Tag: Books

Riff on rereading Gene Wolfe’s postmodern American Gothic ghost novel Peace

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I read Gene Wolfe’s 1975 novel Peace a few weeks ago and then obsessively reread it. The adverb obsessively in the previous clause refers to a rereading that engendered more rereading, taking more notes, going on extratextual jaunts. In my brief write-up of the novel a few weeks ago, I suggested that Peace is

an American post-modernist classic that we would now talk about alongside novels of writers like Pynchon, Barth, Reed, Coover, Barthelme, etc., if the Publishing Industry and Academia didn’t have hangups about sci-fi and fantasy. And the novel is only sci-fi or fantasy in the sense that, like, Gravity’s Rainbow is sci-fi fantasy or Pricksongs & Descants is sci-fi fantasy or Chimera is sci-fi fantasy.

A rereading confirms this belief. (Another way to put it might be, and I’m not a fan of the phrase, is that Peace is what Tom LeClair (using DeLillo as an example) called a “systems novel.”)

But what is it about?

(This What is it about? is entirely the wrong question, but–)

Peace is a postmodern American Gothic ghost novel about houses, games, trees, extinction, alchemy, caves, mythology, aunts, suitors, simulation, bones, forgery, foreclosure, freaks, farming, modernity, murder, hell, eggs, apples, oranges, art, artifice, color, stags, birds, capitalism, rooms, storytelling…

Okay but like, what happens in Peace?

It is the story of Alden Dennis Weer, a boy-man-oldman-etc. unstuck in time and his relation to his family and community. There is a life|death story here, but its telling is really what matters — Peace is crammed with interpolated stories, tales without terminus. There are banshees and princesses and saints and rats and djinn and time travelers and men who are slowly turning into stone. And more more more. Peace is incredibly, powerfully rich, and its profusion of storytelling coheres into a maddening puzzle for the careful reader to tease out.

A proper summary of the novel Peace, of the life(death) of Alden Dennis Weer would require spoilers; I do not think great literature (or Great Literature if you like) can be spoiled, but I do think that part of the charm (and we can use that term charm in its occult sense here) of Wolfe’s novel is that the narrative consistently obscures/hides/buries significant plot elements while at the same time highlighting its thematic emblems in dazzling, baroque passages.

By way of a favorable comparison let me grab William Faulkner’s classic short story “A Rose for Emily.” Both Peace and “Rose” are thematically Gothic, but they are also formally Gothic, concealing mysteries through rhetorical techniques that do not present as obvious techniques. If we were to parse out and then jot down the timeline of “A Rose for Emily,” we might give such notes to a reader who has never read the tale; that virgin reader might then intuit the story’s central horror (and macabre joke) without the heady veil of confusion that usually attends a first reading — and then the story would simply be a freak in a show, labeled neatly, compartmentalized, subsumed into a more general order that paradoxically reinforces the normality of polite human relations, no alarms and no surprises. But that’s not how “A Rose for Emily” works and that’s not how Peace works. The Peace plot, conveyed through the shifty first-personeering of reliably unreliable Den, dares its reader to attend closely to quick flashes and flares that might otherwise be obscured in the dazzle of rampant storytelling. Our Peace is a murders (plural-ess) mystery; keep looking for clues in the coldest cases.

The prose is not cold. Wolfe’s sentences make a body tingle. Here (a version of) Den, Alden Dennis Weer, our narrator, describes his boyhood pocketknife before spiraling into a vision of creation restrained into simulacrum; the scene terminates in plastic, modern, postmodern infertility:

It was large, and stamped with the words “Boy Scout.” The scales were of simulated black staghorn, bringing to mind (at least to mine) the image of a simulated stag, his horns held proudly as those of any elm-deer, ranging the forest among the now-waking trees, trees whose leaves are dying with the summer in every color, like bruises, but bruises beautiful as the skins of races unborn, withheld from us because God, or destiny, or the bland chance of the scientists (whose blind, piping ape-god, idiot-god, we have met before; we know you, troubler of Babylon) has denied us the sight of all these scarlet and yellow—truly red, orange, russet-brown—races on our sidewalks, and all the wonderful richness of stereotypes we might have entertained ourselves with if only they had been permitted us: the scarlet people with tight fists and loose women, gobbling dialects, a talent for paintings done with chalk upon the sides of newspaper kiosks, and high abilities in the retail merchandising of hobby supplies such as tiny-toy jet engines, and model garbage trucks whose hungry rumps, trundled about the wooden tops of retired dining-room tables in basements, will devour the dross of train-station quick-eat restaurants; the orange people with their weird religion demanding the worship of sundials (as our own seems to others that of telephone poles), so that in friendly locker-room conversations, when we have at last and at the threat of certain legal pressures admitted them to Pinelawn and are discussing the round now past, they out with strange oaths. What is a wabe?

