The novel-est novel I’ve read in a while. Its formal fragmentation seemed to mirror the formal fragmentation of life so often spent looking at phones, switching between apps, unexpected text-message incursions of images from friends or concerns from Mom, and then you look up and see something and fall into a dream before returning to a memory of being on the phone with tech support at work while reading an article about the inevitable end of the world or scrolling through endless tweets of doom.
Formally, the quick, addictive, effortless, aerated movement through the box-like book (when it arrived at my office I wondered what it could be, what had I ordered that was so damn heavy?) becomes at best a sort of flip book, a shifting foundation for readerly associations. Readers who come to this with their Associative Intelligence (holy ghost in the sacred trinity of Emotional Intelligence and old-fashioned IQ) revved up as though reading a poem or watching an abstract film will be more than pleased since the novel presents a system of associations.
There are pages throughout or sometimes only paragraphs of asterisks and colons that shift in significance from stars after being knocked out to digital code to radiation to a sense of oblivion after learning crushing news of a loved one’s death to snow etc. My reading experience was novel, too, in that I read maybe half of this 1600+ page book in print on my phone thanks to the free download that comes with the book if you go to the book’s site (linked above) and enter a keyword related to sacrifice found in a footnote on a certain page. The ebook had 13K+ “locations” and the format isn’t quite the same as in the print book, but when I read the ebook I sensed the physical print book somehow in my palm, invisible, extending down through my hand and to the floor of the subway or the concrete of the sidewalk below as I walked to work — more fragmentation, more of a sense of verticality, an unseen tower of text like the fallen World Trade Center towers.
The overall sense, the single lingering impression, is internal collapse, implosion, the way the Twin Towers fell straight down with their innards burned out instead of tipping over, a sort of anguish like that, straight down inside instead of falling over.
For all the fragmentation and formal unconventionality, the effect toward the end, ultimately, is overwhelmingly emotional. On the ebook, soon after the author’s father with cancer dies and then a premature infant dies, there are images of her burial and then old stills from a film of a woman in white diving into an open grave, and then single rows of asterisks and colons, with slight variations, across what felt like hundreds of ebook swipes to the right (like a very literary dating app on which books try to hook up with their ideal readers), creating a progression of downward flushing typography over a few minutes as I leaned against the subway doors on the way to my kid’s daycare on a dark early November day a year and a day after Trump’s election — the effect approached catharsis when finally there appeared an image of a barn door cracked open letting in light.
Funny that the first word of the summary on the back of the book is “funny” since I didn’t LOL once, although there was some humor, particularly with the website-greeter transcripts that may or may not have been human and/or based in Pakistan. Generally, though, “funny” doesn’t really describe this and seems a semi-disservice in the official summary.
I would also like to point out that this is another example of a writer who received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who doesn’t write so-called Iowa Fiction. Not everyone who went there apes Yates and Cheever. Ahem.
Anyway, I liked the meta-fictional and autobiographical/memoirish bits, but not as much as the urgent, excruciating emergency call transcript of the woman on the smoke-filled 86th floor of the WTC on 9/11, with pages of [deleted] and one stranger calling out to another interspersed with prayers and curses.
Also loved the bit about the couple who drowned, the woman lost somewhere between the surface and the floor, like the cover image.
It’s not really a 1600-page book — it’s nowhere near as dense as the merely 1492-page Joseph and His Brothers, the longest book I’d previously read. The estimated overall word count probably doesn’t exceed 100K, my guess. But none of that really matters when you’re reading on your phone, swiping along, engaged, associative intelligence doing some light pleasurable lifting, even scrolling through Instagram and refreshing Twitter, feeling like what you see on the socials is intended to be part of it too (the best art charges perception so everything seen seems like art too), before returning to the proper massive print book to read 100+ pages in less than an hour in bed at home, coming away with a soulful sense of loss and anguish but also hope, presented in an almost sentimental, innocuous, non-fascist #MAGA way, although it seems initially composed during the comparatively rosy GWB years (the oughts).
Read it during the major pre-taper weeks of marathon training and its length synced with the slow and somehow feasible 20-mile training runs. It also made me want to write, generally, and read a few more of the longer major novels I’ve so far missed (the highest accolade in a way).
Anyway, highly recommended to readers who like to make connections and realize from the start that the solution to literary mystery is always mystery itself (a less potentially schmaltzy way of saying “the soul” or geist as the Germans say). Seekers of plot and stubborn lovers of conventional narrative should still probably take a chance on this if only to flex and develop their atrophied muscles of associative intelligence.
An interesting interview with Michael Silverblatt about Quixote, the Bhagavad Gita, salvation through literature, and the book’s reception:
https://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/sho…
Through the first half of Matthew McIntosh’s first book I was thinking it’s perfect, fragmentary structure interlinking all these people, the general place the primary character, everyone sort of desperate, unrestrained, drinking too much, drugs, violence, white northwestern urban poverty, Seattle area, a place called Federal Way, like a lower middle class strip near the airport, all of it expressed in clear, flowing, unpretentious, active, dramatic, moving language, often veering into really well-done sex scenes that weren’t about the sex so much as underlying sadness and general traumatic events of existence.
Midway through a bus plunges off a highway and I started thinking the violence was unnecessary. The margins were really thin like a police blotter so it read quickly but I was wondering what I’m getting from this? Is it sort of like down-and-out Pacific Northwest class porn, like Jesus’ Son transplanted and not as poetic but still with an underlying Christian deliverance vibe?
And then the rest of the book — really a collection of stories occasionally linked by character and always by geography more than an unconventional novel — especially when the narrator was younger and the language not as honed, seemed to fall off, started to feel like stories I could imagine the author putting up for workshop (he’s an Iowa grad, same class as two good friends who graduated a few years before me), the long one toward the end with many under-characterized characters, feeling more like fiction than the first half of the book, all of which felt real, like the author or his friends or family had lived it and he was just reporting back.
I loved TheMystery.doc when I read it a few years ago and for some reason have put this one off until 2021 even if I knew about it and it was recommended to me maybe 15 years ago. Glad I’ve read it finally. Really worthwhile, especially paired with his much more ambitious second novel, the seeds for which are certainly here.
Very much looking forward to whatever he writes next.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).