debut novel

[REVIEW] Nobber by Oisín Fagan

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(John Murray Originals, 2019)

REVIEW BY SHASTRI AKELLA

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Nobber has an exceptional opening act, one that removes the conditional out of John Gardner’s oft-quoted idea that all great novels begin either with a stranger arriving in town or a character taking a journey. Oisín Fagan’s novel begins with four characters taking a journey, and then the novel shifts point-of-view: these strangers arrive in the town of Nobber, and their arrival is shown through the eyes of the locals. The novel, at first, shifts perspectives from one chapter to the next, bringing Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to mind, but as the story progresses, the point-of-view starts to shift within chapters, and at an increasingly dizzying pace, leaving readers with the distinct impression that Nobber is the schizophrenic monster-protagonist and we are stuck inside its head, an experience that anyone familiar with a small town and its incestuous intimacies and flawed loyalties will recognize. It is a setting that in Stephen King’s works is often the source of horror and that, in Fagan’s hands, also has a distinctly Dickensian feel, the claustrophobia of the setting accentuated by the epic scale of the narrative that plays out in such a tight space.

The novel is set during Ireland’s black plague, but its temporal distance does not make its characters feel any less familiar. de Flunkl and his men are on the move in pursuit of real estate in a time of economic slump; their goal, to buy property on the cheap so they can sell it for a higher value once the plague has ended, holds a strong presence in literature set during the Depression. The men have two encounters as they are about to enter Nobber: the first one is with a band of Gaels, a people who have been displaced from their lands and into the wilderness, and who are now perceived to be ‘savages’. The tension of the prolonged dialogue between the men and Gaels, made possible with the assistance of a translator, William (who is a part of de Flunkl’s retinue), hints at social tensions that, in the present political moment, feel close to home (no matter where, geographically speaking, home is). The second encounter, which I will focus on, brings up a striking instance of the animal dysmorphia that runs like a thematic thread throughout the novel. On the outskirts of Nobber, the men see “a cruciform of wood…on it, thickly laid like a skeleton’s musculature, are reams of dead crows, and they give the form a certain plumpness and lifelikeness from a distance.” The crows, which at first de Flunkl assumes are dead, are “nailed into the wood”. As Harold, another member of the itinerant group, persuades de Flunkl to retreat, warning him that such a ghastly sight can bring no good tidings their way, one of the birds starts to flap its wings, and several others follow suite, and a horrified de Flunkl realizes that they are, in fact, alive. The cross, they notice, is topped with a peasant’s cap, a detail which becomes a lens to read the broader narrative implications of the sight.

Throughout the novel, Fagan uses animal dysmorphia alongside a disintegrating human psyche to place the human and the non-human on a level plane. The conjunction becomes a powerful device to show how the victimized responds to a loss of control by distorting the reality of someone less powerful then themselves. A character who enters Nobber with two lambs, two calves, and a badger (all of which are stolen or captured), reflects: “if animals are jumbled up too greatly in species, and confined too closely, disastrous things happen…Beasts, who should emerge into the synechdocal perfection of predator and prey, too closely combined begin to act in an erratic and unpredictable manner. Both of the lambs think one of the calves is its mother. One of the calves thinks [he] is its mother, and the badger, who should prey on the lambs, instead wishes to prey on him.” Earlier in the novel, a local of Nobber is approached by four men who are naked and who have “sheep skulls tied to their heads.” Mary, a Gael who is kidnapped by Colca (another local of Nobber, and one of the more notorious characters in the novel), kills a horse, but this act of cruelty too is inseparable from human depravity. Colca, as readers find out, practices bestiality, and the novel hints at him having sexual contact with the horse. Rather than the plague taking a toll on both man and animal, it messes with the minds of the humans who then act against the animals.

The action of the novel, once de Flunkl and his men arrive in Nobber, takes places almost exclusively inside the houses of locals. Behind each locked door are an unlikely pair or group of people who parry for power. At times the dead and the dying are trapped in the same space, and the corporeal effects of the plague create for tremendous moments of body horror like the following one:

 

“Dervorgilla’s arms, held above her head, are shivering with such force that they are almost a blur. Amidst the matted hair of her armpits are swollen protuberances with smooth surfaces. The swellings are hairless, yellow and thick, one under each armpit, like hidden apples growing out of her. One of them is covered in stale pus that has erupted at some former point. Around each buboe is a purple circular bruise, perfect as the concentric ripple of water…[And] Tedbalt[‘s] putrid carcass is decomposing, sunken beneath his work clothes. Steam rises off him, blending the little light above him into a wavy mirage, and his face is covered in a blanket of sleeping flies.”

