A Rage in Harlem, Chester Himes. Avon Books (1965). No cover artist or designer credited. 192 pages.
Himes’ A Rage in Harlem is a quick, mean, sharp read. I came to Himes via Ishmael Reed, who wrote of the author in a 1991 LA Times review of Himes’ Collected Stories,
James Baldwin, another proud and temperamental genius, said that if he hadn’t left the United States he would have killed someone. The same could be said of Chester Himes, the intellectual and gangster who left the United States for Europe in the 1950s. He achieved fame abroad with his Harlem detective series, which are remarkable for their macabre comic sense and wicked and nasty wit so brilliantly captured in Bill Duke’s A Rage in Harlem.
My fine homemade soups are interesting, economical, and tasty. To make them, one proceeds in the following way:
Fine Homemade Leek Soup
Take one package Knorr Leek Soupmix. Prepare as directed. Take two live leeks. Chop leeks into quarter-inch rounds. Throw into Soupmix.
Throw in ½ cup Tribuno Dry Vermouth. Throw in chopped parsley.
Throw in some amount of salt and a heavy bit of freshly-ground pepper.
Eat with good-quality French bread, dipped repeatedly in soup.
Fine Homemade Mushroom Soup
Take one package Knorr Mushroom Soupmix. Prepare as directed.
Take four large mushrooms. Slice. Throw into Soupmix. Throw in ⅛ cup Tribuno Dry Vermouth, parsley, salt, pepper. Stick bread as above into soup at intervals. Buttering bread enhances taste of the whole.
Fine Homemade Chicken Soup
Take Knorr Chicken Soupmix, prepare as directed, throw in leftover chicken, duck, or goose as available. Add enhancements as above.
Fine Homemade Oxtail Soup
Take Knorr Oxtail Soupmix, decant into same any leftover meat (sliced or diced) from the old refrigerator. Follow above strategies to the letter.
The result will make you happy. Knorr’s Oxtail is also good as a basic gravy-maker and constituent of a fine fake cassoulet about which we can talk at another time. Knorr is a very good Swiss outfit whose products can be found in both major and minor cities. The point here is not to be afraid of the potential soup but to approach it with the attitude that you know what’s best for it. And you do. The rawness of the vegetables refreshes the civilization of the Soupmixes. And there are opportunities for mercy-if your ox does not wish to part with his tail, for example, to dress up your fine Oxtail Soup, you can use commercial products from our great American supermarkets, which will be almost as good. These fine homemade recipes work! Use them with furious enthusiasm.
From The Great American Writers’ Cookbook (ed. Dean Faulkner Wells, 1981).
This is Friday—not today, I mean, this, this blog, is Friday, four or five days ago, depending on how you count such things. We were maybe fifteen or twenty minutes on the road heading northwest to Atlanta—my wife driving the first leg before we stopped for gas—when I checked social media again to see if Godspeed You! Black Emperor were still going to play that night. They were not. This information came via opener Low legend Alan Sparhawk, who had reported the past two nights’ shows canceled.
We headed north anyway. The kids had left school early; my daughter pointed out that she had already missed an AP Bio test and that she wasn’t going with me and the boy to the show anyway, she just wanted to go to Atlanta to hang out. Fair point, of course.
My son was bummed and I was bummed. I don’t know exactly how he came to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s strange, hypnotic, droney anthems—via an algorithm, really—but a few years ago I heard him blasting Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven in his bedroom. I gave him my copy of their debut LP, F♯ A♯ ∞, which I’d bought from the band back in 1998 or 1999 when they opened for Low at a record story I was working at in Florida. They knocked our socks off. It seemed there were more Godspeeds Yous than audience members, and to be clear, the tiny record store was packed. It was a summer afternoon in Florida; very hot and very sunny, a throbbing miasma of sound across Hemming Park, now James Weldon Johnson Park, in beautiful ugly downtown Jacksonville.
(It was just such a night my friend Travis was arrested for skateboarding across Laura Street. Jayskating. (I don’t think it was the same night.))
After the show I bought their record. It had a pouch crammed with incidentals—flattened pennies, a Canadian stamp, some illustrated scraps. I think I listened to it a million times that summer. One of the guys in the band asked me where they could get some hash in Jacksonville. I suggested the Waffle House. Low played after; everyone sat down, exhausted from what Godspeed had required. It was lovely. Perfect day.
