Adam Novy - A strange, Bible-like printed parable about an authoritarian city-state, an underground resistance, and a plague of mysterious birds

Adam Novy, The Avian Gospels, Short Flight / Long Drive Books, 2010.

"A city without a name is cursed by a plague of birds they probably deserve. But when an angry beggar child and his father learn they have the power to lift the curse—they “control” birds—they cannot agree on how to use their gift, and end up using it on each other, taking out everyone around them, especially those they love."

“Imagine an alternate world in which Hungary borders on Oklahoma, where Norwegians and gypsies are secretly linked, where the cultural codes we think we know are reconfigured to become defamiliarized, and where characters slowly morph into their opposites. The Avian Gospels is about the birth and death of a religion, the birth and death of a city and the people in it. Novy's novel explores the way that myth is made and unmade, and is an impressive debut.”– Brian Evenson

"This debut has the potential to become a cult classic, if readers aren't distracted from the oddly compelling story by the unconventional structure. The beleaguered residents of an unnamed mythical city long at war with Hungary are enjoying a parade to mark the end of the "endless war." In the midst of the parade, refugee Zvominir's wife goes into labor, and then dies giving birth to their son in the abandoned storefront they call home. Seventeen years later, Zvominir and Morgan, his son, are "the Bird Man and Bird Boy"; they can control birds but are opposed in their outlooks and philosophies. But when the city suffers from a bird invasion so large that they block out the sun, the pair are commanded by their tyrannical ruler, Judge Charles Giggs, to clear the birds away, and soon the citizens (including the Judge's daughter, Katherine) and the birds are caught up in a conflict of ideals. Cleverly formatted in a Biblical style, this is a fascinating examination of what makes a martyr, a myth, or a legend." - Publishers Weekly

"The second half of the strange, apocalyptic story begun in August 2010's The Avian Gospels picks up immediately where the first one left off in a bird-filled city beset by rumor and turmoil. Morgan, the Bird Boy, has gone missing after a confrontation with Mike Griggs, the wastrel son of Judge Griggs. Taking advantage of the distraction, Zvominir the Birdman wrests control of a gang of rebels from Jane, who is pregnant with Morgan's child. As these troubled characters and their minions, allies, and foes seek Morgan, war overwhelms the city. The escalating deterioration of the various family relationships mirrors the destruction of the city and the surrounding countryside, and the end of order and civility. While the ending is consistent with the characters' established behavior, readers may still be vaguely disappointed by the lack of clear resolution. 11-city author tour." - Publishers Weekly

“Wildly imaginative, emotionally complex, gorgeously captured and crafted, Adam Novy’s two-volume literary aviary — so stuffed with birds you’ll want to keep your handsome copies nailed to the table lest they fly off or at you — is one of the most original novels I’ve read in months, maybe years.”– Laird Hunt

“I write from the aftermath of The Avian Gospels’ last sentence. There are feathers and blood on the floor, my location: a jackknifed timeline on shaken tectonic tiles. I have seen the horrors of broken fidelities to kin and creed, brutal sights of carnage and betrayal. But I have also seen soaring, beautiful, sculptures—sights never before imagined or dreamt. I blame Adam Novy for all of this.” – Salvador Plascencia

“You could call what Adam Novy's doing magical realism, but he writes as though the Latin American Boom never happened. In the world of the Avian Gospels, fire drools, houses wander like a mind, and the map has been rearranged so that China, Oklahoma, and of course, the dreaded Hungary butt up against each other in constant war. Even more striking, the novel contains all the pleasures or more conventional stories -- suspense, romance, violence, and slapstick. While the news he proclaims is not exactly good, Novy has written an authentic gospel for our time.”– Christian Tebordo