 

In the final act the action shifts to the town center, bringing all of its residents together. Colca becomes the focal point of everyone’s anger. Throughout the novel, he enforces a curfew on the people of Nobber to keep the plague from spreading. He kidnaps a Gael and hold her hostage as his ‘wife’, and he has an abnormal relationship with animals. Yet, the conversation he has with his mother and her grief as she watches the plight her son is subjected to makes us wonder if the vigilante form of justice is deserved. And in the process dehumanizing Colca, the people of Nobber dehumanize each other.

Christopher Higgs (2017)  poses the rhetorical question of ‘what does it mean to be human?’ and then responds to it to the following effect: “one is not born a human, one becomes human,” for to be human is “not a natural fact. Instead, it is the result of a certain history, a certain civilization, which has resulted in [his or] her current status” (8). Being human, Higgs notes, is a social construct. He adds that “we must not be fooled into believing a human is a human and a monster is a monster outside of or isolated from social and historical contexts” (9). If the notion of what it means to be human has historically been a patriarchal construction—the patriarchy placing a boundary around what it means to be a human civilization and deciding on the laws of governance that decide who qualifies and who disqualifies—then dehumanization, as Peter Grosvenor (2014) states, is the “psychological capacity to relegate people to the status of non-human animals, and to deprive them of the protection normally accorded to fellow humans by moral codes” (154). Thus, “to become a human,” Higgs states, “one must participate in a system of belonging…one becomes human by sacrificing autonomy in favor of participation…those who are human make this agreement. To break this agreement is to become Other” (31). As a socio-cultural construct humanity is, Higgs notes, an act of membership. The shifting points-of-view in Nobber show how each character is, in turn, dehumanizes/is dehumanized. In the face of the plague, the system of belonging that the locals of Nobber participated in, and that the Gaels were kept out of, has fallen apart, leaving the former with no familiar system to work within, thus reducing them all, in status and behavior, to non-human animals. Their treatment of animals is reflective of their own psychological and social condition.

The novel is highly relevant to our current sociopolitical and environmental reality: where on the one hand, the surge of right-wing regimes has narrowed and tightened the boundaries of the systems of belonging that keep some people in and everyone else out, environmental collapse, on the other hand, is on the brink of erasing all such known systems, creating new ways of life—a hitherto unknown chaos—where those who dehumanize the Other also dehumanize each other because the system that once held them together has fallen apart. Indeed, the locals in Nobber dehumanized the Gales until the plague hit them and then they started to dehumanize each other. One need look no further than the fact that Syrian refugee crisis that began because of an environmental disaster created mass migration into Europe, and the attitudes towards these migrations in turn caused a split between the U.K. and the rest of Europe, precipitating the coming about of Brexit.

I began with a famous literary tenet, and I would like to end with one. Ursula K. Le Guin once remarked that all fantastic narratives ultimately address the ills that ail our present social reality, ills that have become background white noise to us and that, therefore, when exaggerated and placed in strange new spaces, far removed from our reality, startle us into paying attention. That, I think, is where the genius of Fagan’s novel lies. In making us pay attention to the black Plague in the 1300s and showing us how some complex, well-wrought characters react to it, it makes us pay closer attention to our own disintegrating reality, to those around us, and ultimately to ourselves. It interrogates the systems of belonging we participate in and it creates a powerful experience of empathy for our future selves who might no longer have access to those systems and who will, as a result, be Othered. And seeing our future Othered selves might exactly be what we need to empathize with the Other in the here and the now. Nobber is an ode to precarity, one that I think will live beyond its generation, serving as both an instructive allegory and a highly readable work of fiction.

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Shastri Akella earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) where he is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. His story won the Bridging the Gap fiction contest at the Slice Writers’ Conference in 2018. His works appears in Guernica, Electric Literature, The Common, Rumpus, World Literature Today, LA Review of Books, Danse Macabre, and European Stages, among other places. He is currently seeking agents for his novel, The Elephant Songs, queer novel set in 1980s India with an an interracial love story at its core.

[REVIEW] Crudo by Olivia Laing

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(W.W. Norton & Company, 2018)

REVIEW BY S.N. KIRBY

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This is not a book meant to soothe. In fact, this is a book that’s been written without any concern for the reader’s well-being. And why should it be? The year is 2017 and Donald Trump is president, Nazis are on the rise, and nuclear war between The United States and North Korea feels eminent. (No sweat, a year later and Trump will tell a rally in West Virginia about how he and Kim Jung Un “fell in love” that summer—kind of like Kathy Acker.) Everything about the book infects the reader with the same skin bursting sensations of that summer in history and Kathy Acker’s general emotional stasis.

