Fantastic Metropolis

For me, 2003 will be a year marked by salt, spindrift, and seaspray—for the first part of the year, all I read were Patrick O’Brian’s tales of Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin. For many years I have been a rabid Herman Melville fan, but not until finding Patrick O’Brian have I experienced the same sense of pure joy when reading about the sea. O’Brian resurrects an entire world—at once utterly immediate and unutterably lost—and invests his creation with the insights of all great literature, brilliantly portraying the complexities of human behavior and the mysteries of the physical world. Although the driving force behind the books is certainly the call to adventure, at the heart of the series lies a friendship that ranks among the best that literature has to offer. Although virtually polar opposites, the two main characters—united by a love of chamber music—are both fully realized and completely compelling. While any comparisons to Joyce are always suspect, not since Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom have I read two such different personalities brought so convincingly to life by the same creator.

And speaking of literary friendships, I also re-read a book that I count among my Top Ten Novels of All Time—Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, which revolves around the relationship of two astronomer-surveyors as they inscribe the line which will one day divide the New World. Still underappreciated by critics and readers, and partially eclipsed by the long shadow of Gravity’s Rainbow, my second reading confirmed what I initially suspected: this is a better book than Gravity’s Rainbow, and perhaps the finest American novel since Moby-Dick. (I must confess that I think Pynchon is the only living writer that ranks with Melville, Joyce, and Borges. You mileage, as they say, may vary.) Told in an often ironic, faux eighteenth-century prose, the convoluted story ranges from the absurdity of sentient mechanical ducks and talking dogs to the harrowing realities of massacre, colonization, and enslavement. At its center are the titular characters, the ghost-haunted Mason and the irreverent Dixon, bound by an uneasy friendship that bridges the Gothic and Romantic through a shared belief in the Enlightenment. With its nested layers of unreliable narration, eccentric cast of jesters and geniuses, and edgy sense of humor, Mason & Dixon explores the boundaries between belief and knowledge, superstition and science, vision and reality—even as it relentlessly questions the nature of boundaries themselves.

My other “big book” of 2003 was William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, a work I’ve been putting off for years. Written in the 1950s and often considered to be the “missing link” between Faulkner and Pynchon, Gaddis’ sprawling novel is about…well, nearly everything: art, craftsmanship, and forgery; the nature of creativity and inspiration; the anxiety of influence; the corruptions of money, power, and status; the experiences of faith, doubt, and religion; the superficial relationships of the modern urbanite; and the many ways of recognizing and not recognizing essential “truths.” Encompassing both incredibly dense interior monologues as well as rapid-fire party banter, Gaddis’ allusive epic unfolds over a thousand pages and swarms with minor characters—including the author himself, busily writing the book from the sidelines. Although somewhere in the middle of this labyrinthine novel I began to worry that I was getting lost, everything finally connects to everything else, and it all comes together brilliantly in the end. Oh, yes—after it was published, it was so reviled by critics that Gaddis wrote nothing else for twenty years.

Another book that left its mark on my year was Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen, which I reviewed for The Modern Word. Over the course of dozens of exquisite stories (and histories, novellas, glossaries, footnotes, etc.) VanderMeer vividly calls the city of Ambergris into being: an ageless, Byzantine sprawl populated by squabbling artists, lewd visionaries, and philosophers at war with their own obsessions. Like the best architects of imaginary cities, VanderMeer has crafted a dark mirror to reflect (and often distort) our own conceptions of reality, bringing into focus the many ways the human imagination attempts to make sense of an often senseless universe. One of the most intriguing books I’ve read in years, it was also the most fun I’ve had doing a book review since Mark Z. Danielewski’s astonishing House of Leaves.

