Glyph by Percival Everett

 Glyph is in some ways similar to another of Everett's novels, American Desert. In that, a man dies and comes back to life – literally so, rising from his coffin in the middle of his funeral service. In Glyph we have a ten-month-old baby prodigy who has the brain of a fully-functioning intellectual adult and an IQ of 476, reading, memorising and understanding everything that is put before him and, although he eschews speech, able to write and communicate fluently. On the face of it you might argue, then, that the two novels are not especially similar, but they are: in each, a person is violently removed from the mainstream of human experience in order to be able to observe it from the margins. It is the common stuff of satire, of course: by artificially intensifying the emotions and beliefs and taboos and mores of a society, the satirist can reveal its weaknesses and faultlines. This is what Everett does brilliantly.

And so, just as in American Desert, when Ted is kidnapped by religious lunatics and subsequently kidnapped again by the government, in Glyph baby Ralph is kidnapped by one crazed academic, undergoes a bungled kidnap by a second and is immediately kidnapped again by shadowy government agencies, where he is put to work as a spy. That’s not the end of it. He is rescued by a kindly guard, only to be effectively kidnapped again as the guard and his wife, who is desperate for a child of her own, flee to Mexico. There, he falls into the clutches of a paedophile priest, while, one by one, his previous kidnappers and his distraught mother converge on him, each determined to claim him for their own. Crazy? It certainly is, and extremely funny, too.  As ever, do not expect dry social realism from Percival Everett.

It could be argued that a fault of Everett’s is his tendency to take potshots at everything, and certainly, with Glyph, the usual suspects are lined up for their Everettian kicking – racial stereotyping, the media, the church, academia, the government. These tend to appear in all of his novels, and it is only the relative degree of their suffering that changes. That does sometimes give a feeling that his writing is unfocused, and it also serves to give a sense of déjà vu at times.

But that is not to say that this is a weak book – far from it. Everett is one of the funniest writers around and here he has enormous fun. His primary target in Glyph is academia, principally at the expense of Roland Barthes – ‘I’m French, you know’, and the postmodernist, deconstructionist school of literary criticism. Barthes is portrayed as a lecherous, pretentious buffoon, and baby Ralph joyfully rips his treasured theories apart. Of his structuralist analysis of Sarrasine, S/Z (which Everett also plays with in his most famous novel, Erasure), Ralph agrees that, in theory, he could read backwards or pull text randomly from a novel and so produce fragments in the way that Barthes suggests. ‘But I do not,’ he says, ‘any more than than I might walk the middle part of my trip to the refrigerator first this time and last the next.’ Thus, Everett trashes much of the artificiality of academia. There are in-jokes by the dozen here. Many of them fly straight over my head because I am not a literature scholar but, such is the brio with which Everett writes, it scarcely matters.

However, as with all the best satire, there is a message here. Everett makes his usual comments about race and religion and the evils of secret government, but this time his real target is truth. Near the end, Ralph insists that he ‘offers no truth about the culture’, but here he is being too modest. The novel has revolved around truth, around the ways that we interrelate and how we prevaricate, how we come to judgements not based on truth but on our own prejudices and fears and self-interests. Ralph also insists frequently that, the evidence notwithstanding, he is not a genius. How could I be?, he seems to be saying, because:

What genius, I guessed then and know now, allows is the start of a new race. Genius means finding a way back to the beginning where the truths are uncorrupted and honest and maybe even pure.

And there we have it. Raph, despite his massive intellect, is still literally a babe in arms, and for all his knowingness he represents that uncorrupted honesty that we all seek. There is, beneath the satire, a tenderness in the writing of Pervical Everett that makes him a most beguiling writer. He has the wit of a satirist, but the heart of a romantic.

American Desert by Percival Everett

  

Percival Everett doesn’t particularly regard himself as a writer of satire, citing only Glyph as a truly satirical novel. However, if American Desert isn’t satire, I’m not sure what is. It is also high octane farce, a study in psychology and a surprisingly deep analysis of love. More of that later.

The bare bones of the novel are striking enough. Theodore ‘Ted’ Street, a man desparately unhappy with his home life, decides one morning to kill himself. Fortunately or unfortunately, on his way to do so he is killed in a car accident, his head being completely severed from his body. At his funeral three days later, to the consternation of the congregation, he rises from his coffin and looks around. A riot ensues, followed by a media maelstrom. But for Ted Street, neither alive nor dead, the trouble is only beginning.

From the start this is high pressure farce, told in a light, cartoonish manner. But don’t be fooled, because Everett is no two-dimensional farceur. Depth emerges gradually. The story takes in kidnap, religious fanaticism, execution (failed, since it is impossible to execute someone already dead), abduction by shadowy government bodies, vivisection, the cloning of Jesus Christ, escape, more religious fanaticism and finally redemption. And that’s only the half of it. I forgot to mention Roswell, and incest...

