My theory is that old money likes to squash folklore because of what it reveals about how their families got rich.

My friend Kimberley Lynne's novel, Dredging the Choptank, mixes folklore, impressive research, and a soberly gonzo narrative style to tell the story of a documentarian who discovers a Native American burial ground under an Eastern Shore jail.

I say “gonzo” because the book is based on Kimberley's own travails with the Dorchester County Historical Society, so a lot of the interactions between the narrator (named Maryland, oddly enough) and other characters really happened. But while creative license certainly comes into play elsewhere -- it is a novel, after all -- the book isn't gonzo in a Fear & Loathing sense of the term, or like those weird legends that George Lippard wrote about George Washington coming back from the dead. Yeesh.

In any case, Dredging captures the landscape of the Eastern Shore, both natural and man-made, and how unsettling it can be through the right kind of eyes. Our narrator's, to be exact. She is perpetually out of her element -- either she's walking through cemeteries (or oddly quiet streets), or she's trying to pry details about local hauntings from the polite-but-tight-lipped society ladies who control any and all access to regional history.

The role that class plays in the preservation and neglect of folklore is the most interesting part of the book, at least to me. Class issues are a constant source of irritation and disquiet to the narrator, from the broad gulf between haves and have-nots in Cambridge, MD, to the haves' miserly reluctance to talk about the less seemly bits of Maryland's past. Some of them refuse to admit that pirates were ever a part of state history. As the great-great-great grandson of Baltimore privateer Pearl Durkee, I took offense to their shame.

This isn't an unfamiliar attitude in troubled cities like Baltimore, which sits across the Bay Bridge from the Shore and is full of wealthy people who like to stick their fingers in their ears and pretend they live in New York. But the underlying theme of class-based historical whitewashing is just as creepy as the ghosts, or the narrator's research-induced hallucinations. It's a trifle unexpected, too. Who knew ghost stories were this political? I didn't. My theory is that old money likes to squash folklore because of what it reveals about how their families got rich.

The second most interesting part of the book is near the beginning, when the narrator learns that her house's previous owner performed abortions in what is now her basement. “I may never do laundry down there again,” is her understandable response. I bring this up as an illustration of the sense of humor employed throughout. Understated and clever, and sometimes born from necessity, the sardonic edge to the narrator's observations keeps them from getting textbooky or didactic without obscuring their clarity.

That last point is important, because the pace here is set by details: how the “watermen unloaded dripping baskets off tipping oyster boats,” or how Dorchester Country roads “curve through thick swamps with no guardrails.” Moments like those force the reader to linger on pages and really take in the setting, which is so lushly rendered that it should be recognized as a character in and of itself.

I'll leave you all with the promotional video Kimberley put together for the book -- I make a cameo as the ghost who probably sweats off ten pounds in the heavy black cloak he was wearing that day. It did keep the mosquitoes off, though.

Buy this book.

Mule Is Headphone Poetry

Shane McCrae and I trade YouTube clips of bands we like over e-mail. There's a tonal quality in the types of clips we send -- the bands we like tend to have lyric sensibilities while their words and their guitar sounds are distorted through a tangle of reverb and fuzz. I know Shane's favorite band is My Bloody Valentine. I know he likes the Jesus & Mary Chain. He likes bands with guitars that sound like purring chainsaws. Of course, I like these types of bands too. There's something about the union of the lyric with the cacophonous that puts me in a meditative state. Drone music. Layered music . . . music that I can feel in my jaw. Ultimately, it's music that breaks my heart. The hum of it rising from my stomach into my blood so that the bass syncopates with my pulse. Distortion is part of the message. That no matter how hard a musician strives for that perfect note, for virtuosity, there's beauty and grace in his or her failure to reach the achievement.