And all of them, since all the lands of this earth are occupied, must be from strange and farther countries, from Hi Brasil and the Islands of the Sun, from the Continental Islands and the Isles of the Tethys Sea. Only the rarest, the russet browns, belong here, native to St. Brendan’s land, and they are dying; the things they are famous for are not strange oaths, or ability at any art, or cunning in a trade, but alcoholism and gonorrhea and dwindling. They make good soldiers and that is fatal, just as is the bravery of the simulated stag, which will bring him to death, answering the call of the simulated war cry to meet bullets in the dry autumn woods and fall, his lungs hemorrhaging substitute blood at the edge of the potato fields. The imitation huntsman shouts and dances for joy, and then, having learned very well to shoot, but never to butcher, and being, in his own opinion, no longer of an age to carry heavy burdens, leaves him to rot and stink, the bait of plastic flies with fishhooks in their bellies. In time his flesh, torn by such fur-like foxes as remain, and by the teeth of curs, falls away, and only his horns and his celluloid bones remain, the prey of the boys’-knife maker.

I’ve painted myself into a corner here with such a chunk of Wolfe’s prose (my paint thinned with cold grey pink wine on this hot summer night). Sci-fi and fantasy aficionados already know the power of Wolfe’s prose, and his New Sun solar cycle has impressed readers of “serious” American postmodernism, who might be willing to peek into The Shadow of the Torturer and its sequels. Those novels, narrated by eidetic-memoried exile Severian are fantastic, and are probably Wolfe’s masterwork. But Peace shows imagination within postmodern American Gothic restraints; this is a novel that shows the slow painful choking extinction of the American Dream while at the same time showing that the Dream was always just a dream, a drift into nightmare, a notion, foggy or otherwise, corrupted even in its inception, bound to play out in a decaying reverberation that evinces again as a simulation, a ghost. Seek it out.

Read “The Secret of Evil,” a very short story by Roberto Bolaño

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“The Secret of Evil”

by

Roberto Bolaño

translated by

Chris Andrews

This story is very simple, although it could have been very complicated. Also, it’s incomplete, because stories like this don’t have an ending. It’s night in Paris, and a North American journalist is sleeping. Suddenly the telephone rings, and someone asks in English, with an unidentifiable accent, for Joe A. Kelso. Speaking, says the journalist and then looks at his watch. It’s four in the morning; he’s only had about three hours’ sleep and he’s tired. The voice on the other end of the line says, I have to see you, to pass on some information. The journalist asks him what it’s about. As usual with calls like this, the voice gives nothing away. The journalist asks for some indication, at least. In impeccable English, far more correct than Kelso’s, the voice expresses a preference for a face-to-face meeting. Then, straight away, it adds, There is no time to lose. Where? Kelso asks. The voice mentions one of the bridges over the Seine. And adds: You can get there in twenty minutes on foot. The journalist, who has had hundreds of meetings like this, says that he’ll be there in half an hour. Getting dressed, he thinks it’s a pretty stupid way to waste the night, and yet he realizes, with a slight shock of surprise, that he’s no longer sleepy, that the call, in spite of its predictability, has left him wide awake. When he reaches the bridge, five minutes after the appointed time, he can see nothing but cars. For a while he stands still at one end, waiting. Then he walks across the bridge, which is still deserted, and after waiting for a few minutes at the other end, finally crosses back again and decides to give up and go home to bed. While he’s walking home, he thinks about the voice: it definitely wasn’t a North American voice and it probably wasn’t British either, though he’s not so sure about that now. It could have been a South African or an Australian, he thinks, or a Dutchman, maybe, or someone from northern Europe who learned English at school and has since perfected his command of the language in various Anglophone countries. As he crosses the street he hears someone call his name: Mr. Kelso. He realizes straight away that it’s the man who arranged to meet him on the bridge, speaking from a dark entranceway. Kelso is about to stop, but the voice instructs him to keep walking. When he reaches the next corner, he turns around and sees that no one is following him. He’s tempted to retrace his steps, but after a moment’s hesitation he decides that it’s best to continue on his way. Suddenly the man appears from a side street and greets him. Kelso returns his greeting. The man holds out his hand. Sacha Pinsky, he says. Kelso shakes his hand and introduces himself in turn. Pinsky pats him on the back and asks if he’d like a whiskey. A little whiskey, is what he actually says. He asks Kelso if he’s hungry. He assures the journalist that he knows a bar where they can get hot croissants, freshly baked. Kelso looks at his face. Although Pinsky is wearing a hat, his face is a pasty white, as if he’d been locked away for years and years. But where? Kelso wonders. In a prison or an institution for the mentally ill. In any case, it’s too late to pull out now, and Kelso wouldn’t mind a hot croissant. The place is called Chez Pain, and in spite of the fact that it’s in his neighborhood (in a narrow side street, admittedly), this is the first time he’s set foot inside, and perhaps the first time he’s even seen it. Mostly he frequents establishments in Montparnasse with a dubious air of legend about them: the place where Scott Fitzgerald once ate, the place where Joyce and Beckett drank Irish whiskey, the bars favored by Hemingway and Dos Passos, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Pinsky was right about the croissants at Chez Pain: they’re good, they’re freshly baked, and the coffee isn’t bad at all. Which makes Kelso think—and it’s a chilling thought—that this guy could well be a local, a neighbor. As he considers this possibility, Kelso is seized by a shudder. A bore, a paranoiac, a madman, a watcher with no one to watch him in turn, someone it’s going be hard to get rid of. Well, he eventually says, I’m listening. The pale man, who is sipping his coffee but not eating, looks at him and smiles. There is something intensely sad about his smile, and tired as well, as if it were the only way in which he could allow himself to express his tiredness, his exhaustion and lack of sleep. But as soon as he stops smiling, his features recover their iciness.