I had really wanted to experience my imaginative inversion of this concert this past weekend, but it didn’t emerge. I mean Alan Sparhawk, whose new record is so strange and daring and wonderful—I wanted to see that with my kid, who, he, my kid, wanted to see the ensemble Godspeed do their drone magic. I bought him an Aphex Twin record at Wax n’ Facts as a consolation prize, and he bought himself the first volume of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira at A Capella Books. I picked up a first edition hardback of William Gaddis’s last novel Agapē Agape.
And so well we made a weekend of it, browsing book stores and record stores and walking the Beltline. Love that city and my best wishes to GY!BE founding member, Efrim Menuck—I hate that we missed you on the tour but I hope that your health recovers. Thank you for making music my son and I love.
Slender Means unself-consciously employs postmodern techniques to paint a vibrant picture of what the End of the War might feel like. The climax coincides with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the title takes on a whole new meaning, and the whole thing unexpectedly ends in a negative religious epiphany.
Got a review copy of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, a slim lil fellow from NYRB in translation by Charlotte Mandell. The back cover includes a blurb from William H. Gass—
Monsieur Teste is a monster, and is meant to be—an awesome, wholly individualized machine—yet in a sense he is also the sort of inhuman being Valéry aimed to become himself: a Narcissus of the best kind, a scientific observer of consciousness, a man untroubled by inroads of worldly trivia, who vacations in his head the way a Platonist finds his Florida in the realm of Forms.
What the fuck does Gass mean by “Florida” here? I really want to know.
This style of post, the book acquired post, is an established, which is to say tired, blog post format on this blog, Biblioklept, probably going back a decade now, born from a glut of review copies piling up, mostly unasked for but many asked for, books that stack up their own measures of guilt, unread, or then maybe read, months, years later—but the post style is ephemeral, yes, fluffy, sure, embarrassing even maybe. The form is stale; I apologize. I do think the Valéry book seems pretty cool.
I have a not-insubstantial stack of newly acquired new (and used books) stacked on the cherry side table by the black leather couch that I should have made book acquired posts about. These have piled up over the last few weeks. These are not interesting sentences (several of the books seem very interesting).
I am not going to find the new form I want here, am I?
When I was a freshman in high school, my then-girlfriend’s older brother gave me a mixtape that a girl had given him. He didn’t like anything on the mixtape; he liked Buddy Holly. I can’t remember why he gave me the tape—I think I saw it in his car and asked about it. But it ended up changing my life in some ways, as small giant things like songs or books or films can do when they come over you at the right time and place.
There were a few bands on the tape that I knew or had heard of, and even some I owned albums by, like the Cure and the Smiths. But for the most part, the tape opened a new aural world to me. I heard My Bloody Valentine, Big Star, Ride, the Cocteau Twins, and This Mortal Coil, among others, for the first time. There were also two songs by one band: Slowdive’s “When the Sun Hits” and “Dagger.”
(This particular blog post is no longer about acquiring a Valéry translation; it is about something else.)
Those songs are from Slowdive’s 1993 classic Souvlaki. I owned it on cassette. That cassette melted, just slightly, on the top of my 1985 Camry’s dashboard in like August of 1995. The tape was just warped enough not to fit into a cassette deck. I liked to imagine how it would sound. The next year, my lucky privileged ass found a used CD of Slowdive’s follow-up, Pygmallion on a school trip to London. Slowdive kinda sorta broke up after that.
I have always been a proponent of bands breaking up. I think a decade is long enough; get what you need done in five or six albums and move on. There are many many exceptions to this rule. But generally, I don’t think beloved bands—by which I means bands beloved by me—should keep going on too long. And if they break up, they should stay broken.
But I bought Slowdive’s 2017 reunion album Slowdive used at a St. Petersburg record store and listened to it again and again, amazed at how strong it was, how true to form. My kids liked it a lot. And then they put out a record last year, Everything Is Alive—I like that one too (not as good as the self titled one).
(There’s no point to any of this; I might’ve had some wine; I might just feel like writing.)