This is all to say that Shane McCrae's first book of poetry, Mule, breaks my heart in the same delicious way that I enjoy having my heart broken again and again while listening to my favorite LP's on a slow Sunday morning. Such art asks for active cooperation between reader and artist in order to achieve transference. The reader must be willing to surrender, since a total understanding of the speaker's grief in Mule occurs beyond the bounds of reason or logic. At the heart of Shane's work is a heavy layering of formal poetic impulses -- much of the book is written in meter and rhyme -- with the distortion of the meter through caesura, elision, and slanted lines that signify a break in the metrical count. There is no punctuation throughout the book unless you're counting the forward slashes as punctuation. Shane also makes use of heavy repetition. I'm telling you this now because I want you to understand something -- the tension taking place in Mule between the poems' collapsing sonnet-like forms and the highly emotional material (the end of love, fatherhood, race, and loss) will slay you as it did me.

The poem, "Internal Horses" is one poem that tore me up. The poem follows the speaker whose marriage is dissolving while he observes his autistic son:

As we divorced        Nicholas rode

internal horses          / And watching him

from the bench at the edge of the park/ In wildflowers

him in wildflowers in fields/ Of wildflowers him in fields        on

playgrounds which

Blossom from the ground

and then the ground

Must be covered over         with foam with bark

The stammering syntax suggests a speaker who is feeling for some solid, verifiable ground and in failing to find it, resorts to a stutter. I like to think of the loop machine employed by Merrill Garbus, the lead singer and performer of the tUnE-yArDs. She deftly records multiple tracks of her voice and then intersperses them in the song with a touch of a foot pedal. The effect is astounding. The impact of the vocal repetition is primal. So too the impact of the repetition of "wildflowers" in this poem.  The portrayal of the speaker's sense of the child rocking and horses running is a pitch-perfect dissolution of form.  It gives me the impression of a climber searching the crevasse of a sheer rock-face for a foothold.

Speaking of which, the iambic meter surges the scene forward while the speaker seems to attempt to hold the action back by breaking the metrical count. The forward slashes signify the end of a metrical line. The image of "internal horses" suggests that the autistic child is rocking to sooth himself while the speaker imagines an idyllic place for the child's attentions. The poem continues:

To love him just enough     to sit there watch-/ ing not enough         for

us to stay together

Not more enough than us

The above lines refer to one of the central themes of the book -- how to stay "married" despite everything in the world . . . how everything is "Not more enough than us." The idea of marriage, throughout the book, is mutable. Though marriage refers to the speaker's ending marriage, it also suggests the fusion of other disparate selves. In this case, the child is not enough to keep this marriage from collapsing. But in other cases in the book marriage refers to race, fatherhood, and a myriad of other selves that cannot keep the speaker's world from bursting apart.

Finally, the poem closes:

If we had put our ears to the ground

we might have heard the horses/ Carrying him our son away

the sound      carried away and al-/so back        both    both together

Not running from and not             running to us

Imagine this last stanza to be the closing quatrain of a sonnet. The speaker speculates what might have been had both speaker and his soon-to-be ex-spouse listened to what the son might be hearing. But of course, we know that such an exercise is a futile one. The poem is a momentary stay against confusion and ultimately fails to keep the speaker's world together.

Now, I understand that one of the pitfalls of writing challenging work is the potential for readers to feel required and not invited to participate. It's the old issue of accessibility and whether or not the poet is being generous. Let me say that the work in Mule is generous beyond measure and that Shane McCrae's poems are more than inviting. It's so easy to provide the reader an answer, a simple hook, a stable core, but the materials that Shane McCrae handles in Mule can't be touched with kid gloves. There's nothing easy about heartbreak.