Book buying in Boston blog

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We spent most of the last week of June in Boston, a city I’d never visited before. The trip was ostensibly a birthday present for my son, who wanted to see one of his favorite noisy rock bands play, but it was also an excuse to exit the dreadful cruel wet heat of Florida summer. We stayed in the Back Bay neighborhood and did many of the requisite touristy things one expects of touring visitors, but also just soaked in the city’s vibes. The city was slammed with soccer — or football, excuse me — look, the city of Boston was crammed with World Cup goers, fans from all over it seemed, as well as localish folks who attended the France-Norway match in their New England Patriots gear. The general attitude of the city and its people seemed unexpectedly positive and generally very friendly. When I told a driver that I was surprised at how friendly everyone seemed, he told me that It’s because it’s the summer; it’s because you’re a tourist. (I had always thought that everybody hates a tourist.)

Boston is larded with good schools and good health care and just generally a lot of brains and history and such, which means a lot of bookstores, too many to get to, but I tried.

Brattle Book Shop is probably the most famous bookstore in Boston. The ground floor has a nice selection of used fiction, including curated and inexpensive mass market paperbacks (mostly sci-fi). The third floor is where the real magic is — rare and signed editions, not unreasonably priced, but I couldn’t find anything I had to have. (The truth is I like to stumble upon something odd in the wild. The hunt isn’t really fun when it’s already neatly bagged up and labeled for you.) I probably could’ve spent another hour at Brattle, but my scanning the bargain books carted outside was cut short by my hungry hungry teenagers.

I had better luck hunting a few days later at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. I picked up a handsome and inexpensive (and frankly unread) copy of John A. Williams’ novel Captain Blackman. I actually read and reviewed Captain Blackman earlier this month; I’d been looking for a copy for awhile and eventually just checked it out from the library after I finished Williams’ most famous novel The Man Who Cried I Am. From my review Captain Blackman:

Captain Blackman is an astounding, imaginative, and appropriately angry synthesis of Black military history in the United States. It blends genre elements from war novels, science fiction, Westerns, political and economic theory, and even romance novels, and cites heavily from a range of historical documents. It’s very smart and often very funny, at times quite horny, and even surreal. It’s baggy and ambitious and rich and encyclopedic. I loved it.

I also picked up a copy of Joseph McElroy’s novel Actress in the House. About five years ago, maybe more, I came across a cache of maybe five or six McElroy’s novels at my favorite used bookstore and didn’t pick them up, and have since regretted it. When I opened it to check the price I was surprised to find it signed by the author (and not anywhere close to Brattle prices):

I visited a few other book stores, mostly incidentally, including Trident Booksellers and Beacon Hill Books (a cute spot but not all my vibe). And on my walk through the Freedom Trail I got to visit the storied and venerable Old Corner Bookstore, an American literary landmark that was once home to the publishing house Ticknor and Fields, which published titles by luminaries like Longfellow, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Stowe, and Twain.

It is now a fucking Chipotle.

Thankfully the Central Library in Copley Square remains bibliocentered and not burritocentered. I enjoyed the zine collection in the modern wing of the library, but it’s the old library that really blew me away (particularly John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion series of murals on the third floor). I even made a little time to check on my boy Ruggles’ ancestry while I was in the library–

–but it was closing before I could get much farther. It’s good to leave something for a future visit I suppose.

Conversations with Don DeLillo and Other Conversations by Drew Lerman (Book acquired, 3 June 2026)

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I’m a big fan of Drew Lerman’s work, and I’m always excited when he puts together a new collection. His latest is Conversations with Don DeLillo and Other Conversations, collecting his recent strips. I would describe these strips as functioning in the mode of pseudoautiobiographical postmodern literary interrogation, only that makes them sound pretentious, which they aren’t. They are very funny and very niche, and I often feel like I am Lerman’s ideal reader. This is my niche.

Each one-page strip features (a version of) Lerman encountering (and often trailing) a writer (DeLillo, obv., but also Joy Williams, Jonathan Franzen, Gordon Lish, William T. Vollmann…); the conversations are often very one-sided and allow Lerman to interrogate his subject on the kind of minutiae that often overtakes our ability to see the forest for the trees, so to speak, when it comes to art. In one of my favorite bits, for example, Lerman critiques the implementation of (“middle school book report-ass”) Courier New Unjustified as the font for DeLillo’s novel The Silence. I could go on but I should save it for a proper review.

