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The Walls by Jay Fox - Part Two

After letting my previous review marinate a bit, I've decided to slap on an addendum.  It’s not like I said anything I didn't mean to in the previous review, but there’s a thing or two worth adding.

In many ways, I wasn't planning on running into this book for a while.  Experimental, ambitious, and very long.  The Moby Dick of ebooks landed unexpectedly in my lap.  And on display too all the vices of self-publishing: a lack of sensible cutting, an unchained pretentiousness, and endless navel-gazing.

But there was a lot I enjoyed as well.  The narrator didn't attempt to seem too cool.  He was nerdy and awkward with women, and this was endearing.  

  I kept wishing he’d stand up for himself a little more, ask some of the people rambling at him to come to the point.  But shortly thereafter he’d be rambling on himself, the people around him maybe listening intently, probably not.  And after a while I figured this was how people talk in this particular circle.  They talk about whatever happens to be flitting around in their head, some shit they read someplace, and they keep going on about it until, by whatever invisible signal, it’s somebody else’s turn to talk.

I realized this by spending a bit of time, recently, with someone who actually talks like this.  And I realized, before hardly any time had gone by, there is something seriously wrong with this guy!  I think Jay Fox knows there’s something wrong with people who talk like this, too.  The book’s best section involves the character Patrick Shaheen blathering on for hours as countless cheesy seventies songs play on the jukebox, songs that he picked himself before sitting down to talk.  There is magic and looseness to the scene, a real evocation of place and character.  You’re carried on by the weirdness of Shaheen and the situation.

Such bursts of talent are what make The Walls so confounding.  Almost fifteen percent of the book is taken up with a single conversation with a man named Willis Faxo, another oddball New Yorker who muses on and on and on about any topic that comes into his head.  The section, however, is deeply, deeply uninteresting, and was the only section of the book that I felt absolutely no shame in merely skimming.  I feel quite certain no one will ever read the Willis Faxo section from front to end, including Jay Fox.  It is the most unforgivable filler section in the book, contributing almost nothing toward the story but quite a bit toward some magical word count which will make the book important or something.

So, in The Walls we are confronted by a book populated by men who go on and on about more-or-less random subjects in a fairly erudite fashion, apparently whether or not anyone is really listening to them.  Men who seem to have something wrong with them.  We have a narrator who seems to understand these guys have something wrong with them, even while he displays many of the same symptoms.  I have no idea where he is going with this the narrator says while absorbing the pointless verbal barrage of Willis Faxo, and of course neither does the reader.  

In the previous review, I lamented how murky The Walls was, how desperately it seemed to be fishing around for a topic, but after thinking about it for a bit I wondered if perhaps the actual subject of the novel is this specific subgroup of men, these awful men who can’t stop talking about all the shit they know and half-know, these men whose ability to absorb and regurgitate facts seems to their entire raison d’etre.  While reading The Walls I sometimes gently hoped that this was the case, and that at some point the narrator would come to realize there is something stupid and wrong with the way I am living.  

This is literary gold, of course, from Frédéric Moreau to Humbert Humbert to Ebenezer Scrooge, but it requires a depth this novel lacks.  Instead, the novel ends as the narrator meets up with his girl in Union Square, a scene lifted right out of the last five minutes of a Meg Ryan movie, and they head off to the nearest bar to apparently bore the living shit out of someone else.  It’s a happy ending though because we don’t have to listen in.

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The Walls by Jay Fox

One thing you can say for Jay Fox and his novel The Walls: they have good self-esteem.  His blurb reads: Not since the debut of Hunter S. Thompson or Thomas Pynchon has there been a book to emerge that speaks so clearly to a generation. Jay Fox’s debut novel, THE WALLS, is arguably the first iconic book from the Millennials.

By this reader’s judgement, Jay Fox is not the voice of his generation.  If he is, then I feel sorrier for the Millennials than I already did.

Not only does Mr. Fox’s ambition exceed his talent, it exceeds his ability to conceptualize the task he is attempting.  Again and again while reading I got the sense that the author had no idea of what a novel is supposed to do.  In place of effective and efficient storytelling, The Walls clings to two maxims: be very, very long and use a lot of big words.

On both these accounts the author succeeds completely.  Unfortunately, they are terrible goals.