I had this discussion with a couple of friends about Radiohead's new album The King of Limbs. It's a difficult album, but if you're attentive. If you listen closely, it will break your heart with every listen. The album's use of layering as well as distortion, plus the barely audible sounds in the background add tremendous resonance to the entirety of the album. I like to call this type of music "headphone music." It's not an indictment of the album, but rather high praise. It means it requires immersion, an attentive listen. It means it's the reader's moral obligation to give over an afternoon or morning to the celebration of the work. Mule is headphone poetry. It's the type of music I expect Shane to link in his e-mail. It's the kind of poetry I'll play on a loop.

xTx Is Not a Real Person but ___ _____ Is Not a Real Writer (Yet)

xTx likes to send me all the great reviews of her book and I yawn, mostly. She thinks I do that because I am not supportive, but it is because nobody is going to tell me something I already know about Normally Special, a book that I am deeply invested in.

Disclaimers: I read early drafts of many of these stories; I provoked her into writing the story about her dad's penis; I took the photo that is on the cover; I take every opportunity to turn the attention to myself. So enough of that. There are more disclaimers but I will not disclaim them, I will just say this:

xTx is a lovely person who cares deeply about the people she cares about. xTx is not a real person. You are lucky if you are xTx's Internet friend. xTx is friends with everyone on the Internet. Her Internet heart is that big. She is honest -- as honest as someone with a pseudonym can be -- and please consider that her fake name might make her more honest than you could ever hope to be. She injected so much of herself -- her hidden, real self -- into Normally Special that to discuss the book or the person is to discuss the same thing.

Some of the stories make you squirm and gag and that is a good thing. Many reviewers gravitate toward the gruesome tales in her collection because, c'mon, what a THING to say! To admit! To confess! Cringe-worthly. She digs deep for those, into places that make her and the reader feel like monsters. She almost named the book I Am Not a Monster in part because she often feels like one. And that is it right there -- we all do. Maybe we do not write stories about it. Maybe we pretend we do not have these feelings. But we do.

The most frightening story in the book is "An Unsteady Place." A woman on an idyllic vacation with her family struggles to love and is maybe losing her mind and it is terrifying. Trapped by the trappings of her life: a husband and children and choices that are chains, and who is not bound and frightened by that? Who would admit it?

xTx is the inside of this woman. _____ _______ is the outside this woman. _____ _______ could not write the stories in Normally Special. If you met _____ _______ you might ask her where xTx is and she would point at a dark corner and you would not see her.

"If I could only read one book again for the rest of my life, it would be this, Crime and Punishment, always and forever."

I believe I was sixteen when I read Crime and Punishment for the first [four] time[s]. I held the book in my hands, all too many pages of it, wholly unaware that it'd shape everything that came after.

It's a book that scares and intimidates me now because maybe my whole life will be turned over again. Afraid it'll throw me into another existential crises, make me afraid of mirrors and the night again, and so I try, rather unsuccessfully, to avoid it. But I can't, never could: Raskolnikov's as much a part of me as any real world memory or friend or experience I've ever had.

It was the first book to make me really cry, and I wept into it, dropping the tears onto the page as I turned page after blurred page, unable to even look away until the book was finished, just two days after it was given to me. I stared at what I held in my hands and knew nothing would ever feel like this again, that the world outside this cover was changed irreparably, unequivocally. And so the only option was to turn back to page one and so I burned through it once more before the week was finished.

If words can save a life [they can], Dostoevsky's saved mine, even when I wasn't quite aware how much I needed him, needed someone to. It completely destroyed me, dismantled the entire world, the limits of existence, and it spent the next six months or six years reconstructing me, making me hopefully better than yesterday.

If I could only read one book again for the rest of my life, it would be this, Crime and Punishment, always and forever. It may not be as magnificent or perfect as The Brothers Karamazov, but it matters to me more than I can even express. It's so much more than a book or a story: it's my whole life, before and after.

The Poetics of Our Suffering

A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Dorothea Lasky read from Black Life, her most recent collection from Wave Books and a collection I'm absolutely in love with. She introduced a poem to a crowded auditorium of writers by saying "This poem is titled 'It's a lonely world,' but it feels a lot less lonely being here with you guys tonight." It was true -- even though she had just read a heartbreaking poem about losing her father, there was a sense that everyone in the room had come together to support her. It was just one of those nights.

