withholds the introspective logic of cause-and-effect or analysis that often dominates novels. Instead, he allows us to see what his characters see and to take from those sights our own interpretations. Consider the following simple passage, where, a few days after arriving at the crumbling old house, the father and mother argue:

The faint voices of the father and mother reach the boy as a confused murmur. He walks to the gable door and looks at the landscape below, at the slow, solemn, hypnotic swaying of the larches and the tall pines on the edge of the forest.

He sees the mother and father standing facing each other.

The mother stands, left hand gripping her right arm, right hand on her hip in a gesture of utter defiance. While the father is speaking, she is shaking her head as though refusing to listen to what he is saying or dismissing his words, while, for his part, the father is nodding in an attempt to convince her or make her see reason.

The father gestures wildly as he speaks, pointing to the house, the grasslands, the mountain peaks that rise into the impassive sky. When he turns towards him, the son suppresses a shudder. Blood drains from his hands, his fingers prickle with pins and needles; if the father sees him standing in the gable window, he might think he has been watching, spying on them, trying to make sense of the words carried on the wind in fits and snatches.

The son cannot fully read the signs and signals in front of him. He’s left with “fits and snatches” and gestures and movements that are, in a certain sense, part of the same material as everything else he can presently behold—the pines, the larches, the wind. And yet the boy intuits in his witnessing an “irrefutable proof of his [own] transgression, perhaps even of his [own] guilt.”

Del Amo conjures a dark, oppressive world where his titular son of man is born into a prelingual state of guilt, a strange inheritance that yields violence. We see much of the novel’s action through the son’s perspective–or not really his perspective, but rather we see the action as through a powerful invisible camera set close to the boy’s head, but never fully inside it. We see the son seeing his mother, whom he loves and understands, in his own way, and seeing his father, who is frightening and likely unknowable:

On the father’s left side, the son notices a scar tracing a line some twenty centimetres long across the skin slantwise towards the shoulder blade, as though the father had been stabbed and the blade had struck a bone and deviated its course. The scar tissue looks smooth, like the skin of a newborn baby or a burn victim.

Spellbound, the boy cannot tear his eyes away, and when the father stops to wipe his forehead with the back of his hand and light a cigarette, he sees the child staring at the scar but says nothing.

The accretion of concrete details coheres into slow burning dread. Del Amo shows us images and gives us details that allow us to infer an explanation for the father’s previous six-year absence that the son cannot yet comprehend. At the same time, we see the father and the mother each moving along separate poles of manic despair. The mother dreams of an impossible escape; the father dreams of an impossible inheritance. The father does not possess the material, tools, or skill to properly restore Les Roches: 

He seems to have decided to do battle with this plot of land whose obstructiveness is an affront, to remove anything and everything that would thwart his plan, or to give free rein, with every swing of the pickaxe, to a blind fury for reasons the child cannot fathom. …

He casts a strangely distended shadow, a vision of disproportionate limbs, an evil doppelgänger that emanates from him, dogging his steps, aping his every gesture, every swing of the axe, every throw of a stone, in a way that is monstrous and terrifying.

In time, through hints and implications, we come to understand that the father’s monomaniacal restoration project has resulted from his own terrible childhood. These hints and implications explode late in the book into a fifteen-page monologue from the father, a bitter screed like something out of a Thomas Bernhard novel. The monologue climaxes in the father’s realization that he has repeated his own awful father’s ways. He declares that buried memories are “simply waiting for someone to come and dredge them from their deep torpor, so that they can resurface and endlessly repeat the same failures, the same disasters.”

It’s true that The Son of Man emanates a startling claustrophobic horror. And yet it also glitters at times with moments of strong beauty. If Del Amo’s lucid, cinematic prose evokes something like Kubrick’s The Shining, it also is capable of something like Malick’s Days of Heaven. There are idyllic moments, such as when the boy and his mother bathe in the plunge pool under the weir of a waterfall, the rumbling of which, from a distance, the son had “first thought was the voice of the mountain.” The son also makes his own adventures into the forest, meeting a family of wild horses, one of which is missing an eye.

Through such encounters, the son achieves a brief moment of transcendence late in the novel. His fleeting epiphany balances his father’s bitter declaration that humans are “born with this void inside, this dizzying void they desperately strive to fill throughout their brief, inconsequential, pitiful time in this world, paralyzed as they are by their transience, their own absurdity, their own vanity…” For the father, this “dizzying void” is something that must be filled — “Just like you might try to fill a grave with a shovelful of earth.” 