Conversations with Don DeLillo also features a great negative blurb by a certain grouchy “Myron Circle”:

And maybe this is corny of me, but I love that Lerman used Chris Ware stamps to mail me Conversations with Don DeLillo. (Chris Ware shows up in Conversations, btw — he tries to give Lerman a bunch of his books and tell Lerman how much he loves Snake Creek

More thoughts to come.

End of merry month of May blog

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I have always loved the month of May. Spring semester is usually over and done by the last week of April and I seem to breathe a little easier. I love May Day and there’s always been a neat little run of interesting dates in the first week, including my wedding anniversary. (My silly ass has taken to including Thomas Pynchon’s birthday as the capstone to the first week of Merry May). I get that May the Fourth is stupid, but it seemed fun when my kids were little, and I get that Cinco de Mayo, even with its roots in the Chicano movement, is probably now just a marketing tool for amateurs to do it up, a la St. Paddy’s Day and NYE. But it’s fun to have a little treat. My best friend died on 5 May 2025 though and I was dreading the date, although the anxiety over it was worse than the actual day. But then I dreamed about him for a few weeks straight. The month seemed incredibly long but at least the terrible drought in Florida broke with heavy heavy rains.

The wife and I make a point to sneak in an anniversary trip in early May. We spent a few nights in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami and saw Belle & Sebastian perform their 1996 album If You’re Feeling Sinister in full. I felt incredibly old but it was magical. I’ve never been a big fan of Miami, but we had some good meals and enjoyed talking to a few of the artists at the Bakehouse Art Complex. This is the closest I actually got to a bookstore in Miami. Bookleggers is not actually a bookstore, it’s a free library, and it wasn’t open, although there was a loaded library cart full of titles out for offer. I love the idea and if I lived down there I’d pop in to donate at least once a month.

But on to books!

I’ve wormed into William H. Gass’s massive novel The Tunnel again. This is like my fourth or fifth serious attempt. I love Gass’s essays and shorter fiction, but I find that I stall out. My tactic this time has been to read one section a day, or at least to try to. I’m somewhere around page 160 now, and I think I’ve finally gotten into the “story,” or whatever, but it’s all pretty damn windy, and Gass’s penchant for alliteration, which I enjoy in short doses, is, like, too much (there’s a moment where the narrator remarks his wife’s calling him out on all the alliteration; I didn’t dogear it though).

I’ve also stalled a bit on Guillermo Stitch’s The Coast of Everything; I was attempting the same approach as that I’ve taken to The Tunnel — a section a day — but I keep getting distracted by shorter morsels, like Gabriel García Márquez’s In Evil Hour and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (both in translation by Gregory Rabassa, of course). Chronicle was even better than I’d remembered; In Evil Hour was rough, mean, and short.

The pictured stack is not all May reading, although I did read and review Antoine Volodine’s novel The Monroe Girls (tr. Alyson Waters) in early May.  I read and reviewed Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man in April; I then read Joanna Russ’s And Chaos Died and meant to review it and kept moving it up the stack and then eventually lost track. On Bluesky, I tweeted that I was “baffled by the whole thing. Like if Kathy Acker wrote a sci-fi psionic satire. Very weird, I think I loved it, it might not be a ‘good’ novel.” That’s still basically my memory. I picked up a first edition Grove Press copy of WSB’s The Ticket That Exploded and I now have to reshelve all the Burroughs which means I have to reshelve a whole bookcase. So it can hang there for awhile.

I gave up pretty quickly on Stanley Crawford’s Gascoyne — probably too quickly — but I wanted the weirder flavor of his slim 1972 novel Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine. I ended up reading Crawford’s 2005 novel Petroleum Man over two nights and loving every minute of the experience. I highly recommend the novel, as well as Dan Visel’s 2010 review of the novel at his blog With Hidden Noise. I also recommend the blog With Hidden Noise, which was somehow not on my radar fifteen or some such years ago, but which I have very much enjoyed browsing now, which is to say over the past few days. There’s a rich backlog there. I lament too often that There Aren’t Any Good Websites Anymore, but maybe I don’t look enough; maybe I’m guilty of spending too much of my internet time on social media sites. The first book I mentioned here was by William H. Gass; I’ll take my offramp from this cursed blog by suggesting you read a real blog post, this With Hidden Noise post on Gass’s On Being Blue, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and Thomas Browne.

(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.

 

Mass-market Monday | Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem

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Home to Harlem, Claude McKay, 1928. Pocket Cardinal Editions (1956). No cover artist or designer credited. 180 pages.

The cover art, while unattributed inside the book, is likely the work of Isadore Seltzer. McKay’s first novel is now in the public domain and available online.

Sunday Comix

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A panel from The Adventures of Jodelle by Guy Peellaert (art) and Pierre Bartier (script), Le Terrain Vague, 1966. English translation by Richard Seaver, Grove Press, 1967. Reprinted by Fantagraphics, 2013.

Mass-market Monday | Joanna Russ’s Picnic on Paradise

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Picnic on Paradise, Joanna Russ, 1968. Ace Books (1968). Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon. 157 pages.