"If providing readers with hope for the world is one of the great dishonesties of contemporary fiction, then Adam Novy is as honest as they come. Novy’s first novel, The Avian Gospels, is a cruel parable of waste and degeneration, set in a rough hybrid of the American Midwest and post-Kosovo Eastern Europe. Given in two volumes, and handsomely bound in red and gold, The Avian Gospels is a strange and unsentimental epic of a post-war city-state that wages war against its own population while struggling with a city-wide infestation of birds.
Our hero is Morgan, born at the end of an earlier war and raised by his father, Zvominir, an anxious and conservative immigrant. After seventeen years of peace and poverty, the birds arrive: “a hundred thousand cardinals in the Square like a sea of dried blood.” They flood the city, blocking the streets, drowning the sky, filling shops and houses. The gypsies, an immigrant population, think of them as miracles. To the suburban bourgeoisie, however, the birds are an irritant, a danger to business, something that needs to be shooed away.
But there’s something you should know: Morgan can control these birds with his mind. So, as it turns out, can Zvominir, though he keeps his miraculous talent a secret and urges his son to do the same. But Morgan, always rebellious, begins to manipulate the flocks of birds as street theater, guiding them into formation, creating living portraits and depictions of historical scenes. And, as his father feared, the state takes notice.
In these early pages, Novy introduces all the novel’s major characters: the city’s sadistic tyrant, the Judge, and his wife, Mrs. Giggs; the Judge’s idiot son, Mike, who chases Morgan around the city with his gang of bullies; and Mike’s sister, Katherine, who pines after Morgan from afar. Behind them, Novy’s city is sparse and barely detailed, full of generic mobs and crowds: “Bystanders knew he was the Bird Boy, and looked at him with fear.” So much for the outside world. And the inside world is given in equally broad strokes: “It won’t be long now, she thought. I’m scared, he thought. What was he going to do without her, she wondered.”
Morgan’s firebrand politics soon emerge. “I want a revolution, I want justice,” he tells his father, after a violent meeting with the Judge’s family. As they walk home, they meet a band of RedBlacks, the city’s police-force, and are beaten nearly to death. This is one of many examples of institutional brutality in The Avian Gospels. The city, we learn, is like a camp: there is always the potential for the vicious RedBlacks to beat or kill gypsy or gypsy-like bodies.
As Morgan becomes more radical, he falls in love with Jane, a true insurgent. After Jane’s brother is killed, she plots to “overthrow the city.” At first Morgan helps her steal from supermarkets and department stores; eventually, Jane convinces him to help blow up buildings. In one night, she destroys a bank, an armory, and a doughnut shop. “I used to believe in pacifism,” Jane declares. “Now I believe in this.”
Jane and Morgan come to live, with the rest of the gypsies, in a network of underground tunnels. Like a more successful version of Germany’s Red Army Faction, she is soon using Morgan’s mythic abilities to inspire a citywide insurgency. Morgan, still performing for the public during the day, follows her lead in the evenings and urges other gypsies to mimic her violence: “Get off your ass and blow shit up.”
Novy zips through the plot. Over several exhausting pages, we follow Jane as she robs a department store; then we see Morgan declared the messiah of the gypsies; then, Morgan lies to Jane to appear more sexually experienced; consequently, Morgan and Jane almost break-up; and after everything, “they finally fucked.” At the end of this slim chapter, we see that Morgan has learned a lesson, “that he had friends, he had a girlfriend, and the family he hadn’t known he’d wanted.”
Oh boy. But this cliché, given the glorious mess of plot which lies behind it, is barely more than a joke, a code Novy playfully throws into the mix. Novy’s approach is consistently tweaked. Following the promise of his title, the novel begins with a soaring gospel, full of bathos: “[I]f you could witness His wondrous methods you surely would fizzle in awe, so decent and grand is He.” That rude, un-Biblical “fizzle” gives it away: while there might be lessons in The Avian Gospels, Novy isn’t giving us any lectures.
This is a recklessly inventive novel. At times, Novy’s careful artlessness can seem sloppy. When the Judge orders Zvominir to keep the birds from his property, the dialogue is rough, tin-eared:
You will come to my house, and do your birdshow for my daughter, on a trial basis. Make it rated G, keep her happy, and don’t piss off my wife if you can help it, I know I can’t. Keep in mind how hot I am to kill you. I live about an hour from the center of town.
This craftedly implausible dialogue may seem, to less sympathetic readers, like bad implausible dialogue—but given the horrors this book contains, the violence, the carefully paced plotting, and the strategic destruction of sentiment—it’s safe to say that Novy is in on the joke.
And yet, if there is a joke in these sections, a parody of seriousness, then it’s an open question how much Novy is laughing along. The Avian Gospels is a novel of bodies thrown around by power, and of the violent responses such power often compels. Sometimes, there is no possibility of peace. The police state Novy gives us is about as familiar a political organization as one finds in the 20th century, and the “terrorist” resistance which follows is no more or less brutal than any other. But as historically familiar as all this might seem, Novy has still written a cruel book—less about birds than about the simple failure of statehood. This is a strange, compelling, and relevant work of art." - Matt McGregor