Let us contrast the father’s dizzy void with the son’s epiphany:

He sits far away from the nimbus of soft light that radiates from the house, gazing at the inky vault where fires that existed before the world was world still shine, and feeling the presence of the earth, the vastness beneath him. Dizzily, he thinks of the lives simultaneously played out everywhere across its surface, knowing that somewhere a child is walking barefoot, another is falling asleep in a soft bed, that a dog lies dying in the dust in the shade of a sheet of metal, that a city in some far-flung country is shimmering in the darkness, that innumerable creatures are moving about, animated by this mysterious and insistent force that is life, which courses through each of them.

Puzzlingly, he can also feel the great movement – imperceptible yet vertiginous – that carries everything, including him, through time and space, all lives, human and animal, and with them the rocks, the trees, the blazing stars.

Of these moments, he will retain the memory of an epiphany, of being struck by the true nature of things, which no language, no words can communicate; but what lingers will be little more than the trace of a dream, the sense of something being granted and instantly revoked.

The beauty of the first two paragraphs sinks into the reality of the final paragraph. Epiphanies don’t last; we can catch the memories, maybe, but even then, what was granted was “instantly revoked.” We remain trapped in language, outside “the true nature of things.” Will the son then “endlessly repeat the same failures, the same disasters” as his father (and his father and his father and…)? The novel seems to suggest that this will likely be the case, even if it opens other, more optimistic avenues.

In this light, it’s difficult to interpret the novel’s mythic overture. The first fifteen pages of The Son of Man focus on a troop of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. The episode culminates in a hunt scene in which an adolescent son makes his first kill—a doe—and then seems to be fully initiated by his father, who marks him in the deer’s blood. The overture ends with the son fantasizing about “abandoning the group” and laying down in the humus to be swallowed up by the earth. This is, in a sense, a version of the same fantasy the contemporary son will have in the forest around Les Roches tens of thousands of years later. 

It’s unclear how Del Amo would have us read the prehistoric overture. On one hand, it suggests a time of idyllic balance–of humanity in, and not apart from, nature. And on the other hand, it concludes with the same desire to escape civilization that, millennia later, the father will inherit.

Perhaps a second reading of The Son of Man might yield a more conclusive answer, or a second reading of Frank Wynne’s translation of Del Amo’s previous novel, Animalia, a visceral, naturalistic, and very precise rendering of humans as animals that takes on an epic scope. English-only readers interested in Del Amo’s writing couldn’t go wrong with either of these novels, which, unless I’m mistaken, are the only two on the market in English translation. I look forward to reading more of Del Amo’s novels in the future. Until then, I highly recommend The Son of Man.

 Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s The Son of Man is now available in the U.S. in translation by Frank Wynne from Grove Atlantic.

Untitled (Do You See Stars, Fascist Superman?) — Raymond Pettibon

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Untitled (Do You See Stars, Fascist Superman?), 2015 by Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957)

Mass-market Monday | Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness

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The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin. Ace Books, first edition (1969). Cover art by Leo & Diane Dillon. 286 pages.

I read all of Le Guin’s Hainish novels eight years ago, and wrote this about The Left Hand of Darkness:

—The Left Hand of Darkness is amazing. Perfect in its strange imperfections and crammed with fables and myths and misunderstandings, it is the apotheosis of Le Guin’s synthesis of adventure with philosophy. Darkness is about shadows and weight. About pulling weight—literally, figuratively. It’s also the story of an ice planet. (A stranger comes to the ice planet!). It’s a political thriller. It’s a sexual thriller. But the impression that lingers strongest: The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the better literary evocations of friendship (its precarious awful strange wonderful tenuous strength) that I’ve ever read.

The Pleasures of Dagobert — Leonora Carrington

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The Pleasures of Dagobert, 1945 by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)

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The Pleasures of Dagobert (Detail) — Leonora Carrington

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The Pleasures of Dagobert (detail), 1945 by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)

RIP Michael Zulli

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RIP Michael Zulli, 1952-2024

Comics artist Michael Zulli passed away this week at the age of 71. While Zulli was likely most known for his work on Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic (as well as an unpublished comic where Swamp Thing meets Jesus Christ), it was his work on The Puma Blues that really sank into my spirit as a kid.