I've frequently heard writers and readers say that the best poems always end up being sad poems. It's weird, isn't it -- the human tendency to let another's misery be a therapeutic vehicle? I'm not one to make lofty statements about such a broad demographic, but I can say that I personally enjoy sad poems because of how I react to them: something about their gut-wrenching nature always leaves me with a strong urge to be a better reader, a better writer, and a better person. Maybe I'm being a little too romantic here, but I believe that in this shared sense of sadness, we're empowered to be more compassionate and understanding individuals.

I mention all this because whether she's writing about the mathematicians she's loved or the living rooms she's imagined, you always get the sense that Dottie is the type of person that understands suffering. The thing that's most important about Black Life, I think, is that Dottie can get down in the mucky, muddy underbelly of human existence and sculpt it in a brutally honest way that reminds us of our own disappointments and shortcomings. There is, of course, solidarity in sadness.

Not to over-share or anything, but the last couple of months have been pretty hard on me. The thing, though, is that Dottie's poems always seemed to remind me that I wasn't alone in my misery. In this one poem I really like ("How to Survive in this World"), Dottie reminds us that "There is a lot to be sad about/but no point in feeling that sadness."  I've grown very attached to this line over the last couple of months: in the moments where I've felt defeated and powerless, I've thought about what little could be accomplished in my wallowing. I've taken that negative energy and applied it to more important things; I've kept my head up, and I've moved on.

And maybe that's why I find myself so frequently in Awe of Dottie's poetry: maybe the poetics of our suffering are the only things that bind us together; maybe if we can see through life's repulsive moments, we can be better to one another and (more importantly) be better to ourselves.

I promise you that there's a lot more worth talking about in Black Life. I plan on getting there and I certainly plan on being less dramatic, but I want you to know how important this collection is to me. From the little I know about Dottie's ideals and aesthetics, I think she'd be happy to hear that Black Life reminded me of how sad and ugly this world can sometimes be; she'd probably be happier to know that  while I was reading Black Life, I felt a strong urge to never let that sadness and ugliness defeat me. And that's why I think it's such an important and awesome book: even in her moments of absolute weakness and disparity, Dottie found a way to remind me that there still is a lot of beauty out there -- I  just had to sort through all the awful stuff first.

Mark Leidner Is the Boss of Me

Mark Leidner does a boss non sequitur. He is the boss of boss non sequiturs. I am pretty sure adding an S to a Latin word doesn't actually make it plural? If you need boss proof, please go away and read "The Awesomest Bagel," which I read in the shower of an old apartment and read every day for two years, except for the days when I didn't shower. Then come back and keep reading this page here. Oops, you're already gone. That's okay, I am pretty sure plenty of the other people can't read instructions like you can.

Real talk: I have been in love with Mark Leidner since I was 16 years old and had a LiveJournal and discovered his LiveJournal and had vigorous marriage-based fantasies about him. That is seven years of love and counting. He was a member of a poetry community where, to get in, you had to submit three poems and the members would critique them and  vote on whether you should be allowed to join. Mark Leidner voted "yes" on my application and that is still the best part of my life so far.

So the aphorisms in The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover kind of feel like Mark hair I've been collecting from a Mark brush, and I do mean that in the best way possible. They are precious and mysterious, which probably a lot of things in Harry Potter are too? If you liked Harry Potter, you’ll love The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover, I am pretty sure.

Check out just one of these bad boys: “aphorism pithily opens a window between the known and the not; nevermind it is winter.” Does it immediately remind me of Game of Thrones and how they really need to get rid of that excruciatingly boring Night’s Watch storyline because I can no longer stand to watch Jon Snow and his dumb boring sad face? Yes. Is it also really freaking “beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it”? Yes. Do I watch too much TV? Absolutely. There's  no hope left for me, but if you are interested in delaying the decay of your own brain, I hear that books are good for that. This one is even small and easy to read, which is a plus if your brain is half decayed, or three quarters.