Olivia Laing’s debut novel reads as Virginia Wolf stream of consciousness meets William Burroughs’ propensity for crudeness. Every breath and beat of the book evokes feeling rather than thought. What’s remembered isn’t necessarily what a character said or a particularly witty comment, but rather the emotion that the skin is an inefficient container for the self. Everything suddenly feels too tight, as if we too are inches away from crumbling like the world around us. The title itself evokes a sense that the world and the self are hurtling too fast for the writer to catch up with them both: Crudo. Laing’s book is raw and rough, like a deep dive of the id in motion.

The narrative follows a close third on our radical heroine, Kathy Acker. But even this self is a slipping of psyche—a playful act of creative borrowing. Channeling the spirit of a post-mortem Kathy Acker, there is a continuance of the experimentalist writer’s self. Of course, it’s not actually Kathy Acker. She died in Tijuana in 1997. Or did she? I’d like to think not. Instead, I imagine her slipping in and amongst the pages of Laing’s novel, in pure spirit form.

Like Kathy Acker’s work, Oilivia Laing draws inspiration from the creative borrowing of William Burroughs and Andy Warhol. This combination of influence draws from both the late Kathy Acker, who often referred to Burroughs as part of her artistic lineage, and Olivia Laing, who researched and wrote about Andy Warhol for her nonfiction book Lonely City. In the formation of the prose, Laing inserts the late Kathy Acker’s quotes as the thoughts of the character Kathy Acker in a form that mirrors the stylings of Burroughs’ cut-ups. The character Kathy Acker refers to herself as, “Warhol’s daughter, niece at least, a grave-robber, a bandit, happy to snatch what she needed but also morally invested in the cause: that there was no need to invent, you could make anything from out of the overflowing midden of the already-done, the as Beckett put it nothing new, it was economic also stylish to help yourself to the grab bag of the actual.” It’s all very meta.

The lines between Olivia Laing, Kathy Acker the character, and Kathy Acker the writer are constantly thinning. Trying to find and follow the lines can be a bit of a maddening experience. Olivia Laing just married poet Ian Patterson. Kathy Acker marries an older man, another famous writer. Is Kathy Acker the character a stand-in for Laing? Or is the character Kathy Acker a reincarnation of the late Kathy Acker? Or is the character Kathy Acker just that, a character unto herself? There’s a weird and twisted truth in that she is all three. Call me legion for we are many.

Love may be the dividing point of the self and character. Something about the way Kathy Acker describes her relationship to love and partnership feels authentic to her character alone, “she was like a feral animal, she had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as an invasion, as a prelude to loss and pain . . . .” There is something wild and feral about her in the way she moves through the world; doing whatever she wants, whenever she wants. There’s little sense of consequence in action, just pure action from the id. When it comes to loving her partner, she shouts and condemns him on whims that seem more set by nature than emotional causality. It was hot. There was a full moon. Kathy Acker is in a state of constant motion because she has emptied herself out so completely, that she becomes a part of the roving rage and chaos of the universe.

This is what makes Kathy Acker the perfect character to tell the story of the summer of 2017. The translucent line between herself and the outside world tunes her into the emotions of the moment. She acts as a living mirror to the feelings flooding the world consciousness. There is a sense of wanting to destroy for the sake of destruction: “A thing people said a lot that year, and especially the year before, x is a trashfire, also I want to burn everything, sometimes eroded to: burn everything.” She feels this so strongly, and often times without any kind of distance. The same ripping and tearing that the world seems to be tuning into on a mass level, resonates within Kathy Acker’s emotional microcosm. Her emotional states are often a reflection of the outside/inside relationship between herself and others. She is fighting, always. Pushing against something, anything with mass, and trying to break free.

So much of the text revolves around the idea of crashing open the self, which unveils an animal-like rawness to Kathy Acker’s actions and emotions. There’s a rather lovely scene where Kathy Acker feels this sensation of wanting to break open with such intense physicality that it pulsates off the page and beats with a wild passion: “She put the claws on the table and hit them hard. It was brilliant, she would have been happy to smash many more things. She hit the back of the crab as hard as she could. Nothing happened. She hit it again. A network of cracks appeared. She pried at it with her fingers, tearing out small white chunks of flesh.” There is something extraordinary feral about this moment that rings true to the same wild, pure id of the world’s consciousness. Everything feels like it’s being ripped and torn apart. Why shouldn’t Kathy Acker want to feel the same way?