"Adam Novy’s The Avian Gospels, published in two pocket-sized volumes made to look like the Bibles you find in hotel drawers (faux-leather covers, gilt page edges, etc.), is no evangelical manual-for-living, but a “gospel” of a distinctly literary sort: a work of imagination and allegory, transforming contemporary America into a fantastical world.
“I’m from a suburb near Chicago called Northbrook,” says Novy, 39, now living in Irvine, California. “It is everywhere and nowhere, which is probably why my book takes place in some imaginary city that could be anywhere.” The “city” that Novy creates is part sci-fi, part Gabriel Garcia Marquez: an indefinite geography bordered by Hungary and Oklahoma, an anyplace filled with a nameless civilization that has suffered through a long war with a merciless enemy. Now, they find themselves overrun by birds, a Hitchcock film’s worth of birds that they try to trap and kill, but that just keep coming back. Below these people, both in social caste and literally (having built a world for themselves in the subterranean tunnels left after the war) are a race of gypsies who play ska and worship birds and who are daily oppressed by the dominant race’s militant Red-Black soldiers, bored and craving violence in this time of peace. “Peace” is a relative concept, here. Faced with this unending bird epidemic—this enemy that cannot be easily or directly fought—peace turns out to be far more upsetting to the Red-Blacks than war ever was.
Into this world come a father and son, Zvoninir and Morgan, believed to be gypsies though claiming to be Swedes. Morgan is an only child, his mother having died in childbirth, and is the precocious and bratty counter to his father’s soft-spoken submissiveness. Both share, however, a unique talent: They can control birds. They can make birds dance, can configure birds into flying sculptures, and most importantly they can make birds go away. Thus the book’s initial setup: a civilization oppressed by an enemy it cannot simply destroy, that hungers for a violent solution to its problem, if not for the relief of violence generally, is forced instead to put forth a diplomatic foot, and enlist the help of the very people it oppresses. Novy, who started the novel in 2004 while living in Chicago, is certainly aware of the ways his plot suggests parallels to circumstances in America today.
“One thing that interested me when I was writing was the feeling of being justified,” he says. “After 9/11, our country thought it had the right to go and fuck up other countries, as though we had been dumped, and felt we had to find a girl who looked a little like the girl who had just dumped us, who we in turn could fuck and dump, or in this case, invade and obliterate.”
In fact, the theme of terrorism is played out in both the back- and foreground of The Avian Gospels, and the critique of American foreign policy is palpable; yet as the book progresses, the story grows complicated. We meet the ruler of this land, called The Judge, a tyrannical figure who it turns out has a family and a whole slew of problems all his own. Morgan, meanwhile, falls in love with a gypsy, Jane, founder of a terrorist resistance movement, and finds himself caught between worlds. Other characters enter the fray, and a practically Shakespearean plot plays out, thick with sex, revenge and, of course, politics.
Against such classical drama, the novel’s Biblical packaging might seem a bit unusual—and, of course, it is unusual. In fact, it was his publisher’s idea, but one that Novy says he was immediately taken with, not only for the play on the “Gospels” of the title, but because it points readers back to the novel’s allegorical nature.As a form, allegory is at its best when it both does and doesn’t correspond to the world-as-we-know-it; when you can see correlations, but the story isn’t contained or defined by them. It’s literature’s way of being political without being predictable, or without being political only. Novy says that he wanted The Avian Gospels “to read like a bogus social studies lesson told by somebody untrustworthy.” It’s a terrible recipe for pedantry, but not bad at all for art." - Martin Riker