"What I am fine means is please stop talking."

Before I say anything about Kamby Bolongo Mean River, I have to tell you that its author, Robert Lopez, is a friend of mine. I also have to tell you that I edit a journal in which his fiction has appeared several times and will likely appear in the future. In other words, I am completely biased here -- I want Robert’s books to be great, and I think they are great, from his first novel, Part of the World, to his recent book of stories, Asunder, to his second novel, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, which, because I taught it last spring, is the Lopez book I’ve read most recently, frequently, and closely.

I think any book worth reading is worth reading more than once. For me, a first read often involves just figuring out what’s going on, answering the who/what/where/ when/how questions. I might have a strong emotional response on a first read, I might admire language or lines or a whole lot of things, but I can’t really tell how good the book is because I always feel like I’ve missed a lot of the nuances. A second read brings greater depth to a book because it allows me to see and feel more -- of a character’s isolation, for example -- as threads are revealed earlier and woven more subtly than I noticed on the first read. A good book gets better on a second read because that’s when I start to see the purpose and power in its construction, the choices the author made regarding line and language, tone and rhythm, withholding and revelation. Kamby Bolongo Mean River is fluid and funny and moving on a first read, but its exploration of existence and isolation gets smarter, funnier, and deeper every time I read it, and its construction tighter and more satisfying.

The book starts with this sentence: “Should the phone ring I will answer it,” and returns to variations on that line throughout the novel. “Should the phone ring” becomes a kind of touchstone, a way to both ground the story and move it forward, a verbal tic on the narrator’s part that also serves as a kind of reset button and device to propel us forward. Far from being monotonous or irritating, line repetition is one of the great strengths of this novel, the variations revealing character depth and complexity through a kind of evolutionary mutation as the book progresses, the lines taking on the feel of a broken or breaking chorus:

“Should the phone ring I will answer it.”

“Should the phone ring I might let it keep ringing until the machine answers.”

“Should the phone ring I will ask the caller to identify themselves before I say the hello how are you.”

“Should the phone ring I won’t stop the conversation with myself to answer.”

“Should the phone ring I will ask why it is I can’t dial out anymore.”

“Should the phone ring I will let the machine pick up because I have arranged for the machine to tell everyone but Mother to go fuck themselves.”

“Should the phone ring I think I will drop dead all over the floor because it hasn’t rung since I don’t know when anymore.”

“Should the phone ring I will ask Charlie why he and Mother put me here.”

That “here” just referred to, where Charlie and Mother “put” the narrator, is some kind of institution, a hospital or jail, a hospital jail, just a room really, without windows, but with a phone that we initially believe might ring at any moment, that we later think rang just last night, and that we finally know hasn’t rung in years and will never ring again. There are doctors who act more like absurd orderlies or guards or slave drivers as the place comes to feel more like a prison:

“Sometimes when one of them is examining me another one is in the corner reading the newspaper. He is sitting with his legs crossed like he is on a park bench somewhere. I always tell this one to go fuck himself.”

“Sometimes I call the doctor massa because what’s the difference.”

While we know the narrator is incapacitated and institutionalized, we never determine the exact nature of his problem, though we get greater insight regarding his oddness and otherness as the book unfolds. What we don’t get is a diagnosis. And it would be a mistake to try to come up with one, because to diagnose this character would be to reduce him to his diagnosis, and the book is far more interested in a kind of existential isolation that we might all experience, raising questions that fiction so often examines, like, How are we separated from other people? How do we connect and fail to connect with other people? What if we don’t want to connect with other people? How did we get here and why? What happened to me? What happened to you? What happens to everyone? Further, because our narrator has no way to measure the passage of time (“Should the phone ring right now I might say can you at least give me the fucking time of day here”) there’s a kind of horror to a timeless present in which there’s very little opportunity for action. A good deal of the novel focuses on the past, or rather the narrator filtering the past in this nearly empty present, weaving variations on stories about his childhood and his mother and brother Charlie with observations about his present, sometimes using the phone as a device to connect past and present. The narrator is often waiting for a call from Charlie. But the phone only comes to indicate how isolated the narrator is:

“I have often held the phone to my ear and listened to the nothing coming through. The nothing coming through the telephone is the best nothing there is. . . . I am almost always doing nothing it seems. It hasn’t always been like this but it has been like this for as long as I can remember.”