I guess if you’d told me back in ’95 or ’05 or even ’15 that I’d see a reunited Slowdive twice in one year I’d say that that sounded silly. (The ’15 version of me that had seen Dinosaur Jr.’s dinosaur act wouldn’t have been interested.) But we went out into the woods to see Slowdive this Sunday. They played the St. Augustine Amphitheatre to a large, strange, diverse crowd, out there in the Florida air. A band named Wisp, TikTok famous I’m told, opened, and they were pretty good. But Slowdive was perfect—better than back in May in Atlanta—echo and reverb ringing out into Anastasia State Park.
We stayed in a cheap motel off of AIA that night—another sign of my age. When I was younger, I could drive six hours, watch a band, and drive the six hours back without blinking. We are about 45 minutes from St. Augustine. It was a nice night out.
A younger version of me could’ve read the 80 pages of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste in the time it took to twiddle my thumbs in this post and write a real (and likely bad) review to boot. Again, apologies. I’m getting old, a dinosaur act. But I can’t break up, not now.
Slowdive, St. Augustine Amphitheatre, 10 Nov. 2024
A few years ago, I reread Donald Barthelme’s collection Sixty Stories and wrote about them on this blog. I enjoyed the project immensely. A recent comment on the last of those Sixty Stories posts asked, or demanded, I suppose (the four-word comment is in the imperative voice) that I Now do Forty Stories. Which I am going to now do, Forty Stories.
40. “January” (first published in The New Yorker, 6 April 1987)
“January” begins as a dialogue between two characters, a mode Barthelme would return to repeatedly throughout his later career. The story is ostensibly a Paris Review style interview with one “Thomas Brecker,” who has authored seven books on religion over his thirty-five year career. The story begins as light satire; our Serious Writer is “renting a small villa” in St. Thomas; the interviewer notes that “a houseboy attended us, bringing cool drinks on a brown plastic tray of the sort found in cafeterias.” The interview quickly takes the shape of a career-spanning reflection, with Brecker sliding into a more melancholy mind frame. By the end of the story, the “interviewer” disappears, leaving us in Brecker’s imagination, where we have likely always been, and it’s hard not to read Barthelme’s autobiographical flourishes beneath Brecker’s mordant quips:
I think about my own death quite a bit, mostly in the way of noticing possible symptoms—a biting in the chest—and wondering, Is this it? It’s a function of being over sixty, and I’m maybe more concerned by how than when. That’s a … I hate to abandon my children. I’d like to live until they’re on their feet. I had them too late, I suppose.
39. “The Baby” (Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983)
“The Baby” was composed around the same time as “Chablis” (1983); both stories are love letters of paternal affection for an infant daughter. Again, it’s hard not to see Barthelme’s own biography here. His daughter Katherine was an infant at the time he wrote them. While I don’t think “The Baby” is as strong as “Chablis” is (or, at least as strong in my memory — “Chablis” is the first story in Forty Stories, so we’ll get there, I guess) — while I don’t think “The Baby” is as strong as “Chablis,” it’s still a fun little ditty with an anarchic punchline. It’s also, like barely five short paragraphs–just read it.
38. “Great Days” (Great Days, 1979)
As I revisit my notes for “Great Days,” I realize I should probably read the story again, more slowly, and try to tune more into its voice. Or voices. Are there two voices here, or one? I think there is more of a n actual story story here than I can summarize — not that anyone wants summary of Barthelme — but my takeaway is that this is Barthelme doing Stein doing Cubism doing… In his 2009 biography of Barthelme Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty wrote that New Yorker fiction editor (and early Barthelme champion) Roger Angell rejected an early version of the story (under the title “Tenebrae”). According to Daugherty’s bio, while Angell recognized the story as a “serious work” and a “new form,” he ultimately thought it was too “private and largely abstract” for publication.
I think this bit is lovely read aloud:
—Purple bursts in my face as if purple staples had been stapled there every which way—
—Hurt by malicious criticisms all very well grounded—
—Oh that clown band. Oh its sweet strains.
—The sky. A rectangle of glister. Behind which, a serene brown. A yellow bar, vertical, in the upper right.
—I love you, Harmonica, quite exceptionally.
—By gum I think you mean it. I think you do.
—It’s Portia Wounding Her Thigh.
—It’s Wolfram Looking at His Wife Whom He Has Imprisoned with the Corpse of Her Lover.