I came to The Puma Blues in the very early nineties via the proselytizing of Dave Sim in Cerebus comics; I managed to a hold of a handful of back issues from very late in the comic’s run. I of course had no idea what was going on, but that didn’t matter. Working from Stephen Murray’s enigmatic script, Zulli crafted a post-apocalyptic dreamscape, an evocation in black and white. His wild animals always seemed more detailed, more pure, more real than the humans who walked through the world he’d conjured in black and white.

I quit regularly visiting comic shops by the mid-nineties, but if I ever happened to be adjacent to one I’d pop in to look for back issues of The Puma Blues (and a handful of other indie titles). It wasn’t until a decade or so later that (with the extralegal help of the internet) I was able to read the entire series. Great stuff—baffling, evocative, Zulli and Murray’s series ran on its own aesthetic logic.

In a 2016 interview at The Comics Journal to mark the publication of a complete volume of The Puma Blues, Zulli spoke on the work as an act of ecological witnessing:

The nature drawings in Puma especially, but so much of the detail in the book feels like an act of witness.

It is. It’s an idea that we’re surrounded in what scientists call the ecosphere, for lack of a better word. It’s this incredibly beautiful and sophisticated system and somehow we think we’re separate from it? I don’t think so. We are not superior to it, we are a part of it and we should take care of it because in doing so we take care of ourselves as a species, too. If not for nature and the earth’s own sake, do it at least for your sake and your children’s sake. That’s all we have got. One day somebody could stop your electricity. What are you going to do? You’re completely unprepared to think about life without your support systems. I don’t mean to be excessively grim. I see a lot of hope. I cling tenaciously to it, but at the same time, Puma is sort of a shot across the bow to wake the fuck up. Take a real good look around you and see what’s really there. Participate in it. Because like it or not you are part of it.

Read “The Priest,” a very early short story by William Faulkner

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“The Priest”

by

William Faulkner

His novitiate was almost completed. Tomorrow he would be confirmed, tomorrow he would achieve that complete mystical union with the Lord, which he had so passionately desired. In his studious youth he had been led to expect it daily; he had hoped to attain it through confession, through talk with those who seemed to have it; through living a purging and a self denial until the earthly fires which troubled him had burned themselves out with time. He passionately desired a surcease and an easing of the appetites and hunger of his blood and flesh, which he had been taught to believe were
harmful: he expected something like sleep, a condition to which he would attain in which those voices in his blood would be stilled. Or rather, chastened. Not to trouble him more, at least: an exalted plane wherein the voices would be lost, sounding fainter and fainter, soon to be but a meaningless echo among the canyons and majestic heights of the glory of God.

But he had not gotten it. After talk with a father in his seminary he could return to his dormitory in a spiritual ecstasy, an emotional state in which his body was but the signboard bearing a flaming message to shake the world. His doubts were then allayed; he had neither doubt nor thought. The end of life was clear: to suffer, to use his blood and bone and flesh as a means for attaining eternal glory—a thing magnificent and astounding, forgetting that history and not the age made Savonarolas and Thomas a Beckets. To be of the chosen despite the hungers and gnawings of flesh, to attain a spiritual union with Infinite, to die—how could physical pleasure toward which his blood cried, be compared with this?

But, once with his fellow candidates, how soon was this forgotten! Their points of view, their callousness, were enigma to him. How could one be of the world and not of the world at the same time? And the dreadful doubt that perhaps he was missing something, that perhaps after all life was only what one could make of his short three score and ten of time, might be true. Who knows? who could know? There was Cardinal Bembo living in Italy in an age like silver, like an imperishable flower, creating a cult of love beyond the flesh, purged of all torturings of flesh. And was not this but an excuse, a palliation for this terrible fearing and doubting? was not the life of that long dead, passionate man such a one as his own: a fabric of fear and doubt and a passionate grasping after something beautiful and fine? Even something beautiful and fine meant to him a Virgin not calm with sorrow and fixed like a watchful benediction in the western sky; but a creature young and slender and helpless and (somehow) hurt, who had been taken by life and toyed with and tortured—a little ivory creature reft of her first born and raising her arms vainly upon a dying evening. In other words, a woman, with all of woman’s passionate grasping for today, for the hour itself; knowing that tomorrow may never come and that today alone signifies, because today alone is hers. They have taken a child and made of her a symbol of man’s old sorrows, he thought; and I too am a child reft of his childhood. Continue reading “Read “The Priest,” a very early short story by William Faulkner” →