"I'd heard a lot about The Avian Gospels (Short Flight / Long Drive Books) before ever reading it. I'd stared at those covers online, the red and gold, the abstract of birds in flight, and imagined what a combination of The Birds, The Road, and The Stand might look like. Would it be dense language, a languid read of heavy prose? The sample online hinted at that. Would it be a story of nature rebelling against man, an image of a phone booth, birds attacking it, stuck in my head? Would it be a journey across the wastelands, a cast of misfits striving for redemption? It is all of these things, and at the same time, none.
The first word to come to mind when describing The Avian Gospels is surreal. The beautiful oxblood covers frame the two volume set, and immediately set the tone with their embossed gold stamping of birds slowly gathering, the gilded edges painting the rounded corners with shimmering flakes. It gives off a prophetic, biblical vibe, complete with numbers running down the sides of each page to mark the scripture of your choice. The Avian Gospels is set in the near future, where this city without a name has been shrouded in birds, a plague of flapping wings and desecration. This is an alternate future where Oklahoma and Hungary butt up against each other and society has descended into a battle between the RedBlacks and the gypsies, with the constant threat of the Swedes and Hungarians, just beyond the borders. The rich live above ground, or far away in the suburbs, while the gypsies hide in the tunnels, struggling to survive. The Giggs family rules over it all: the brutal Judge is in charge of the war, slowly losing his mind; his wife is but a ghost after the death of their eldest son, Charlie, in the war; the vengeful younger son Mike is left to his own destructive devices; and the lonely daughter Katherine wanders around the house as sanctuary to the looping soundtrack of shrieking parrots and the echoing gasps of death. Zvominir, and his son, Morgan, can control the birds, both a gift and a curse, and do so with differing ambitions. They send the birds away by day, but the beasts always return for the elaborately staged shows, at night. Morgan weaves the birds into hypnotic shapes, changing landscapes, and the faces of his lovers. It is a brutal, lonely life, this dystopia, every day a new challenge, with violence a commonality, death at the hands of your enemies, and friends.
At its heart, The Avian Gospels, is a love story, a coming-of-age tale of Morgan, the wunderkind, seeking to escape the rule of his father, the Bird Man, evolving into the new prophet and messiah. It doesn't take long for Morgan to fall for Katherine, daughter of the Judge, the one girl he should avoid. Their eventual couplings are carried out in secret, hidden underground. But at the same time, it seems he has gotten Jane pregnant, this self-appointed leader of the gypsies, queen of fire and destruction. Their future lies buried in the ruins of uncertainty, under the oppressive weight of their emotions. Every day gypsies are beaten and killed, and it doesn't take long for Jane to seek revenge on the RedBlacks, to stage an uprising in the name of love, for her abruptly murdered brother, Billy.
When there is nothing but chaos, the point of view in this story can only be fragmented and scattered. It shifts from the angry plans of the Judge to the sadness and concern of Zvominir, two fathers that watch over their children with little control or reward. To see such violence through the eyes of these lost teens, to sit in the heart and mind of Jane, Morgan, Katherine, and Mike, is to take the fear and loneliness of your typical teenager, and multiply it by a thousand, the chance of a brutal death imminent, the constant need to kill or be killed, mutating any chance of a normal childhood into that of desperation, revenge, and survival. And yet, even amidst this insanity, they are still teenagers, they still seek approval, still want to have fun with their friends, and belong to a group, even if it means joining a clique that is hell-bent on blowing up buildings, burning down barracks, and beating other kids to death in the name of a false god and elusive goal.
The language is both a dark poetic and the voices on the street, mixing dense prose that often pauses to reflect on the barbaric world around them with that of thugs and bitter teens, every threat riddled with profanity, every motivation driven by power, and sex.
Consider the following example:
"But we do not weep at your untimely death, Swede; you who were unchained from your body and freed; as from an Eqypt of the soul. It is we who are doomed, and you who are released, we who, spirit-corpses, toil beneath the living, brandishing our phantom-knives at plethoras of nothing, and you who see the Earth from above, clenched and pulsing, like a sparrow's heart."
Compared with:
"Punch me, said the tutor. Beat my face into a mess. Are you crazy, Mike asked, I won't do it. Tom and Gus said, We'll do it! You guys back off, said the tutor. It's between me and him. I don't want to hit you, Mike said. You're a pussy, said the tutor. A coward, a girl, a fag, afraid to fight.
As the tutor hurled insults, Mike hit him, blasting punches at his face, swung his hands like hammers."
Violence begets violence, and the outcome of these desperate measures has been wrapped in bloody rags and dropped in the dust for all to witness. The empty heads of those that have been to war, ringed with buzzing flies and covered in the stench of decomposition, have seen their loved ones die at their feet, with little or no help on the horizon. This is not a story for the weak of heart, or mind. It shows mankind at its worst, with little remorse or regret, and leaves us with a sinking feeling in our gut--the loss of so much, hard to swallow. In the end one can really only react to The Avian Gospels in one of two ways: absorb the destruction, and descend into the darkness and depression, embracing the soiled aspects of humanity as your own, or, wake up and run towards the light, eternally grateful that this is not our lot in life, our time to fight these horrific battles, the realities of our current lives so much better than what they could have been.
This book does not sit firmly in the lyrical prose of Cormac McCarthy, nor does it remain centered in the epic storytelling of Stephen King. You can certainly glean aspects of The Road or The Stand, but this is not a mash-up. It is more elusive than that. It forced me to think about what the author was trying to say, what the message was, and how my own experiences certainly must be shaping this reaction, my own history with violence and betrayal. As the hamster wheels in my head spun around and around, and I strained to decipher the babble of bible verses drifting in the wind, flashes of movie screens unfurled before me, toothpicks shoved in my eyes. I had the sensation of a heavy weight settling on my chest, the uneasy feeling that I was missing something, the blur in front of my eyes nothing but hazy shadows that would certainly slam into focus if I would only concentrate. To truly understand the Avian Gospels you have to open yourself up to it, to yourself, and that's not a comfortable thing to do." - Richard Thomas

