Fantastic Metropolis

And the Ass Saw the Angel tells the life story of Euchrid Eucrow, a poor mute with imagined telepathic powers who has from birth had an awareness of his own existence. Or rather, Euchrid tells his own story—from a plot of marshy quicksand where he has been chased by vengeful, brutish townfolk:

Ah calculate thus: That by the time the moon comes shining over the top of yonder trees—that is to say, in approximately sixty minutes—mah soul will have departed from, and in no way will have remained in, this here world. And mah body which for some time has been and at present continues to be, even as ah speak, under repossession, will have departed from this world and deeply sunken will its flesh and bones be…

There follows an absurd series of calculations concerning rate of sinkage that are composed of one-fourth pathos and three-fourths black humor: “Suffice it to say, though, and say not at all unhappily, after long and probing ruminations and having drawn no hasty conclusions, that ah, Euchrid Eucrow, have a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing the sun come up tomorrow.”

One of the book’s great strengths as it follows Euchrid’s tragic life is this element of gallows humor which, expertly placed, relieves the intense gloom. Although the final two chapters of And the Ass Saw the Angel collapse under the weight of the language (or, perhaps, it is the reader collapsing under the weight of the book), the book remains a triumph of “gothic noir,” truly original and framed by a rough genius.

Arc D’X (1993) by Steve Erickson

Steven Erickson’s Arc D’X may be the most important novel about America published in the last 10 years. The novel provides a fully-rounded view of Thomas Jefferson and his ambivalence toward slavery, an ambivalence documented in his righteous public stance versus his inability to free the slaves on his own plantation. The battle between Jefferson the upholder of liberty and Jefferson the man are set out early in the book when a slave woman is burned for killing her master:

...the squire’s five-year-old son watched the smoke too. Into the night the little boy smelled it. He smelled it in his food and his bath. In the air outside his bedroom window that should have been ripe with the scent of spring rain, he smelled nothing but the burning body of the black female slave. He woke in the middle of the night vomiting; and lying in bed the next day, depleted and delirious, his five-year-old head was filled with excruciating visions: staring into the nothingness above him, he waited for the woman’s ashes to fall from the sky, to clot the branches of the trees and hang from the rafters of the house like black snow.

In particular, Arc D’X explores Jefferson’s treatment of his slave lover Sally. Jefferson’s rape of Sally reverberates throughout the novel. Erickson’s depiction of a Jefferson torn between ideals and his brute nature is magnificent:

It thrilled him, the possession of her. He only wished she was so black as to not have a face at all. It thrilled him, not to be a saint for once, not to be a champion. Not to bear, for once, the responsibility of something noble or good. Didn’t he believe that one must pursue his happiness? Such a pursuit is as ruthless as any other.

At the end of this crucial scene, Jefferson sees the ashes of the dead slave woman from his youth finally falling outside his Paris window.

History diverges at this point, the rogue history of Jefferson leading a slave revolt intertwined with various images of the future: a totalitarian regime and an apocalyptic Berlin in the year 1999. The culminating scenes of this extraordinary novel contain the tragedy not only of individuals but of history itself.