morning
Finishing Naked Singularity which is heartbreakingly good. And fine.
5:45
pm Finished the novel about twenty
minutes ago, scanned some commentary on Conversational and then took a crap,
unusual time of day for such and somehow related---in terms of the old thinking
of the body approach.
Back to De La Pava's novel. Real sense of Over-ness haunting me
now. hanging on. Very powerful work. Might be better than Infinite
Jest. Too soon to say but it comes
to mind.
Weds
April 3
Paula came early this morning. Final packing things. Super bright and sunny but really cold
and still high winds.
Thinking about how thrilling De La Pava's book
is. Wonder if he took the use of
swords from Marîas's Your Face Tomorrow?
Vol 2. Even if not, he sure
knows what he's doing. If only
Salvatore's first novel had been this wonderful, this splendid and
spectacular. Both took ten years
to write.
Contrast ANS with the little book of Walser's that
I read a few weeks ago. Walser's
inimitable style and modes, yes, but still, early 20th C airy slightness, Peter
Panism, until I read a few more of his works to get a better take on them. Meanwhile, De La Pava's work is
certainly "after David Foster Wallace"--half a generation? after
it. But perhaps greater than
it. Huge books by young men out to
prove their moves. Pava's is so
much warmer and human. Infinite Jest I read so long ago that my
memory of it is not reliable, but what I do remember, and the remembered experience
of it, is that exhausting sense of brilliance at high pitch, the exploding
nebula of amazing brightness---and coldness. The best scene is where the Quebec wheelchair terrorists put
mirrors up across highway I-93 in the dark of night to bewitch drivers. Of course that stuck with me because I
live close to the very scene and enjoyed the whole local referentiality. No need to go on trying to compare the
works. Better to just say that ANS
does succeed in expanding itself outward and the whole "deconstruction,"
to use an really old-fashioned word, of what it started out to be---a legal
thriller, a lawyer-esque detective work, the spiraling explosion of genres,
once we've lived through the incredibly enjoyable and intense heist movements,
keeps going upward into if not a sublime then a contemporary version of
exaltation where love land fear embrace to erase victory and loss. Or maybe to merge with all of those and
all the other terms we can think of.
I read one commentary yesterday that said that after
the sword scenes the reader then felt let down by the remaining hundred pages
or so of the novel. But I didn't
and I don't think so. There is a
natural denouement after climax, yes, De La Pava follows the conventions and he
manages to break them open at the same time and the denouement moves themselves
become almost a new novella/epilogue in which resolution issues morph into
nearly new revelations of character and relationship and human
connectedness. We have family,
children, sister and mother, love, and fear of retribution which itself becomes
turned inside out into some indefinable cosmic embrace. And it is none of it as hokey as this
run-down surely makes it sound to someone who has not yet read the book.
At key places you can say to yourself, oh boy, is
Tarantino going to die to make this a movie and you also say, no, this is so
much better than what mess he would make of it because I am reading it and De
La Pava's implied narrator is pacing us through it in ways that only a supreme
writer can do.
Another lasting impression concerns the ways De La
Pava takes the risk of describing madness and near-madness and pulls it
off. Various sorts of distortions
of experience that we recognize and don't recognize, have felt ourselves or can
tell others have felt, De La Pava portrays those, conveys what they are like,
has his protagonist, Casi, live through them, live with them for a time, and we
find them credible and moving, especially in hindsight. As the story moves along we can look
back and recognize what that was, perhaps in ways that Casi himself cannot, and
yet, this might be a major achievement, our experience of these effects do not
seem to involve irony. At least
not in the ways that have become standard as "dramatic irony" or
"literary irony." Nor are
there the now standard "post-modern irony" or other such
effects. Instead the book hangs on
a few ordinary armatures---legal procedure, the history of boxing in the 80s,
crime, some violence, oh, and memorable characters, expansive, big, complex
characters, like Toom and Dane.
Casi's voice carries the rich brew. De La Pava's incredible mastery of
idiom, rhetoric, street talk, talk of every sort, rushes the book forward. Language rich to a breaking point,
never cute, never just clever, language handled so poetically it disappears,
taking us into the naked singularity of poetry. That title phrase is from physics and I assume the concept
gets used and explained clearly and astonishingly---assume, because everything
else I can judge gets handled that way.
The history of western philosophy, yep, in there, forgot to mention
that. Literary theory, even
television theory, of sorts, without extraneous chat about pop this or that,
and without superfluous big thoughts about politics or history, but they are
there too.
Melville hovers around the edges. One character named Ballena and bigger
than all get out. Confidence men,
ambiguities, uncertainties and shifting realities in which we wander enchanted
isles.
Philsophy, hence theology and spirituality. Character named Aloyna. Hmm, Dostoyevsky. The list goes on.
Philsophy, hence theology and spirituality. Character named Aloyna. Hmm, Dostoyevsky. The list goes on.
