Nightmare in a Novel

Honestly, I feel like I’ve just been on an acid trip. Is it 1960? Are Tom Wolfe and Ken Kesey lurking about? This type of writing was called New Journalism long ago – now it’s just Messy Journalism. The same could be said about Kelman, but in that novel there was a payoff – getting to know the interior workings of the mind of a drunk, out-of-work, stinky Glasgow guy. It was wickedly funny in parts and poignant in others. Smith’s work, however, has few of those redeeming values. Its signature statement, “Remember you must live, Remember you most love, Remainder you mist leaf,” has some lyricism but is generally abstruse as is most of the novel. The publisher’s note on the back cover is simply baffling when it calls the novel “playful, defiant, and richly inventive” and “wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book.” And this note – “this is a riotous elegy.” Really? A riotous elegy? Well, I think that English/Scottish readers and I have radically different standards for inventive writing. I can write in a stream of consciousness too it’s really not that hard as long as you just keep on typing without using any punctuation or sense and oh my gosh the dog wants to go out but those flowers are still blooming anyway while the pot boils for pasta. Deep? No. Good writing? Hell no.

Clare’s section of the novel was at times poignant but it was so bloody difficult to read that I became cranky and thought I could not make it through without an icy Root Beer and a Butterfinger bar. So, perhaps when I go back and reread some sections I will somehow find more value in this novel. I did, however, get a real charge out of Penny, particularly when she considered taking a cab to a hardware store. Talk about bored, that girl needs help. I get it about the ghost and the messed-up people -- I just didn't think it was very good. Yes, we are all a product of our screwed-up lives and choices and the disorganized, uncaring society in which we live and we should appreciate life more. I had hoped Smith would intersect the lives in a more intense and interesting way. (Jim Jarmusch nailed it in his film, “Night on Earth,” a very funny and touching view of life from inside a taxicab in five different places.) Honestly, I think the only way this novel can be considered worthy of any prize is if we lump it in with other incoherent works whose incoherence lends a certain mystique -- if we can’t understand it, it must be brilliant. Hmmm.

As to Dr. Karl’s article, it was all kinds of brilliant! I am not sure I understand much of it but I think she’s saying that the broken bodies in these two neoliberal novels reflect the disintegration of our social and known economic system for the new-neoliberal system of globalized capitalism. In other words, the economic changes wrought in this postmodern era are responsible for breaking everything into pieces and if they are put back together, it’s totally messed up. We are disconnected people drifting in and out of a society that is something like the uncaring, cookie-cutter hotel controlled by nameless corporations. Dr. Karl says, I think, that the confusing narratives in these two books echo the lack of cohesion under neoliberalism. I’m sure I will soon find out.