My passion for Ambergris rekindled an old literary love—the literature of the fantastic, particular the works of Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, and Gene Wolfe. This lead me to discover the joys of “interstitial fiction,” and I was happy to discover (and devour) a host of authors—undoubtedly the “usual suspects” rounded up when this fantastic metropolis is shaken down: K.J. Bishop, Stepan Chapman, Michael Cisco, Jeffrey Ford, Rhys Hughes, Robert Freeman Wexler, Zoran Zivkovic; you know the crew. And having said that, is it a surprise that my favorite anthology was Thackery T. Lambshead’s accursed guide? Particularly Ballingrud’s “Malady of Ghostly Cities,” Chapman’s “Motile Snarcoma,” VanderMeer’s “Tian Shan-Gobi Assimilation,” and Cisco’s “1923 Reminiscence.”

As with many on this list, I was also taken by William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Aggressively stylized, self-consciously hip, and wickedly funny, I’m not sure if even Gibson knows what he’s created—fiction, satire, prophecy, or all of the above? Like a stripped-down version of Count Zero resonating a few energy levels closer to ground state, Pattern Recognition performs the remarkable feat of turning the immediate present into science fiction. And “immediate present” is the key phrase—Gibson’s book is a bubble track from a cloud chamber, a snapshot of a transition between two states of being trembling on the cusp between today and tomorrow. Although this sense of exhilaration comes with a built-in expiration date—Pattern Recognition dates itself as you read it—for the moment, it’s as thrillingly raw as one day it will seem quaintly charming.

To continue with books published in 2003, two other new books that really struck me were Tom Carson’s Gilligan’s Wake (review) and D.B. Weiss’ Lucky Wander Boy (review).

You can all sing along to this, right?—“Gilligan, the Skipper too, the Millionaire and his Wife; the Movie Star, the Professor and Mary-Ann…” It’s the most famous “sequential list” hit since the Alphabet Song. In the dazzling Gilligan’s Wake, Tom Carson takes these seven famous castaways and tells their stories, each related in the narrative style of an appropriate literary genre. By seeing them as symbols as well as individuals, by interweaving their lives through the fictions and realities of the twentieth century, Carson builds up a unique and compelling vision of the fascinations and horrors of the so-called American Century. From the surreal hallucinations of an institutionalized Gilligan—addled by thorazine and EST, his thoughts trapped somewhere between Jack Kerouac and Finnegans Wake—to the Great Gatsby secret life of “Lovey,” to the mad fantasies of the demented (and insanely horny) Professor X, the book continually amazed me, each chapter outdoing the last as it drove towards its satisfying but enigmatic conclusion. Although this brief description of Gilligan’s Wake may make it sound too preciously pomo, Carson isn’t doing this as a mere gimmick—he has something to say. The book is actually quite moving, and often at the most surprising places.

Lucky Wander Boy, on the other hand, has a more localized approach to nostalgia and the American experience. Its lone protagonist is a self-professed geek, a dot-com wage slave obsessed with the video-game arcades of his youth. Quietly writing a book he calls the Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments—in which games like Pac Man and Donkey Kong are mined for philosophies on modern life—our hero becomes obsessed with a “lost” game called Lucky Wander Boy. (Imagine a platform game designed by a Japanese Zen master with a fondness for Kafka and Beckett.) As his obsession spirals out of control, his sense of proportion begins to collapse, shortly followed by his sense of reality. With its perceptive take on Gen-X nostalgia, its insights into pop-culture and geek obsessions, and its loopy philosophical observations, Lucky Wander Boy is perfect for a reading audience founded by Douglas Coupland, sharpened by Chuck Palahniuk, and nourished by comic books and manga.

Other books that impressed me in 2003 include K.J. Bishop’s The Etched City, Nick Cave’s And the Ass Saw the Angel (review), Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Veniss Underground. In nonfiction, I read a lot about Iraq and the Middle East (surprise surprise!), but the book that moved me the most was Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. Always compassionate, never strident, her account of the great tragedies of the twentieth century and the complex role of America in responding to them was simply staggering, both in its wealth of detail and its clear-eyed lucidity. I think it may be the only work of non-fiction that has ever brought me to tears.