Still, she’s pleasant; there is a hue of sincerity in her tone that portends either gullibility or the acceptance of that suburban propriety with all its underhanded comments and supercilious punctilios.

This is literally a sentence in Jay Fox’s The Walls.

By my calculations the novel is just a hair shorter than Gravity’s Rainbow.  Gravity’s Rainbow features hundreds of characters and skips from era to era, continent to continent.  The Walls takes place over a month in New York City and has probably twenty characters.  However, the novel has to be very, very long and so the author shoehorns all sorts of disjointed and fundamentally uninteresting rants into the text.  The reader drowns in filler, which is okay because at least Mr. Fox got to write a very, very long novel.  Speaking in general terms of his very important generation:

It’s more than that familiar sense of indestructibility that has corrupted the judgment of ephebi since before Jason assembled the Argonauts; it’s the belief that our own opinions of those with whom we agree are sacrosanct, impervious.  We are the progeny of a perverse philosophy of self-affirmation without self-reflection: Cogito, ergo sum rectus.  The Colbert Nation.  Homo Certo.  But these are the early stages.  Moving beyond the opinions we espouse, what could called our personal tenets, we come upon the daunting intellectual landscape of the information age, a space in which there is no proof of a greater veracity in any one institution.

  And so forth.  Not only does the narrator talk this way, but so do most of the characters.  Again and again it feels as if we’ve been buttonholed by some guy at a party reciting, for no clear reason, a series of half-remembered Wikipedia articles to us.  But the pages do fill up, so fuck the reader, I guess.

The story’s plot seems very much lifted from The Crying of Lot 49, though I suppose subtly enough that it can be considered homage.  The narrator is trying to track down an artist who creates his works in bathrooms of bars, the very place where Oedipa Maas first happens upon the Trystero horn symbol.  On his trek he meets up with many strange characters and organisations, including A.R.E., a catchy acronym which naturally brings to mind Lot 49’s W.A.S.T.E.  The search for a reclusive artist of which very little is known seems to borrow from the facts of Pynchon’s own biography.

The novel lacks for a real subject, or at least a subject that would support such a lengthy undertaking.  There are two topics the novel repeatedly addresses: the beauty and geography of the city where it is set, and the difficulty recent college graduates sometimes find in deciding what to do with the rest of their lives.  I can’t imagine anyone being seriously interested in the latter topic, but Fox address the former sometimes quite elegantly, on the rare occasions he isn’t fluffing himself up with self-importance:

I begin to backtrack with the hope of finding a street with more storefronts, and end up heading west until I come to the southern border of Greenwood Cemetery, its sprawling acres verdant and lush and manicured and fragrant with the scent of damp leaves and mowed grass.  I soon realize that the street is something of an extension of the cemetery, so I once again change course, and end up on 39th.  Initially, it contains nothing more than the jumbled mixture of row homes and those tenement buildings -- miasma of twisted metal (foreground); beer-bottle-brown brick (background) -- that are so ubiquitous in nearly every part of Brooklyn; soon it becomes a shallow canyon cutting through a low-density industrial zone profuse with loading areas (some gaping like toothless mouths, some closed behind walls of retractable steel), diesel-spewing trucks, and tan men on forklifts.  I turn down 14th Avenue when the opportunity arises.  This leads me into a community in which I am subjected to a silent curiosity too profane to admit steady eye contact.  I am less than an enigma here, more like an apparition just tangible enough to warrant chameleon tongues and quickened steps.  The women feign interest in their children: tiny creatures -- pudgy to the point of amorphous -- with faces both frail and innocent like good men in love.

No great shakes, but evocative of wandering about in unfamiliar urban territory.  The author shows and doesn't tell!  He can do it!

The Walls needs to be cut drastically.  At one-third its current length and with considerable rewriting I'd imagine it could hum along quite nicely.  Self-publishers now have the luxury of correcting and refining their texts with ease from anywhere.  Hopefully they will do as Walt Whitman did, continuing to edit all their works until the day when they finally keel over.  

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Pcock by Pacze Moj

Poland is a nation of 40 million with 4 winners of the literature Nobel.  Those are insane numbers, and it would seem that as a people the Poles just know how to write.  For this reason I was excited to happen upon Pacze Moj's collection of short stories Pcock while sorting through the heap.