Elisabetta Sirani, Portia Wounding her Thigh, 1664
37. “Letters to the Editore” (Guilty Pleasures, 1974)
A lively little gem from Barthelme’s mid-seventies “non-fiction” collection Guilty Pleasures. Its inclusion seems to show an editorial need to pad out Forty Stories with more hits than the old boy had strung together by ’87. Anyway. “Letters to the Editore” is a fantastic send-up of small aesthetic aggressions writ large in the slim pages of little magazines. The ostensible subject is a dust-up surrounding an exhibition of so-called “asterisk” paintings by an American in a European gallery—but the real subject is language itself:
The Editor of Shock Art has hardly to say that the amazing fecundity of the LeDuff-Galerie Z controversy during the past five numbers has enflamed both shores of the Atlantic, at intense length. We did not think anyone would care, but apparently, a harsh spot has been touched. It is a terrible trouble to publish an international art-journal in two languages simultaneously, and the opportunities for dissonance have not been missed.
Barthelme’s comedic control of voices here is what makes this “story” an early (which is to say, late) standout in Forty Stories. It is the “opportunities for dissonance” that our author is most interested in and attuned to.
36. “Construction” (first published in The New Yorker, 21 April 1985)
“Construction” is the non-story of a writer flying out West to complete the “relatively important matter of business which had taken me to Los Angeles, something to do with a contract, a noxious contract, which I signed.” The documents he signs are “reproduced on onionskin, which does not feel happy in the hand.” This is one of two decent verbal flares in “Construction”; the other is an extended episode (as verbal flare-ups go) in which we find our Writer-Hero up against the wall of absurdity:
The flight back from Los Angeles was without event, very calm and smooth in the night. I had a cup of hot chicken noodle soup which the flight attendant was kind enough to prepare for me; I handed her the can of chicken noodle soup and she (I suppose, I don’t know the details) heated it in her microwave oven and then brought me the cup of hot chicken noodle soup which I had handed her in canned form, also a number of drinks which helped make the calm, smooth flight more so. The plane was half empty, there had been a half-hour delay in getting off the ground which I spent marveling at a sentence in a magazine, the sentence reading as follows: “[Name of film] explores the issues of love and sex without ever being chaste.” I marveled over this for the full half-hour we sat on the ground waiting for clearance on my return from Los Angeles, thinking of adequate responses, such as “Well we avoided that at least,” but no response I could conjure up was equal to or could be equal to the original text which I tore out of the magazine and folded and placed, folded, in my jacket pocket for further consideration at some time in the future when I might need a giggle.
Barthelme’s stand-in confesses here to what we’ve always known: He’s a scissors-and-paste man, a night ripper with a good ear, a good eye, but mostly one of us, a guy who needs a good giggle.
Robert Coover passed away a few days ago at ninety-two years old. In his decades-spanning career, Coover published twenty-one novels, four plays, and four short story collections. He also published dozens of (as-yet) uncollected stories, essays, and a host of so-called “electronic fiction.” A fifth short story collection, 2018’s Going for a Beer, collected some of Coover’s greatest hits, and is generally an excellent starting place for those interested in Coover’s metatextual fabulism.
Coover didn’t start out as a metatextual fabulist. His first novel, 1966’s The Origin of the Brunists, is vivid, humanist realism with the slightest tinges of magic brightening its edges. 1968’s follow-up, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., strays much deeper into the pop-myth fantasies that Coover would perfect in his mature career.
Coover’s 1969 collection Pricksongs & Descants shows a remarkable shift into postmodern metafiction. Pricksongs features some of his better stories, like “The Brother” (told from the point of view of the biblical Noah’s brother), “The Elevator,” and “The Magic Poker,” which begins with the sentence “I wander the island, inventing it” — a tidy encapsulation of Coover’s growing motif of the self-creating story. At times, this metatextual motif can exhaust the reader, as in Pricksongs’ capper “The Hat Act.” However, the collection features one of Coover’s best stories, “The Babysitter,” in which the titular character serves as a locus for a mundane suburban community’s collective repressed anxieties of sex and violence.
Coover would continue to explore such themes throughout his career, refining and sharpening his metatextual hat act in standout novels like Spanking the Maid (1982), Gerald’s Party (1986), and 1977’s The Public Burning—arguably Coover’s most important novel. It’s easy to think of The Public Burning as the last part of a loose postmodern American trilogy of large daring novels, the first two parts comprised of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and William Gaddis’s J R (1975).