Kamby Bolongo Mean River examines a profound and nearly hopeless isolation, but the book never become leaden or oppressive, and I think there are two reasons for this: First, the prose is as clear as can be, with a lot of air in it, a lightness, and the rhythm and variation in the repetition make for a kind of beautiful song. The other reason Kamby’s not oppressive is because it’s so funny on the page, maybe the funniest book I’ve ever read. And while it’s hard to reproduce the humor here, because so much of it’s based on variation in the repetition and a kind of accumulation of absurd detail -- sandwiches and air conditioning and answering machines and coleslaw and ladles and uniforms and meditation and masturbation and powder and chafing and those “glorious” two years long ago -- I find myself laughing throughout the book:

“Sometimes,” the narrator says, “the doctors have me write poems to see how I’m doing. They tell me to express myself and I tell them it’s hard to do when I chafe like this. . . . The poem I wrote last night was the best one yet.

The answering machine is like a sandwich

My uniform is like coleslaw

So what the fuck is wrong with the air conditioning?”

Another reason Kamby doesn’t feel oppressive is that it ultimately focuses on a struggle for liberation, a movement toward escape or a moment of freedom. Lopez creates a difficult problem for this book by imposing a kind of stasis on it. Yes, the narrator can move in his mind, back to childhood memories of his hometown of Injury Alaska, which may or may not be a real place. And, yes, the narrator can move about his cell, can draw with chalk on his walls and floor, can interact with the “doctors.” But time and action, which are so crucial to movement and development in fiction, are significantly limited as narrative tools in a world in which the narrator can’t move outside of his cell and has no real sense of how much time has passed since he arrived wherever it is that he might be. Voice becomes crucial, because very little action is going to unfold. And voice serves this novel well, as does the book’s fragmented structure and weave. But if a character can’t move, if nothing much is going to happen, if it’s not clear how much time has passed from one section to the next, what can drive the story? As noted above, a strong voice and so much humor keep the reader engaged on the page, as does the exploration of this character’s odd, often fascinating consciousness, but something else is at work that makes the book more than merely funny or engaging.

As readers, we’re actively involved in trying to understand where our narrator is and how he got there and what happened to him in the past and what’s real and what’s delusion. Gradually as the story unfolds, the narrator’s situation starts to feel more oppressive, the narrator’s caretakers more abusive. We come to learn that his clothes have been taken away, maybe a long time ago, that he must ask permission to go to the bathroom, and later, that he’s often manhandled by his keepers:

“[T]wo of them will grab my arms and another two will grab my legs and the four of them will hold me aloft like I am on the rack. This is what it must feel like to be drawn and quartered is what I tell them. . . . They tell me not to struggle but I forget sometimes and struggle anyway.”

It’s the narrator’s struggle that starts to suggest his movement toward a kind of escape. Further, we get the sense of passing time, the sense that the narrator is changing, though we can’t outline anything close to a specific chronology. He says, “I think I have been in the middle of the conversation with myself for thirty-two years now,” and I wonder, Is this conversation with himself his life? Gradually, I start to think, no; maybe the text -- the book in my hands -- is the conversation with himself. Later, he writes, “Saying I am in the middle of this conversation means the conversation will continue another thirty-two years or so I think.” But on the next page: “I am probably two-thirds to three-quarters to almost done with the conversation with myself if you can believe that sort of thing without a calendar.”