From Joachim Boaz’s review at SF Ruminations:

Joanna Russ’ first published novel Picnic on Paradise (1968) delightfully subverts traditional SF pulp adventure tropes.  Although not as finely wrought as The Female Man (1975), And Chaos Died (1970), or her masterpiece We Who Are About To… (1976), Picnic is worthwhile for all fans of feminist SF and the more radical visions of the 60s.

Unfortunately, the metafictional implications/literary possibilities of the Alyx sequence of short stories and novels—of which Picnic on Paradise is part of—are not realized until the publication of the short story “The Second Inquisition” (1970).

Antoine Volodine’s The Monroe Girls (Book acquired, 13 Feb. 2026)

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There is an old saying, some may say a cliche, but nevertheless it rings as wisdom in my waxy ears: The best time to read a Volodine was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. Maybe start with Volodine’s 2021 novel The Monroe Girls, forthcoming in translation by Alyson Waters from Archipelago. Their jacket copy:

Breton has seen brighter days. Now his body sags as he pulls a pair of binoculars to his withered face. He peers from the grimy window of a near-empty psychiatric compound—one of the last buildings standing after an unspecified disaster—spying rue Dellwo below, dreary in perpetual rain. Into this world of devastation drop the Monroe girls—paramilitaries trained in the “dark place” by Monroe, a dissident executed long ago. Their mission to revamp the Party is futile in this bleak, decaying world. Breton, our schizophrenic narrator, is tasked (and tortured) by what remains of the Party to locate and identify the Monroe girls using special optical equipment and his powers of extrasensory perception. Breton’s journey through a bardo-like, hostile labyrinth invites us into a sensual swirl of bodily decay, political acquiescence, and civilizational collapse. In this derelict setting, Volodine ruminates on identity, surveillance, life after death, and love (which, alas, does not conquer all). An urgent and blistering tale, beautifully rendered with Volodine’s distinct pathos and humor.

Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man (Book acquired, 23 Jan. 2026)

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I started Thomas Kendall’s second novel, How I Killed the Universal Man last night. Good stuff so far. Blurb from publisher Whisk(e)y Tit:

John Lakerman, alternative current affairs journalist for donkeyWolf media, is sent to participate and report on a clinical trial for a newly developed, biopharmaceutical, antidepressant. While researching the article, and the disappearance of its lead researcher, Lakerman is drawn into a complex world of body augmentations, migrant labour, billionaires, a Virtual Reality Game and a series of fatally seductive mutations.

How I Killed The Universal Man is a transhumanist noir taking place in a near future where environmental disaster and the advent of biological A.I is leading to the radical reorganisation of consciousness. A narrative about the unknown forces structuring narrative’s necessity, How I Killed The Universal Man begins from the premise that reality is always virtual.

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.

A partial glossary for Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

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The October 1980 issue of Esquire ran a piece titled “What to Think about Gravity’s Rainbow” by the poet Terrill Shepard Soules. It’s not really a what to think piece, though (the title seems an editorial intervention), but rather a witty glossary.

“WHAT TO THINK ABOUT GRAVITY’S RAINBOW”

by Terrill Shepard Soules

VERY CLEVER.

THOMAS PYNCHON, AUTHOR, KEEPS A LOW PROFILE.

MAIN CHARACTER: TYRONE SLOTHROP.

FIRST LINE: “A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY.” NICE FIRST LINE.

LONG — 760 PAGES IN HARD-COVER.

BUZZWORDS: PIGS, PARANOIA, B MOVIES, SEX, NAZIS.

PUBLISHED 1973; EVERYONE WENT CRAZY.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, OF COURSE. PULITZER JUDGES LOVED IT, PULITZER TRUSTEES THOUGHT OBSCENE. ALSO INCOMPREHENSIBLE. NO PULITZER PRIZE. SOMETHING LIKE ULYSSES THAT WAY. A FREQUENT COMPARISON.

INSIDERS CALL IT RAINBOW. INSIDERS ARE INSIDERS BECAUSE THEY LOVE THE IDEA THAT
SOME RECLUSE (A CORNELL GRAD?) WROTE A 760-PAGE BOOK ABOUT PIGS AND PARANOIA. ALSO BECAUSE THEY KNOW SOME VERY EXTRAORDINARY WORDS FROM RAINBOW, LIKE THE ONES IN THE GLOSSARY BELOW (FROM THE HARD-COVER EDITION).

BOOK 1
Beyond the Zero

NARODNIK [p. 11]
From Russian narod, “people.” Intellectual trying to metamorphose peasant into revolutionaries. The Narodniki flourished in the late 1860s. In the late 1960s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activists were referred to as narodoniks. By show-offs.

PRETERITION, PRETERITE
[p. 15 and throughout]
A passing over. Preterition is the Fluke Cosmic, the doctrine that God in John Calvin’s breast (cf. the Jampere-phrenia in Alien) decreed that you and you and you are heavenbound no questions asked but We’re going to have to think about the rest of you — don’t get your hopes up.