Indeed, Coover was regularly grouped with a (very white, very male) clique of postmodern American writers. In his 1980 essay “The Literature of Replenishment,” John Barth halfheartedly counted up the members: “By my count, the American fictionists most commonly included in the canon, besides the three of us at Tubingen [William H. Gass, John Hawkes and Barth himself], are Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.”
There was some chatter on social media that Coover’s passing left just Pynchon–and maybe Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy–as the last living luminaries of twentieth-century US American postmodernist fiction. Of course, Pynchon really wasn’t a member of this or any other clique (he declined an invitation to Donald Barthelme’s so-called “postmodernists dinner“), and, as is too often the case with such groupings, Ishmael Reed’s contribution to American postmodernist fiction continues to be marginalized.
Let it stand then that Robert Coover, despite whatever connections and friendships he held with other writers and artists, was his own special self-made creation. He was prolific, especially later in life, publishing nine novels in the twenty-first century. One of these was The Brunist Day of Wrath (2014), a sequel to his debut; he also collaborated with comix artist Art Spiegelman on the graphic novelette Street Cop (2021) and even found a sliver of mainstream readers with Huck Out West, his wonderful 2017 “sequel” to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Coover’s latest novel Open House was published just over a year ago.
Clearly, Coover leaves behind a large body of work, and we’ll likely see more of his work collected and published over the next decade. I won’t pretend to have read most of what he’s written, but I’ve loved a lot of it—particularly Pricksongs & Descants, Huck Out West, Spanking the Maid, and Briar Rose, which, as far as I can recall, is likely the first thing I read of his (my girlfriend at the time’s sister had to read it in college; she professed that she hated it but thought I’d like it). The aforementioned 2018 collection Going for a Beer is a nice starting place for Coover; those more interested in novels might like Spanking the Maid. Or jump into one of his later short novels, like 2004’s Stepmother or 2018’s The Enchanted Prince, both of which exemplify his metamagicianist mode. Or hell, just go for the big boy, The Public Burning. Ultimately, Coover leaves behind a trove of trembling, writhing, vividly-living words, an oeuvre that will continue to engage readers fascinated by a certain stamp of so-called experimental literature–and for that I thank him.
Coover’s metafiction always points back at its own origin, its own creation, a move that can at times take on a winking tone, a nudging elbow to the reader’s metaphorical ribs—Hey bub, see what I’m doing here? Coover’s metafictional techniques often lead him and his reader into cartoon landscapes, where postmodernly-plastic characters bounce manically off realistic contours. The best of Coover’s metafictions (like “The Babysitter,” 1969) tease their postmodern plastic into a synthesis of character, plot, and theme. However, in large doses Coover’s metafictions can tax the reader’s patience and will—the simplest example that comes to mind is “The Hat Act” (from Pricksongs & Descants, 1969), a seemingly-interminable Möbius loop that riffs on performance, trickery, and imagination. (And horniness).
I’m dwelling on Coover’s metafictional myth-making because I think of it as his calling card. And yet Origin of the Brunists bears only the faintest traces of Coover’s trademark metafictionalist moves (mostly, so far anyway, by way of its erstwhile hero, the journalist Tiger Miller). Coover’s debut reads rather as a work of highly-detailed, highly-descriptive realism, a realism that pushes its satirical edges up against the absurdity of modern American life. It reminds me very much of William Gass’s first novel Omensetter’s Luck (1966) and John Barth’s first two novels, The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958). (Barth heavily revised both of the novels in 1967). There’s a post-Faulknerian style here, something that can’t rightly be described as modern or postmodern. These novels distort reality without rupturing it in the way that the authors’ later works do. Later works like Barth’s Chimera (1973), Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), and Coover’s The Public Burning (1977) dismantle genre structures and tropes and rebuild them in new forms.
We have the right to convey the fictive of any reality at all–and there is nothing that is not real—by any method we wish, and to have as our goal, if we so opt, only that we maintain the reader’s tension, the solitary indication, itself mercurial, of a work-of-art event.
Syntax being nothing more nor less than the codification of selected usages, we may alter syntax or reject it wholly.
We may compose the fictive in such a manner that the result is ambiguous, baffling and sometimes altogether impossible significantly to paraphrase-but so long as the piece seizes and holds the reader, a basic meaning, impossible to state in language as we know it, has been established, a meaning that belongs to a time series of seizing-and-holding.