Is this merely the thinking of an unreliable narrator in a world with unreliable time? I don’t think so. At this point in the novel, there’s a sense of acceleration toward something. Part of this escalation involves greater revelation of the violence and oppression of his present, which also reflects back on his past, as we learn, among many other things, that he “got stuck in Mother’s tubes on the way out.” There’s now a noise in the narrator’s head, “like a horrible dial tone from a horrible phone that never shuts off.” Woven with the escalating violence and paranoia of his present is the evolving resistance and escape thread. The narrator imagines that “[T]he people of Injury Alaska yearn for me.” There’s a kind of dawning indignation: “If the people of Injury knew I was here they would storm the gates and set me free.” The narrator starts to feel more active than he’s felt before, more an agent directing his own life: “When they let me leave here I want to return to my native home of Injury Alaska…. Back to my people waiting for me.” The fact that the narrator “wants” anything is striking. Has he wanted anything abstract in the present before this? Has there been any suggestion of a possible future before this? And while his hope to be liberated by the people of Injury might be delusional or absurd, the fact that he wants any contact with people or can imagine anyone wanting him or waiting for him suggests that he’s still capable of engagement with humanity and life.

But with that engagement seems to come an ability to see his present more clearly, as indicated in one of the most revealing and naked lines in the book: “I do the same thing here because I’m not getting any better.” This recognition of something being wrong with him, something hopelessly wrong (“I’m not getting any better”) is when his awareness of being enslaved becomes most acute, followed by a yearning to escape that seems no longer joined to the possibility of anyone out there awaiting his return.

I think it’s always sort of ridiculous to say what a book “does” or is “about” because good books do and are about so many things. But one thing Kamby “does” is examine a character’s growing awareness of his imprisonment and subsequent desire to be free, his growing resistance to imprisonment, his growing sense of fight even if that resistance (and freeing of self) takes the form of self destruction. Because once he thinks, “I’m not getting any better,” and starts identifying directly with slaves, that’s when he decides that, “should the phone ring I will let it ring and ring,” and that’s when he reveals the two ways to “do something to yourself,” which is self destruction -- suicide -- and that’s when the people of injury Alaska can “all go fuck themselves if they’re not coming to set [him] free,” and that’s when it occurs to him to “ask Charlie why he and Mother put me here.”

The narrator’s movement toward self destruction is tied to his movement toward self realization or seeing how unbearable things really are, a kind of naked lunch moment that, at least momentarily, sparks a movement toward liberation, toward recognizing a static, meaningless, oppressive present and resisting it, fighting it, even the earlier parts of the novel coming now to seem like resistance based on the narrator’s attempts to create meaning from his stories of the past. And even if the narrator shuts down again, which he will, his ability to become active in his life and to recognize the oppression of a timeless present feels like an  awakening, that awakening as well as the oppression of a timeless present ringing metaphorically or allegorically or universally (existence as a kind of imprisonment) without ever feeling forced or pretentious. The main question of the book -- “Should the phone ring,” should the outside world try to reach in -- is addressed at the end of the novel with a list of possible responses, including “I will return to the good people of Injury as they are waiting,” and “I . . . don’t feel like talking so please leave a message because I am fine.”

Is he fine? No, not really. At some moments, maybe. But he’s completely isolated and often bewildered and incapable of interactions in the present that don’t leave him feeling like a slave or a lab specimen. He is alone. But he listens to himself tell his story, and we listen too. We participate in his struggle to make his story make sense. We laugh at the absurdity of his situation and are horrified by how easily and casually he’s abused, ignored, and forgotten. But he keeps himself alive with his memory and his fight and his voice, with his conversation with himself that becomes a conversation with the reader that seems to indicate someone on the other end of the phone after all.  Even if he can’t hear us, even if we can’t call, even if he doesn’t know we exist, even if the conversation is entirely one sided, we’re there and we hear him.