In the course of reading I got the sense from his language that most likely Moj is an Englishman of Polish extraction.  While many of the stories take place in England, Budapest and even North Dakota.

Moj can write, but he doesn't know how to cut.  Short story collections are generally the product of many years of attempting to get published in magazines, so that the finished collection of stories is likely the result of hundreds of failures and abandoned efforts.  While there are strong pieces in the collection there is also a superabundance of filler, stories that don't particularly come together.  The worst of these is "Fitch and Baumgartner Kill a Cougar," where two men apparently are hunting a literal cougar, which then turns out to be a woman, a figurative cougar.  That's really all there is to it.  Maybe I just didn't get it.

Moj has a good eye for macabe, surreal detail and strings words together attractively.  Consider this weird, frenzied scene from "Don Whitman's Masterpiece":

Don Whitman saw the vastness of the interlocking chambers and, within thm, the writhing, ecstatic, no-people of the underground, human-like but non-human, cross-bred mammals draped in plaster-white skin pinned to numb faces, men, woman and children, male and female, naked, scared, dirty, with humans -- humans Don Whitman knew and recognized -- among them, on them and under them, hitting them, squeezing them, making them hurt, making monstrous sounds with them, all under slowly rotating heat lamps, all open and together, one before another...

The longer pieces are generally stronger, giving Moj a firmer structure to build around.  "Don Whitman's Masterpiece" is bizarre but disappointingly straightforward.    "Johnny Firecracker" describes a German man's telepathic pursuit of his mother's killer in Tokyo, a freaky setup that plays to the author's strengths.  The story's climax is pretty stupid, unfortunately.

My favorite story in the collection was "Vista," a well-shaped science fiction piece where Moj really seems to be hitting on all cylinders.  He creates a world and presents his hero with fascinating quandary, and for once his penchant for ambiguous endings delivers a real emotional impact.  If Moj asked for my advice I'd say keep "Vista," but stick the rest in a drawer for a while.   

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Any Suggestions?

I want to read some good ebooks.  

Please send any ebook suggestions to ebookslagheap at the gmail.com.  I don't care if your wife wrote the ebook.  I don't care if you did.  Just send me some suggestions.

I'll give you an honest review.  If I hit a nerve, well then maybe you or your wife can move on to some more sensible hobby.

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The Psychedelic Genome Project by Francis Fletcher

Midway though this novel its author does this reviewer a terrific favor: he succinctly explains the book's central failing.

Maybe at this point in the narrative it would be appropriate to talk about the wonderful scenery, the strange customs of the hill tribe folk or the lives and amusing stories of the other trekkers.  However, I'm going to be honest and admit that I was way too fucked up to remember any of that.

Perhaps that is the point, but it makes for boring reading.  Revealing that his he and his girlfriend's lovemaking now involves her now wearing a strap-on dildo, we get this commentary:

I'm dreading the long journey home.

It hurts when I sit.

HAW HAW HAW!  How transgressive!  When one thinks of the incredible scenes that could be written about a couple negotiating such a decision, the essential humanity that might be revealed, one soon realizes the utter lack of imagination the author displays, deploying a joke that Dane Cook would probably cut.

As the narrator's depiction of his descent into alcohol, prescription drug, and Thai ladyboy abuse accelerates, he reminds us -- repeatedly -- that we are watching a soul plunging into the abyss of complete depravity.

 Never forget that when in hell: you will burn for all eternity.

Gotcha.  Also, the narrator is going totally insane!

Congratulations, you have reached the end of this section of the guide book and the general consensus is that you are now 

TOTALLY FUCKING INSANE

Oh, okay.  Is there anything else?

The reader should, by now, be fully versed in the opportunities that tropical islands offer when it comes to going completely insane.

Excellent.  That's all?

Good luck on the continuation of your journey through hell…

Well, you get the idea.  After a while The Psychedelic Genome Project appears to be that queerest of breeds, a novel written by someone who has never read a novel.  Well, there are some call-and-response sections akin to those found in Fight Club, but for all I know he just saw the film.  The Matrix receives an incredible number of references, I suppose for its universally acknowledged intellectual heft.