Although the title of this feature—“Read and Appreciated in 2003”—suggests that I wrap this up, I’ll follow in the footsteps of a few others, erring on the side of enthusiasm as I stumble past the bookshelves on my way to the CD rack. (A polite way of saying I am a raving fanboy, and if you’ve read this far, I have no plans on stopping now.)

I found 2003 to be a fantastic year for music, with box sets by Bob Dylan (16 gloriously re-mastered SACDs) and Johnny Cash (4 discs of “American” outtakes) vying for my constant attention. On top of that, there was Stephen Malkmus’ surprisingly proggy Pig Lib. One of the best albums I’ve heard in years, it combines the elliptical style of Pavement with a more relaxed guitar groove. Like many, I was happily trampled under foot by the stomp of the White Stripes’ Elephant, and of course Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief continued their streak of remarkable albums. I was glad to discover two new groups: British Sea Power and The Blood Brothers, who put out Burn Piano Island, Burn—can you possibly beat that title? There was Elvis Costello’s elegant North, surely the most beautiful album of my year, and Belle and Sebastian’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress, a piece of perfect pop set with a million irresistible hooks. I was pleased by solid releases from old favorites King Crimson, Robyn Hitchcock, Primus, and Nick Cave; and David Bowie came out with Reality, his best work since 1995’s greatly underrated Outside.

In the classical department, one CD that has not left my player is Philip Glass’ Études for Piano, Vol. I. This is Glass at his best, his most focused: ten beautifully crafted works, like ten portraits of snowfall—some drifting silently down in lazy spirals, others whirled into dancing patterns by a flickering wind. Teldec’s György Ligeti series has been a blessing, each volume better than the last—his “Hamburg Concerto for Horns” is what sophisticated orcs might listen to at Mordor’s version of Carnegie Hall. Steve Reich’s video-opera Three Tales was finally released, both on CD and DVD. A trilogy that cautions against the dangers of placing too much faith in technology, its highlight is the first “tale,” which focuses on the Hindenburg disaster. Another very welcome recording was Elliot Carter’s short opera What Next?, which takes a car crash as its unlikely subject. As each member of the traumatized family wanders the wreckage, Carter’s angular, thorny sound perfectly captures their inner world, shattered by the sudden violence and slowly returning to coherence.

And finally, I would be remiss if I failed to mention my end-of-the-year obsession: Manhunt, a PlayStation-2 game from Rockstar. Although I played the bejesus out of SSX-3, Midnight Club II, and Silent Hill 2, it was Manhunt that really seized me in the insomniac coils of addiction. In this little fragment of hell, you play James Earl Cash, a convicted killer. Rescued from your own execution by a millionaire snuff-film director, you are dragged from urban landscape to urban landscape and hunted by various insane gangs. It’s kill or be killed, your every act filmed by the unseen Director, who gloats, insinuates, and taunts you through an earpiece. The game is violent—no, not cartoon-violent like GTA; I mean really, honest-to-God, make-your-mother-shocked kind of violent—and the harsh dialogue is genuinely unsettling. Have you ever wanted to cower in the shadows behind a rusting truck, while a white trash Nazi wearing a hockey mask and armed with a nail-gun looks for you, calling out “Where are you, you chickenshit? I will take away your pain, shed your serpent skin so you can be REBORN!”—and your only recourse is to toss the severed head of his brother out as a distraction, allowing you to sneak up behind him, tap his shoulder, and stab him in the face with a 16” glass shard—all the while an omniscient psychopath is hissing in your ear, “That’s right, Cash—kill this fucking bigot! I’m getting some great footage here!”—If you can answer yes to this question, it’s a good start. After the first time I played Manhunt, I felt like I needed a shower to make myself clean; I felt like I might have done something wrong. And if you don’t read this as a recommendation, then you might want to stick to Frogger.

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Allen B. Ruch is the editorial director of The Modern Word .