The notion, we submit, of clarity, remains simply a notion, real enough, of course, under whatever category it is sub-sumed, but of no universal vigor, necessarily, nor marked by socalled objective truth; clarity is a notion identifying a particular social agreement in a one-to-one sense as to what construct evokes similarity of analysis.
Empirically all that is demonstrable is that we experience as creator or audience a series of perceptions. Now, if we set forth that demonstration in the fictive in such a fashion as to generate and sustain tension in the reader whether or not he is mystified by the significs, we have met the sole possible criterion.
We are not of course here in any way concerned with the alleged scalar values of a given fiction-the notion of value belongs to ad hominen pleaders usually involved in depressing or elevating a status for economic reasons—just as we cannot in any way be concerned with the alleged scalar values of the given reader. Fiction and reader are conjoined, and may not with any sense be disjunct if we are trying to penetrate the nature of the esthetic.
Such being the case, I believe we can with some innocence look at the choices of the contemporary avant-garde herein, and digest them according to our lights or chiaroscuras.
We need remember only how much more we usually discern if we take the trouble, to begin with, to clean our own canvasses-within reason.
—Gil Orlovitz
Gil Orlovitz’s introduction to The Award Avant-GardeReader (1965).
The Spring 1980 issue of Northwestern University’s literary journal TriQuarterly included an early version of a chapter from Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian. The TriQuarterly excerpt, published as “The Scalphunters,” is essentially Ch. XII of the finished 1985 Random House publication of Blood Meridian with some minor differences.
Consider, for example, the following paragraph–the seventh paragraph in “The Scalphunters” —
When the company set forth in the evening they continued south as before. The tracks of the murderers bore on to the west but they were white men who preyed on travelers in that wilderness and disguised their work in this way. The trail of the argonauts of course went no further than the ashes they left behind and the intersection of these vectors seemed the work of a cynical god, the traces converging blindly in that whited void and the one going on bearing away the souls of the others with them.
McCarthy significantly expands the passage in his final revision, underscoring Blood Meridian’s theme of witnessing:
When the company set forth in the evening they continued south as before. The tracks of the murderers bore on to the west but they were white men who preyed on travelers in that wilderness and disguised their work to be that of the savages. Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings. The trail of the argonauts terminated in ashes as told and in the convergence of such vectors in such a waste wherein the hearts and enterprise of one small nation have been swallowed up and carried off by another the expriest asked if some might not see the hand of a cynical god conducting with what austerity and what mock surprise so lethal a congruence. The posting of witnesses by a third and other path altogether might also be called in evidence as appearing to beggar chance, yet the judge, who had put his horse forward until he was abreast of the speculants, said that in this was expressed the very nature of the witness and that his proximity was no third thing but rather the prime, for what could be said to occur unobserved?
Perhaps the most jarring differencethough is that in “The Scalphunters” McCarthy refers to his erstwhile protagonist not as the kid but as the boy. Here’s a longish passage from The TriQuarterly edit to give you a taste of that flavor:
Brown let the belt fall from his teeth. Is it through? he said.
It is.
The point? Is it the point? Speak up, man.
The boy drew his knife and cut away the bloody point deftly and handed it up. Brown held it to the firelight and smiled. The point was of hammered copper and it was cocked in its blood-soaked bindings on the shaft but it had held.
Stout lad, ye’ll make a shadetree sawbones yet. Now draw her.
The boy withdrew the shaft from the man’s leg smoothly and the man bowed on the ground in a lurid female motion and wheezed raggedly through his teeth. He lay there a moment and then he sat up and took the shaft from the boy and threw it in the fire and rose and went off to make his bed.
When the boy returned to his own blanket the ex-priest Tobin leaned to him and looked about stealthily and hissed at his ear.
Fool, he said. God will not love ye forever.
The boy turned to look at him.
Dont you know he’d of took you with him? He’d of took you, boy. Like a bride to the altar.
Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon. Penguin Books (1973). Cover design by David Pelham. 268 pages.
Here is the first paragraph of Star Maker:
ONE night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill. Dark heather checked my feet. Below marched the suburban lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of dreams. Beyond the sea’s level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity. I distinguished our own house, our islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day’s oddities and vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned. There the children were born, those sudden new lives. There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either alone.
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.
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 Abductionsearlier 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.
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.
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…
Biblioklept 