One wonders what might good it might have done Mr. Fletcher to read the tale of another sexually-ambiguous Englishman debauching himself in another foreign locale, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano.  He might have created a deeper and less repetitious work, or perhaps he would have been so intimidated by Lowry's novel so as never to attempt his own story at all.

And really, I'll say, I think that would be a shame.  As much of a slog as The Psychedelic Genome Project can be, its third act is something of a wonder.  The total soulless dick of a narrator finally gets his.  My respect is such that I actually don't want to ruin it, just in case any brave soul out there winds up reading this book besides me.  I found myself abruptly swept along by the story, and upon reaching the end was left wondering what the fuck had just happened to me.

In many ways the pleasure of the last section is predicated on the reader's eventual assumption that the book will never get any better.  When it does it really blows you away.

That said, upon reflection it's still a bad book.  The dull parts are just way too dull.  But I guess it's still better than The Celestine Prophecy or something.

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Subdural Glow by Mike Erickson

No one was home except Ray, who was playing video games in his room.  I wandered around the house with no lights on; morning sun filtered through the pines and made jerky shadows on the couch as the boughs moved.  I sat down in the middle of a shadow’s path, closed my eyes and watched the flickering orange light. 

Through the course of a particularly tumultuous period the protagonist is repeatedly shuttled between his mother on the East Coast, his grandparents in Iowa, and his father in Texas.  He suffers three concussions in the course of the novel which leave him first with a strange affinity for machines and individual people’s vibrational attunement, and finally the ability to read others’ moods and thought processes in the form of a sort of electrical storm he sees floating over their heads.  It’s an interesting idea, somewhat reminiscent of Philip K. Dick, but ultimately the author doesn’t do much with it. Stunningly, the book is unfinished, apparently dropped by the author out of boredom in the middle of a scene and then, for no discernable reason,  put up for sale to the public.   And so another danger of reading ebooks comes to the fore: you have no sure way of knowing whether you are entering into an author’s meticulously-crafted private world, or whether you will just wind up tromping about in the stillborn remains of someone’s crappy Nanowrimo project.

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Houston Chemical by William Moore

It was a scenic spot with jalousie windows giving a one-eighty look at the back yard.  There were sweet potato vines growing from clear vases of water set on the windowsills.

Throwing back a fish:

I took him to the waterline and let him loose.  When the shore break waves receded, I saw him flip from side to side in the wet sand.  The waves came back in, and his top fin appeared for a few seconds above the ripples.  Then he wiggled under the breaking arc of a new wave and took off.

Moore deploys a deceptively simple style and keeps a loose, sure grip on the mind of his reader. In all, the appeal of Houston Chemical lies in its simplicity.  All across America people live in apartment complexes, work at dull corporations, and have love lives that don’t ever gel.  Moore does not make Foy’s lot in life fascinating, but that doesn’t seem to be his goal.  He presents Foy faithfully, and he shows the meaning in his struggles.  Given Moore’s skill as a writer one wishes now and again he would push harder at his limits; the New Orleans sequence in particular calls out for a more generous display of imagination.  But in the end one gets the sense of an author telling exactly the story he felt like telling.

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Further clarification

My greatest desire with the project would be to discover a exemplary work amidst the dreck. A classic, something appropriate to a college classroom, regardless of whether it actually reaches one.

This disqualifies all genre fiction, which accounts for 90% of fiction ebooks, if not more.

And no, no college teaches Sherlock Holmes or Lord of the Rings. Even if they do they should stop.

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Clarification of Terms

I am not pursing Ebooks which are but the electronic version of commercial bestsellers.  I am looking for the grubby and nubby, the never-ran, the self-published.  I am generally looking at works which do not exist in any print form, except for perhaps a few POD samples.

Go looking yourself.  There's a lot of ebooks out there.  Long, earnest, self-published ebooks with 0 sales.  Good spelling and grammar, actually not too bad!

Endless tundra or undiscovered territory?   

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General Statement of Intent

The notion being that the distribution of literature has, quite recently, migrated to the internet.  Hugely democratizing, even though most of the ebooks out there are of poor quality.

Of course, so are most of the print books on store shelves.  One's better off getting a crappy ebook for less money, often no money.

Ebooks by nature are the products of an author's weird obsessions and experiences, generally lightly edited, generally more rugged and bizarre than commercial fare.

There are diamonds in the rough, or at least I imagine that there must be.