"In September 2010, Hobart/Short Flight/Long Drive Books releases Adam Novy’s The Avian Gospels Book I. After a summer of earthquakes in Indonesia, on September 4th, a volcano begins to erupt, thousands are feared homeless, lost, dead. September 21st, Vol. 1 Brooklyn interviews Adam Novy. September 23rd, the West Virginia Senate begins talks on providing rights for relatives of miners lost in coal tunnel accidents in response to last April’s explosion at the West Virginia Upper Big Branch Mine. September 30th, Angelina Jolie visits flood victims in Pakistan. October 13th, the trapped Chilean Miners are rescued. October 20th, James Yeh says to me, “You wanna take a look at the Novy?” October 30th, ink cartridges believed to have originated in the Yemeni region are found on cargo planes heading to Dubai, Chicago and elsewhere. November 15th, I open the Adam Novy Book I and Book II copies and proceed to read while sipping green tea specifically because Kyle Minor will not stop posting incessantly on his Facebook page about seeking healthy alternatives to soda after a recent trip to Haiti. December 9th, today, I summarize for the first time in a book review, God forgive us all.
I read The Avian Gospels Book I with an incredibly skeptical eye. In an effort to locate the reader, Novy chooses to open the work with an explanation of beliefs in his Dystopian and to my mind, Ecotopian world. (Ecotopian fiction is the wing of Dystopian fiction wherein the author posits either a utopian or dystopian world revolving around environmental conservation or destruction. The novel The Bridge [1973] by D. Keith Mano presents a world dominated by a global environmental fascism, where the government ultimately promotes the extinction of the human race by enforced mass suicide, so as to “save” the environment.) The Avian Gospels is an updated Ecotopian work in its use of the environment by man to attempt a subset of man’s entire genocide, and the book fuses a myriad of philosophical questions presented in the inherent struggle therein. Bear with me, I’m getting there.
The book opens with an introductory explanation on what we are to expect, this opening letter is written with such lyricism that we are intoxicated in the charms that are to befall us. We are indeed prepared for the tunnel into which we descend.
A man who is a bird in his own way, who is not a bird, who can control birds brings birth to the world, while becoming a widower. His wife dies during the birth of his son, and we meet our characters. A gang of incredulous and solid yet torrid mortals captive by world pained with war, starvation, dirt, hate make our allegory, our religious metaphor and referencing, our plot. Read carefully, for in these pages, a bible. We find Moses, we find Babel, we find Novy pulling out all the Dystopian stops:
“His village had been razed, his people scattered through a world inhospitable; his wife had died before his eyes. Every single thing that he had loved had been destroyed except his son. His face scared almost everyone, all horizontal wrinkles, shadowed hollows, like a cliff worn down by weather, his green eyes wide and terrified and ringed by circles dark enough it seemed he was a door to the abyss.”
Men try to find their way through life under consistent Hitchcockian attack via Aves—the winged, bipedal, endothermic, egg-laying, vertebrates we call birds. The birds serve as allegory for varying strife and the phases we attempt to fly over, below, and through. There is a love story, there is a familial duty story, there are Kafkian references to four political movements; The Penal Colony rises from the grave and sings as a beautiful feminine ghost, long hair floating behind her, swimming through the air. There is a common fight toward hope and survival.
The work feels as though Adam Novy was writing for his life, actually. Like he set out to prove something. Foreshadowing, plot twist, all the elements woven like an unworn night cloak. The work is about vulnerability, but it is told with such a strong voice that it at times risks sounding too authorial. Sometimes Novy stamps at the page instead of letting the words flow from it, but we keep reading. “There was nothing left to do but destroy her.” We are consistently met with charging though the night sentences and imagery. The writer has stamina. A very controlled at most times narrative, humanity and vulnerability do simultaneously seep through, perhaps against Novy’s steering, actually, but now and then, simplicity in complication is there, exhaustion is there. “I do what I have to do to keep my wife from crying.” “Nothing is real here, least of all me.”
