From Our Own
2008; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2008.0116
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Humanities and Scholarship
ResumoPage 30 American Book Review FROM OUR OWN For the last decade or so, new works by the founding crew of Fiction Collective-era metafictionists , including but certainly not limited to Jonathan Baumbach, Raymond Federman, Steve Katz, and the late Ronald Sukenick, have frequently met with mixed reviews. For most, every laudatory notice recalling their brave gambit some three decades ago in forsaking commercial publishing in order to found a new, more innovative tradition in fiction, there have been charges of silliness, misogyny, even downright aesthetic laziness about individual works. While it may be suggested that mainstream reviews are biased in favor of a publishing establishment that is rigidly anti-experimental, no one would argue that in recent years experimental fiction has enjoyed as high a regard or cultural importance as experimental poetry.As Language poetry became the hip word-art currency of the 1990s, experimental fictions faded out of fashion like so many handlebar mustaches. A culturally emblematic moment seemed to have come in 2005, when Baumbach’s son Noah Baumbach’s Academy Award-nominated screenplay The Squid and the Whale seemed to portray the universal caricature of the experimental fictionist: an aging male lecher whose highest compliment of a work of art is to stroke his beard and intone, “Hmmm, very dense.” So it is that even a writer of Steve Katz’s stature has to prove himself anew these days. While I have been a fan of Katz’s short fictions since the 1980s—the metaphysical meanderings of Moving Parts (1977), the comic springtraps of Stolen Stories (1977)—I had initial trepidations about reading a book subtitled “a miscellany.” Would there be no concern about the overall form of the book? Was Kissssss a collection of pieces left over after cleaning out the garage? So it is to my own relief that I report Kissssss is one of the most creative works of fiction I’ve seen in recent years, both a handbook of possibilities for the fictive form and a wise and comprehensive work that counterweights its laughs with powerfully human evocations and, particularly toward the end of the book, righteous anger toward the dark reign of George II, where brutality and lack of imagination walk hand-in-bloody-hand. Katz’s work is all about imagination. As much as one might think one knows where the road is heading in one of his narratives, this is an author who takes particular pride in making sure you are wrong. Nor are the pieces in this collection all narratives.Appearing about two-thirds into the book, “Manifesto Dysfic” is a statement of fictive poetics where the author makes explicit the connection he sees, much in the manner of the Language poets, between the normative sense-making apparatuses of our culture and exploitative profiteering and violence. Katz herein instructs future writers: “break out! flee the workshops! make sense not!” The call here is dual, both to search out something ancient and eternal (“to emancipate language into the mystery and power at its source in heart and cosmos”) and to engage in Dada-like, pacifist ridiculousness (“DYSFIC embraces dyscombobulation and silliness as no serious genre has dared”). Kissssss shows Katz may be the most strenuous exemplar of a type of writing that has always demanded for its success continual renewal. As in much of Katz’s work, silliness is manifested throughout the collection and inevitably reaches out the backdoor toward the philosophical. In “Hollywood Novelette,” the longest text in the book, character names are created from anagrams of movie stars; the story’s hero is Eukan Severe (Keanu Reeves). The bizarre plot has the older generation reaccessing its free-love hippie roots through cannibalization of the young. By the end of the novel, these shenanigans start to take on a kind of critique of Hollywood youth dogmas and the way we as audiences for these entertainments accept the same readily recognizable people in role after role in socalled “realist” dramas.Throughout the book, we also see exhibited the native silliness of Katz’s sentences, with registers of humor, whimsy, and beauty: She has a throaty, mature voice, and carries the song like a backpack into the ghetto. You have...
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