You get the picture? We’re not talking high realism here. But nor are we talking shallow nonsense, for in satirising contemporary culture – the media, the government, the church – Everett does begin to ask questions about what it is to be human and the nature of love. For all its high-energy fantasy, this is a novel with weight.

At the start of the novel Ted is about to drown himself because he sees no value in his life and is essentially in a living death. He is failing at work (a university professor struggling to obtain a tenure), he is unfaithful to his wife and remote from his children, particularly his daughter. He is bored. He comes to believe ‘that life [is] over anyway, that he made no difference to anyone’. He has reached his nadir, or so he thinks. But by being thrust into a literal living death, by being brought unwillingly back to life, he is given a second chance and is forced to confront both the world and, more problematically, himself.

In his new, limbo-like state, he gradually comes to feel more alive than when he really was alive. When he returns to the family home after the riot at the church, ‘[t]he house felt more comfortable than ever’, different from the ‘cold tomb’ it had seemed before the accident. Later, as he lowers himself into the bath, he cries for the first time since he was eight. He re-reads novels and finds more resonance and joy than he ever had before.  When he makes love to his wife, we are told:

Then, he felt genuinely good about himself, realizing that the old Ted could not have been so selfless, that the old Ted would have worried about his manhood and passive-aggressively taken his feeling of inadequacy out on her. Ted closed his eyes and drifted, he hoped, only into sleep.

A by-product of his life-in-death status is that he can read other people. He observes them and can see episodes from their past playing out, those moments of deceit and dissembling of which we are all, to some extent, guilty. In this way, Ted begins to understand life, and in so doing, he starts to uncover the truth about himself. Gradually, he finds meaning. Late in the novel we are told, ‘Ted had new resolve in the matter of protecting life in general.’ This is very different from the Ted to whom we were introduced two hundred pages earlier. The climax of the novel occurs when Ted turns that resolve into action by attempting to rescue twenty-seven children from a murderous religious cult who have blockaded themselves deep in the desert. ‘I am finally, in this life, a decent man’, he tells the watching world in a media interview afterwards, and the novel concludes with Ted having found a very human redemption. It is, I suppose, an It's A Wonderful Life for our times.

This is a fine work. It operates at two levels – high farce and serious drama – but does so in a natural and unaffected way. This is a difficult trick to pull off. The slapstick quality of a farcical narrative makes it difficult to imbue any depth in the characters – even the master of the genre  Kurt Vonnegut didn’t always get it right – but here Everett succeeds impressively. He is sometimes criticised for taking pot-shots at easy targets – the media, the lunatic religious fringe, the government, all of them so bizarre they are beyond parody, we are told – but while that may be so it is hardly Everett’s fault. What he does is isolate them in the cold, hard light of reality and confront us with the vacuousness at the heart of so much contemporary culture. But, ultimately, this is shown not in the farces that attach themselves to the shallow media practitioners or deranged religious cultists. That would indeed be too easy. No, instead Everett allows us to see their vacuousness through the basic decency of Ted Street. That is why this novel works as a piece of satire and that is why, for all its madcap inventiveness, it is also a remarkably subtle piece of writing.

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

What do Harry Houdini, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, J Pierpont Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Booker T. Washington, Henry Ford, Evelyn Nesbit and Emma Goldman have in common? Fans of EL Doctorow’s 1975 masterpiece Ragtime will be jumping up and down with their hands in the air. All of these real historical characters – and a slew of lesser known ones, too – are central characters in this remarkable novel. We are fairly accustomed to novelisations of real characters nowadays – Charles Lindbergh in Philip The Plot Against America, for example, or John Brown in Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter or Fyodor Dostoevsky in JM Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg. And Doctorow, of course, returns to the device in later fiction too, such as his telling of the story of the Collyer Brothers in Homer and Langley, or General Sherman in The March. He had done it before, too, with The Book of Daniel, about the Rosenberg case, more famously immortalised in fiction in the opening line of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. But at the time, Ragtime was innovative. And controversial.

In a later interview, Doctorow noted:

I heard secondhand that the editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, was very critical of the book, that someone prepared a major review and he said no. I had transgressed in making up words and thoughts that people had never said. Now it happens almost every day. I think that opened the gates.

Ragtime truly is extraordinary in the way it melds real and fictional characters. Moreover, the technique is vital to the thematic thrust of the novel, given that it focuses on the establishment of the American nation and the development of the American psyche: the process of assimilation of millions of immigrants from dozens of countries, particularly throughout the latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries was an extraordinary piece of national re-invention. It saw people almost literally become someone else as they threw off the trappings of their old lives and adopted new ones; it saw ordinary people grow to prominence and fame; and it saw famous citizens slide into lives of unutterable fantasy and delusion. America at this time was massively polarised between people playing out different types of ragtime – the ragged poverty of the underclass on one hand and, on the other, the syncopated, life-affirming joyousness lived out by those innocent rich who had no idea what was to unfold in the rest of the century.

