Fantastic Metropolis

The second volume, The Four Encounters, follows Siddhartha as he grows from a frail, gloomy, introspective ten-year-old into an adult seeker who leaves his wife and child in search of enlightenment. Along the way, he becomes involved in a Rube Goldberg contraption of royal intrigues that intertwines his fortunes with those of a tough, sexy bandit named Migaila, a power-hungry archer named Bandaka, and a wise Brahmin. Tezuka has reconfigured Siddhartha into a revolutionary—both of consciousness and society. He is obsessed with finding humankind’s place in the cosmos and the cause of perpetual suffering in a universe of impermanence. But he is also continually striving to challenge and overturn the caste system and, by implication, the very notion of hierarchy. But the unfolding of his tale—epic in scope, sparking with energy—is only part of the readerly pleasure. The exaggerated, sometimes creepily cute, big-eyed, pug-nosed, spiky-haired echt-manga characters are set against an often meticulously drawn background reminiscent of Japanese landscape painting. Against the beautifully detailed realism of these are placed metafictional sight gags where, for example, Tezuka himself makes Hitchcockian cameos while bit characters complain about the lack of color on the pages they inhabit. Such tonal inconsistency, which serves to reinforce the story’s theme of impermanence, is further underscored by characters vacillating between high diction and anachronistic street slang. In Tezuka’s world, the exquisite collapses into the goofy in a New York minute, the goofy into the melodramatic, the melodramatic into the brutal, and the brutal into the sincerely touching. The surprising result is a work wholly unique and downright fun.

Pattern Recognition, William Gibson

(Putnam, 2003)

I came to this one late this year and I approached it warily because, honestly, I had begun feeling Gibson had ceased exploring new and interesting roads in his fiction a while ago. He seemed content, instead, to just keep doing Gibson—i.e., fast-paced SF novels set in near-future worlds that rehashed the same hipper-than-hip thematics. So reading Pattern Recognition was a happy surprise. Here he has moved away from science fiction, and yet set his novel in a contemporary, post-9/11 London, Tokyo, and Moscow that are hauntingly strange, defamiliarized to the point where it feels like we’re seeing our world through a warped and deeply revealing lens. The narrative revolves around Cayce Pollard, an American woman whose job is to troll streets sensing the next fashion trend and feeding it to corporations so they can benefit from it. She also becomes involved in a cult built around shards of a mysterious film that has begun appearing on the internet, and soon is on the trail of the filmmaker responsible. While I found the last fifty pages too obsessed with tying up loose ends, and while I found the film itself much less imaginative than it could have and should have been, I thoroughly enjoyed Gibson’s extraordinary eye for cultural detail; Cayce is, after all, in many ways his alter ego. Too, I found Pattern Recognition one of the most powerful engagements with 9/11 in fiction yet, shot through with the heartbreaking awareness that we are all, like Cayce, weeping for our century, “though whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t know.”

Letters to Wendy’s, Joe Wenderoth

(Verse Press, 2000)

In this funny, bitter, and bright epistolary critique of American commercialism, desire, and sanity, an unnamed and deliciously unstable narrator composes a series of very short (most five-to-seven sentences in length) letters over the course of a year to Wendy’s, the fastfood chain, and to Wendy, female icon of U.S. consumerism, whom he wants to ravage. Along the way, he meditates upon the nature of the Frosty, our culture of commodification, and the pleasures of porn, while slowly if relentlessly unraveling. This is a wonderful, wholly original, MIG-fast read from a small press usually associated with poetry.