In Pursuit of the Imagination
Nine Elusive Books
Quinn, a writer of detective novels, has been mistaken for a detective and, rather than disillusion the caller, he takes the case. In so doing, he opens up a whole world of the surreal, including the pursuit of a man whose path of daily walks repeatedly spells out his name across entire city blocks. Among the great pleasures of The New York Trilogy are Auster’s spare yet luminous prose, the sheer brilliance of his pacing, and the strangeness of his observations about the human condition. Auster adeptly fools the reader in the service of his story, and the first two books must be revisited in light of the revelations contained in the third book.
The Passion of New Eve (1977) by Angela Carter
The Passion of New Eve is a crude, ugly book, by measures erudite and pompous, angry and profane. The plot has a streamlined single-mindedness dedicated to feminist satirizing of the image of the United States promulgated by the United States through its movies: the most obvious and potent of the tactics employed by the agents of cultural/gender imperialism.
Evelyn, an Englishman who has been offered a job teaching at a U.S. university, arrives in New York City only to find that the country has gone belly up. Harlem is a walled fortress defended by black extremists, and tanks rumble down streets of broken glass, while radical feminists fight it out with the National Guard. Remember Watts? The level of breakdown described by Carter is only a few steps beyond the L.A. riots; it is, however, leavened by black humor, especially as regards the feminists:
They blew up wedding shops and scoured the newspapers for marriage announcements so that they could send brides gifts of well-honed razors… there were rumors of a kamikaze squad of syphilitic whores who donated spirochetal enlightenment for free to their customers out of dedication to the cause.
Evelyn soons finds that his university position has been liquidated and, penniless, takes up with a black woman whom he gets pregnant; when she almost dies from a botched abortion, Evelyn flees the scene of his own cruelty. In the deserts of the southwest, he is forceably given a sex change operation by a tribe of lost Amazonians and then taught what it means to be a woman by a host of male stereotypes. By the time Eve/Evelyn reaches the West Coast, s/he has undergone more than a physical transformation.
Carter is not so much concerned with an accurate picture of the day-to-day reality of the United States’ future as she is with symbolic, poetic, and cinematic truth. Only Carter could, by the tenacity of her imagination and drive, hold such a macrocosm of bastard throw-aways together so that the book becomes something more than the sum of its parts: a chemical, rather than physical, reaction. The mixture of mythologies together with the bleak and barren landscapes, the evocation of the Mother Goddess, inhabit a land where J.G. Ballard and Joanna Russ collide, and presages both the myth-science of Ian MacDonald’s Out on Blue Six and the surreal America on display in Steve Erickson’s visionary novels.
Carter’s less obscure works include the brilliant The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Nights At The Circus.
And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) by Nick Cave
Nick Cave is better known as the front man for the raucous, avant-garde rock band Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, but with the publication of And the Ass Saw the Angel (a line taken from the Bible), he staked a legitimate claim to inclusion among the first or second rank of stylists in his native Australia. The novel is told in a strange style that conjures up comparisons to William Faulkner, heavily influenced by Joseph Conrad, the Old Testament, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mervyn Peake. Such cluttered, supersaturated prose at times threatens to sink the book, but each time thus endangered, Cave rights himself with the aid of some wholly new and incredible characterization or insight.