Drawing the disparate real-life characters together are three fictional families around whom the novel revolves. Firstly, there is Father, Mother, the Little Boy, Grandfather and Mother’s Younger Brother, a middle-class, well-to-do family making a good living from Father’s fireworks and flag-making business (gunpowder and the sanctity of the flag – what could be more quintessentially American?). Secondly the immigrant family of Mameh, Tateh and The Little Girl, who initially live in abject poverty but (the surviving members, at least) end the novel with unimagined riches. And thirdly the black ragtime musician, Coalhouse Walker Jr., Sarah, a maid whom he makes pregnant, and their illegitimate baby. And so, of course, we have a cross-section of the melting pot that became America. The way these three families come together is clearly connotative of the establishment of this brave new country and we, the readers, are forced to recognise that beneath the veneer of progress terrible hardships and deprivations and cruelties abounded. For Coalhouse, in particular, a victim of terrible racism, the idealism of this young nation is a blighted notion indeed.

Part and parcel of the development of this new America is, of course, industrialisation. The Industrial Revolution may have started in Great Britain but it flourished in twentieth century America. Enter Henry Ford, and the principle of the assembly line. As Ragtime explains: 

From these principles Ford established the final proposition of the theory of industrial manufacture - not only that the parts of the finished product be interchangeable, but that the men who build the products be themselves interchangeable parts.

One can read Ragtime, then, as a critique of modernity and the dehumanising effect of progress and technological advance. The novel ends during the First World War, a calamitous event the immediate (though not the underlying) cause of which was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, another character who makes a cameo appearance in the novel. Indeed, the assassination itself, by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in August 1914, is dramatised in the narrative. Given that Modernist sensibilities regularly decried the First World War as proof of the calamitous turn that humanity had taken since the Enlightenment, such a critique of the novel’s thematic intentions might seem apposite.

And yet it is not sufficient, I think to explain the complexity of Ragtime. For all Doctorow’s unblinking gaze on the less salubrious aspects of American nationhood, it does not feel, to me, like a reactionary social critique of hubristic modernity in the way of Eric Voegelin and novelists who advanced his theories, such as Flannery O’Connor. Rather, I would say it is closer in tone to Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, which likewise did not flinch from portraying the seedier side of life but managed to do so without being either too critical or too sentimental. Doctorow, a beautifully nuanced writer, asserts a similar degree of balance. How does he do it?

Principally, he does it by nature of the narrative itself and, in particular, the three fictional characters who dominate it. The scene is set from the word go. This is the opening:

In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. It was a three-story brown shingle with dormers, bay windows, and a screened porch. Striped awnings shaded the windows. The family took possession of this stout manse on a sunny day in June and it seemed for some years thereafter that all their days would be warm and fair.

That one word – “seemed” – tells us all we need to know about this edenic scene which is being suggested to us. Although their stories are, initially, separate, the three families begin to coalesce and it is clear that each impacts on the other in manifold ways. The connections of humanity are mysterious things, the community of being is a web we cannot see and do not control. A simplistic reactionary binary of technology/modernity – spirituality/tradition will not suffice here.

The very first chapter of the novel ends with The Little Boy speaking to Harry Houdini and telling him, apropos nothing at all, “Warn the Duke.” This means nothing at this stage, but it becomes clear that this little boy has some form of divinatory powers. Later in the novel, Houdini does indeed meet the Duke – Archduke Franz Ferdinand – but he doesn’t “warn” him and we know the outcome. Those little connections of humanity, those random chances, those coincidences and happy or unhappy occurrences that populate our existence: these are the stuff that matters in our lives. And those writers, like Cormac McCarthy, who suggest that, for all our hubris, our paths are ordained from the very first and we can have no say in our own progress, are simply wrong. Doctorow knows there is much wrong with our modern ways of life, but he is equally certain that the remedy is in our own hands. That is what Ragtime can teach us.

Runner-up in the Raven Short Story Competition

My story, Zoroman's Cave, was runner up in the 2019 Raven Short Story Competition. The judges said of it:

‘Zoroman’s Cave’ is a throwback with the hyper intelligent yet sinister narrator reminiscent of Lovecraft’s high-pulp style narrators. The volume of verbiage and contortion of the narrator’s thoughts can come across as quite dense, high falutin’ even, yet it flowed. It made for a smooth read. For that I thought it should be recognized as a standout and a great nod to the classic weird story genre.

I've been on a decent run recently. Some joy with the novels would be good now...

Darling Axe First Page Challenge

I'm delighted to have won the Darling Axe First Page Challenge for the opening page of my novel Cloudland. Having seen the stories that came second and third, I can see the standard was very high.