MAFFICK [p. 17]
The founder of the Boy Scouts defended the garrison at Mafeking against the Boers for two hundred seventeen days. When the siege was raised, on May 17, 1900, London went crazy, and the jubilant celebratory maffick — it’s a verb! — was born. Here, part of Lieutenant Oliver “Tantivy” Mucker-Maffick’s moniker.

TANTIVY [p. 17]
Mucker-Maffick’s nickname. Means to gallop along, or a blast on a horn, or that headlong gallop itself.

LOVE-IN-IDLENESS [p. 22]
The perfect word for violet. Pynchon’s choice is dazzling. First, on a map of London there’s a star for each of Slothrop’s women, Slothrop “having evidently the time, in his travels among places of death, to devote to girl-chasing.” Second, the many stars are of many colors. Third, Slothrop gets the idea that the stars look like flowers. Now Viola tricolor, the flower in question, turns out to be a violet with yellow, white, and purple petals and several country names. The name our author finally selects enables him to pull off a genuine rampage-prose triple play: “and all over the place, purple and yellow as hickeys, a prevalence of love-in-idleness.” Continue reading “A partial glossary for Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow” →

The Pisstown Chaos, David Ohle’s post-convenience novel of abject gags and grotesque japes

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Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: The Pisstown Chaos is an improbably perfect and beautiful name for a novel. If you don’t like the title, The Pisstown Chaos isn’t for you. It is 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 author of The Pisstown Chaos is David Ohle. The novel was published in 2008; it is the second of three “sequels” to Ohle’s 1972 cult classic Motorman. You do not have to have read Motorman or The Age of Sinatra (2004) to “understand” The Pisstown Chaos. (But you’ll probably want to dig into those if you dig The Pisstown Chaos’s uh pungent urinous ammonia bouquet)

Moldenke, hero of Motorman, is a bit player in The Pisstown Chaos, a walk on, a song-and-dance man with no songs or dances. A storyteller. He’s a zombie, too — a “stinker” in the novel’s parlance — adorned in “black rags and a wide-brimmed white hat,” sporting “an inch-long tube of flesh protruding from just below his ear [which] had the general appearance and shape of an infant’s finger, but lacked a nail. In the end of the tube, a small hole leaked a clear, gelatinous fluid.”

Moldenke, we are to infer, is one of the “Victims of the Pisstown parasite…thought of as dead, but not enough to bury. Gray haggard, poorly dressed, they lay in gutters, sat rigidly on public benches, floated along canals and drank from rain-filled gutters.” He may or may not be centuries old.

It’s not clear how far into the future we are in the Ohleverse (it doesn’t really matter). After “the Great Forgetting,” and multiple and ongoing Chaoses, the world has regressed, or progressed, or really mutated, into a dusty, wet, gross, nasty post-infrastructure reality. You might read The Pisstown Chaos as a slapstick zombie Western.

The Reverend Hooker presides over this wonderfully abject world. Hooker’s loose theocratic federation revolves elliptically around a “shifting” scheme. Nothing is permanent, everything is moving, plates spinning on poles. Folks receive their shifting papers and must relocate from, say, a cozy cottage to a prison camp. Or they might end up paired with a new concubine or some such.

That’s the fate of Mildred Balls, née Mildred Vink, who meets Jacob Balls on the road to Witchy Toe. The pair meet cute and get on famously. (And who wouldn’t; after all, suave Jacob Balls was the inventor of  the “finely-grained, yellow-tinged powder” known as “Jake” — a kind of post-apocalyptic Bud Light.) Optimistic Jacob is optimistically optimistic of all the shifting, attesting his belief that “in any culture, when boredom and apathy take hold, the currency is debased and the decline is irreversible…What could be more of a tonic than a random redistribution of the populace?” Mildred is less convinced: “The whole scheme is idiotic.”

The Pisstown Chaos focuses on the Balls clan — primarily an older Mildred and her young adult grandkids, Roe and Ophelia. There are stinkers and imps, shifting folk consuming urpflanz, willy, and Jake on their way via Q-ped to Indian Apple or Bum Bay. Reverend Hooker is always lurking in the margins, too, before taking over the narrative’s final pages in a mock apotheosis that brought a stupid smile to my face.

Ohle’s narrative isn’t exactly a picaresque, but it runs on the same energy. Each chapter opens with a series of frank excerpts from the Pisstown rag, the City Moon. Here’s one update of news you need:

A fondness for pickled lips has led to the arrest of a Kootie Fiyo, a stinker known to be a trader in tooth gold and a vicious biter. Fiyo was just leaving the impeteria in South Pisstown when two Guards entered. The proprietor said, “That stink can eat more imp lips than I can heap in front of him. “

The City Moon is not just a source for the goods on a stinker’s glimpse of pickled imps’ lips, but also a gloss on the undead (or un-undead’s) physiology:

What then is a final-stage stinker’s life like? It has been described by scientists as showing a poverty of sensation and a low body temperature. In their nostrils is the persistent odor of urpmilk. The membrane which lines their mouth is extremely tough and is covered with thick scales. They like to touch fur and drink their own urine. Because they have been known to go without food for as long as eighteen years, we can assume that their sense of time passing is also very different from our own.