Raw emotion spills upon the pages, leaving the reader with a neurotic and itchy feeling. Like somehow, Kathy Acker found her way under our skin in an attempt to crack open the shells of ourselves. I can almost hear her there, pounding away from within. Suddenly, the world feels too hot, too small, too maddening. As for the question of love, well, Kathy Acker has a moment where—in the same carefree, childlike rush of emotion—she says profoundly that yes, she can and does love! Although, I think Kathy Acker knows herself best when she says, “I grew up wild, I want to stay wild.” Something tells me that for a creature such as this, love may be another container, another shell, another self that is meant to be cracked open and freed once more.

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S.N. Kirby is a graduate of the MFA fiction program at The New School. Her fiction work explores the relationship between man, magic, and nature. She has interviewed musicians across musical genres such as Ray Toro of My Chemical Romance and Beats Antique. Her National Book Critic Circle interviews with Ruth Franklin and Pulitzer Prize winner T.J. Stiles were featured on The New School writing blog. She is a frequent reader at TNS After Hours at KGB Bar. When she’s not writing, you can find her teaching yoga in New York City. If you smell sage burning, it’s probably her.

[REVIEW] A Diet of Worms by Erik Rasmussen

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(Mastodon, 2018)

REVIEW BY PRATIMA BALABHADRAPATHRUNI

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Erik Rasmussen’s first novel,  published by Mastodon, has the most intriguing title I have seen for some time. A Diet of Worms, though, is both historically and theologically relevant.  In 1521, Charles the Fifth convened a council in Worms, commonly referred to as the Diet of Worms, where Martin Luther was asked to defend his beliefs.

I open the first page with two question on my mind:  Why the goldfish?  Why the title?

 

“There are a thousand ways to tell how things happened. But there’s no way to know why. You have to pick a reason out of thin air. Then you have to explain it with the same words you use to talk about your shoe. Why should be like a yawn, something everyone understands immediately.” 

 

The book is intriguing; after one read, I still can recollect my favorite instances: the brilliant conversation the teacher Mr. Brush has with Larry as he consoles Larry, using quantum physics as a starting point. Rasmussen’s dialogue is both brilliant and ludicrous. The author is able to conjure for us the old memories of growing up through his everyday characters, elucidating and illustrating with instances that can be easily visualized. There are no greater-than-life characters. There are no spectacular abilities attached to any of them. There is, however, the institutionalized system of everyday life as it is, and how it influences Larry, who could be the kid living next door. Admittedly, this is his story, with a bullet in his pocket and an ailing father being the son of a gun, the  white noise in the background, the man who eats the goldfish and is gone without a good-bye. This is also the story of Larry’s increasing awareness of life, loyalties, friendships and bonds. Like all teenagers, Larry, too, outgrows his adolescent skins.

 

“When your friend likes a girl, he becomes this whole other person …”

 

Larry sounds real.  So do Joey, Ashley, Alexis, Demaris, Mr. Brush, and anyone else in the book; they all ring true. None of them read as farcical or flat. They all  have their own kind of variable, complex lives. Larry, however, seems to be helplessly caught up in the  buccaneering world around his budding adolescence. There is  no catcher in the rye out there to help him. Friends, girlfriends,  father, fate, life, everything seems to spin out of control, move on, and, for a brief moment that lingers, leave Larry behind.

When I was young, I always was surprised that the immobile train on parallel tracks seemed to move along, until we sped past, and there was just the wide expanse of  world around, through the tiny  window. For me, Larry seems to be the moving train, speeding away until he is  a ferocious blur.

It is however, his journey’s closure that wraps it up for me. Here is where the book actualizes its theological argument. Ironically, it is also when I stumble upon the author’s reasoning for choosing the particular title for his book. Except I have to add that the “Diet of Worms” issued an “Edict of Worms”–and I am left wondering whether Rasmussen will come up with a sequel for this stirring debut. Larry, after all, is only seventeen years old as the novel concludes. Ten days after reading the book, I can still see the story happening in my head: a read that was alternately fast- and slow-paced; an experience in which very often, the words flew off the page.

 

“The path was narrow as your shoelace, and up ahead, ten feet, it disappeared beneath the heel of an enormous night.”

 

The reader can either accept the book as a simple story of growing up or  come to terms with the fact that there are more than one way to read a book. Like Larry points out, when it comes to God, people can argue and go on for hours. I can say the same about books.

Goldfish, do you agree?

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Pratima Balabhadrapathruni is a homemaker, writer, and poet. A winner of the in the Poetry Sans Frontieres contest twice in a row, she also has been chosen for the 2014 IWP workshop in non-fiction conducted by the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in OTATA, and Haiku Presence, Haibun Today, and other publications.