The Stinker Problem is likely the signature event of whatever century we are in. There’s probably an icky metaphor or allegory somewhere in there, but I find myself disinterested in that end of the novel. But still: Consider Mildred–who wants to find a “cure” for stinkerism–in charge of a crew of stinkers who, after their daily labors, commit “to walking in circles and searching the ground.” But these are not geologists peering into the navel of the world: “‘No, Miss,’ Spanish Johnny said, ‘We like to get dizzy and faint. It’s the way we have fun.'” We’ve all been there.

Mildred’s granddaughter Ophelia commands much of the narrative, shifting about her stations in life. Her domestic comedy with servants Red and Peters is a class-conscious comic delight. Our Miss Madame goes through a series of abject slapstick routines with the Help (including an enema gag that uh, gag me yeah). Here’s a foul episode in the life of Ophelia Balls:

She walked carefully from slippery stone to slippery stone until she got to the potting shed, then blew out the candle. She tried the door and found it locked. Wiping the dirty door-glass, she looked in at Peters, lying on the peat pile with his pants pulled down, fanning his rear with a handful of straw. Red, sitting beside him in Mildred Balls’s underwear, combed Peters’s coarse hair with a tortoise-shell comb. Peters’s cheeks were flushed, his eyes half-closed. When Ophelia entered, the scene seemed all the more lurid for the dim lantern and its flicker.

“I hope you don’t take any offense,” Red said, “but I’ve just mated with Peters here.”

Peters sat up. “I was quietly potting geraniums when that idiot stepped out of a dark corner and made advances, clumsy, lewd advances, with his big willy sticking out. I tried, but I couldn’t resist him.”

“Is that true, Red, that he put up resistance?”

“He lies like a rug. He clearly indicated he wanted me to sex him good and sex him hard.”

Ophelia saw the pointlessness of going any further with the inquiry. “All is forgiven. Let’s move past this.”

“I’ll serve the swan,” Red said.

If I’ll serve the swan isn’t your kinda punchline, The Pisstown Chaos ain’t your cup of Jake. It’s a rich, smelly, gross novel, fun, funny, fueled with 19th-century inventions viewed through piss-colored glasses, aimed at the apocalyptic future. It’s smoked imp-meat served with urpsmoke, a vaudeville buzz against the zombies in the gutter. When I was a kid we held our breath when we passed cemeteries. There are other ceremonies, other totems, but warding off the dead remains a concern.

I have neglected the Balls scion, young Roe, who eventually finds himself attending the Reverend Hooker. Late in the novel, Roe Balls prepares an enema for the theocrat; Hooker then delivers a sermon:

“I’ll warm up the bathroom right away, sir, and get the enema bag ready.”

Once Roe had firmly inserted the hose, the Reverend sat on the pot and closed his eyes. “There, that’s it, Roe. It’s in well enough.”

“Shall I leave you alone now, sir?”

“No. Don’t leave. Let me sermonize a little. I’ll tell you a story, a story with a lesson. In the days when all men were good, they had miraculous power. Lions, mountains, whales, jellyfish, hagfish, birds, rocks, clouds, seas, moved quietly from place to place, just as men ordered them at their whim and fancy. But the human race at last lost its miraculous powers through the laziness of a single man. He was a woodman in the Fertile Crescent. One morning he went into the forest to cut firewood for his master’s hearth. He sawed and split all day, until he had a considerable stack of hickory and oak. Then he stood before the pile and said, ‘Now, march off home!’ The great bundle of wood at once got up and began to walk, and the woodman tramped on behind it. But he was a very lazy man. Now, why shouldn’t I ride instead of galloping along this dusty road, he said to himself, and jumped up on the bundle of wood as it was walking in front of him and sat down on top of it. As soon as he did, the wood refused to go. The woodman got angry and began to strike it fiercely with his axe, all in vain. Still the wood refused to go. And from that time the human race had lost its power.”

“That certainly explains everything I’ve ever wondered about, sir.”

“You may clean me now.”

“Yes, sir.”

The punchlines accumulate after the Rev. Hooker’s fable — young Roe’s deadpan line “That certainly explains everything I’ve ever wondered about, sir” made me laugh aloud when I read it, and the following asswipe line is too much — but I think we have here in the fable a key to the novel. Not the key, but a key.

In the Rev’s woodman’s fable, humans once wielded Promethean power over the world. But that power’s contingent; it exists only when humans move with the world, attentive to its rhythms and limits. When the woodman attempts to ride the wood and make it a convenience instead of walking alongside it, cooperation collapses. S’all she wrote.

Ohle’s chaotic, grotesque world echoes his some-time collaborator William Burroughs’ alien abjection. It will also be comfortingly/nauseatingly familiar (familiar?!) with anyone who digs David Cronenberg’s corporeal horrors. The Pisstown Chronicles will also appeal to weirdos who dig the abject fictions of Vladmir Sorokin, José Donoso, and Antoine Volodine.

The Pisstown Chaos is not a novel for everyone, but there’s a certain type of reader who will love wading through its abject humor, grotesque imagery, and absurdist chaos. Ohle’s post-convenience world grunts and howls; it’s dark, vivid, gross, and hilarious. That scent will linger. Highly recommended.

Gerhard Rühm’s The Folded Clock (Book acquired, drifted through, last week or the week before, end of 2025)

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I dug/was perplexed by Gerhard Rühm’s Cake and Prostheses a few years ago, so when I got my soft pink hands on The Folded Clock, (translated like C & P by Alexander Booth), I was intrigued. Publisher Twisted Spoon describes The Folded Clock as 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.”

Rühm seems to identify Kurt Schwitters as his artistic precursor, or an artistic precursor. Like Cake and Prostheses, the pieces in The Folded Clock defy easy categorization — Is it a script or a poem or art? is probably the wrong question.

Passing eyes over the text is probably not the way to go; Rühm’s asking you to engage. As Joseph Schreiber puts it in his review at Rough Ghosts, you might follow Rühm’s directions and “allow yourself to read aloud and, there are you are, from the very beginning, not simply reading but actively engaging with the poem.”

I don’t really like numbers that much, at least not in a mob, a gang, a swarm. I tried and didn’t work out. Not just with this book but in general. I can’t count sheep, I guess.

I had a better time with Rühm’s forays into music and letters and collages; I enjoyed whatever psychotic version of minesweeper or Sudoku this piece is:

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is a perfect novella

Edwin Turner3 Comments
The Race, 1942 by Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975)

With blunt grace, Denis Johnson navigates the line between realism and the American frontier myth in his perfect novella Train Dreams. In a slim 116 pages, Johnson communicates one man’s life story with a depth and breadth that actually lives up to the book’s blurb’s claim to be an “epic in miniature.”  I read it in one sitting on a Sunday afternoon, occasionally laughing aloud at Johnson’s wry humor, several times moved by the pathos of the narrative, and more than once stunned at the subtle, balanced perfection of Johnson’s prose, which inheres from sentence to paragraph to resonate throughout the structure of the book.

The opening lines hooked me:

In the summer of 1917 Robert Grainier took part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer caught, or anyway accused of, stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle.

Three of the railroad gang put the thief under restraint and dragged him up the long bank toward the bridge under construction fifty feet above the Moyea River. A rapid singsong streamed from the Chinaman voluminously. He shipped and twisted like a weasel in a sack, lashing backward with his one free fist at the man lugging him by the neck.

The matter-of-fact violence here complicates everything that follows in many ways, because Grainier it turns out is pretty much that rare thing, a good man, a simple man who tries to make a life in the Idaho Panhandle at the beginning of the 20th century. The rest of the book sees him trying—perhaps not consciously—to somehow amend for the strange near-lynching he abetted.

Grainier works as a day laborer, felling the great forests of the American northwest so that a network of trains can connect the country. Johnson resists the urge to overstate the obvious motifs of expansion and modernity here, instead expressing depictions of America’s industrial growth at a more personal, even psychological level:

Grainier’s experience on the Eleven-Mile Cutoff made him hungry to be around other such massive undertakings, where swarms of men did away with portions of the forest and assembled structures as big as anything going, knitting massive wooden trestles in the air of impassable chasms, always bigger, longer, deeper.

Grainier’s hard work keeps him from his wife and infant daughter, and the separation eventually becomes more severe after a natural calamity, but I won’t dwell on that in this review, because I think the less you know about Train Dreams going in the better. Still, it can’t hurt to share a lovely passage that describes Grainier’s courtship with the woman who would become his wife:

The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in—as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream. They spent the whole afternoon among the daisies kissing. He felt glorious and full of more blood than he was supposed to have in him.

The passage highlights Johnson’s power to move from realism into the metaphysical and back, and it’s this precise navigation of naturalism and the ways that naturalism can tip the human spirit into supernatural experiences that makes Train Dreams such a strong little book. In the strange trajectory of his life, Grainier will be visited by a ghost and a wolf-child, will take flight in a biplane and transport a man shot by a dog, will be tempted by a pageant of pulchritude and discover, most unwittingly, that he is a hermit in the woods. In Johnson’s careful crafting, these events are not material for a grotesque picaresque or a litany of bizarre absurdities, but rather a beautiful, resonant poem-story, a miniature history of America.

Train Dreams is an excellent starting place for those unfamiliar with Johnson’s work, and the book will rest at home on a shelf with Steinbeck’s naturalist evocations or Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. I have no idea why the folks at FS&G waited almost a decade to publish it (Train Dreams was originally published in a 2002 issue of The Paris Review), but I’m glad they did, and I’m glad the book is out now in trade paperback from Picador, where it should gain a wider audience. Very highly recommended.

[Ed. note: Biblioklept originally published this review in May of 2012. I still haven’t seen the Clint Bentley-directed film adaptation.]