Our major characters: Zvominir, a father; Morgan, a son; the Judge, a father; Mike Giggs, a son; Katherine, a sister, a daughter, a love; Jane, a vigilante, a love, a vehicle. Outerlying characters include a mother, armies of “RedBacks,” species of birds, Hungary, Gypsies, a gang of Rosencrantz and Guildensternish (yet unfunny) men such as one named Chico, war itself, starvation itself, guns, mortality, an omnipresent narrator, the Tutor, the book looking like a bible itself as physical object which consistently gets us looks from people in the coffee shop. By the way, Novy, I loved the Metallica reference on p. 271. Let’s move on to Book II, which is what we’re supposed to be talking about.
Book II:
The RedBlacks have won, Charlie Giggs Jr. has grown and our author Novy, within the first three sentences, is making a statement on wartime draft. Then comes the nod to Carver’s Popular Mechanics, fitting with the rest of the narrative, two worlds at war, essentially. But what Novy is able to do is then create the war within the war. The Judge, who is leading the larger war is more finely watched via microscope, we are not only given his war professionally, we are given it in greater layering personally, we are given his narrative at home: “The Judge did not return to the house for three days, and when he finally re-appeared at six am, he was drunk, and barged into Mike’s room. Mrs. Giggs tried to seize the boy, to protect him, but in the melee, Mike was dropped, and started screaming. His parents pretended not to hear him.” A war-torn home leading the middle of war-torn lands.
Katherine comes into her own, escaping the walls of her house, hiring a driver to take her to liquidate her bank (interestingly called “Boston”), while passing a field of wildflowers in the car. We are torn with love affairs. Writes Novy: “Katherine, always Katherine, as if his daydreams lingered in the sky and still made Jane suffer.” Katherine and Jane both serve the narrative, and women for that matter, as veritable Joan of Arcs and the fact that women are depicted so loudly, so strongly, yet thought of so tenderly by our protags is quite moving, actually. Outerlying character Andre (who is a poet as character), stays with us throughout the work. “He was tall, and seemed to judge her from above, with a dark and sleazy gaze that seemed to say he knew her all too well.”
We are met with so many intricate personal wars within the larger war, that we are reminded of our own. Novy uses the larger to ask us in the smaller, to not forget, to remember what it’s like to have a sore back: “When Zvominir came to our part of the city to de-bird, his professional veneer had disappeared. Anytime the birds suggested patterns in the sky, he’d start to weep, claw his face, or cry out at the sky. The de-birding would stop, he’d forget he was at work, and stare off at nothing. RedBlacks gently tapped him, to remind him of his job.”
We are brought deeper toward the Ecotopian philosophies, inescapable and proudly pronounced. It is some pretty punk writing: “A night of rain had cleared the sky of smoke, and Katherine could see the whole city from the rooftop, the venus flytrap river and the trees like squatting turkeys, and slums where streets were thriving with rebellion…Birdclouds blocked the sun and revealed it, blocked and revealed it. People sang together when the birds were overhead, and their prayers were like laments, strange and reproachful. Who was the God that had left them in this dreadful situation?” (This dreadful situation we realize is geographically in a world where continents have fused, by the way.)
Through tunnels we find pain, faith, fighting. “Nightingales roared like lions, and that is how she knew.” The safety our character once slightly knew is overtaken, women are made to live in houses with a half dozen others, our beings are defeated and fighting, a head, as Saint Valentine’s wife’s heart, sent in a box. An Oulipian moment on point of view aptly and cleanly stated: “It seemed like an embellishment at this point to call herself ‘I.’ And yet, she persisted. We’ll get through it together.” A gorgeous, complicated work where everything is all and nothing is all and everything and characters alone become one through wading waters made of their own lack of humanity and deeper sense of humanity. A triumphant publishing project for Hobart, and an inquiry into the future of fiction." - Nicolle Elizabeth

"To be totally honest with you, when I first received parts 1 and 2 of The Avian Gospels, (Short Flight/Long Drive) I thought to myself, “no fucking way”. The books are designed to look and read like The Bible, and in the hands of most people, that could be a terrible idea. But after reading both books, I thought to myself “hey, this is like a cross between The Birds, The Road, and The Stand, except way more out there. I should ask Adam Novy a few questions.”
When you started writing The Avian Gospels, was it your intention for it to look like the bible?
- Splitting the book in two and making it look a Bible were the ideas of my editor, Aaron Burch, who runs Hobart, along with Elizabeth Ellen. Aaron’s a really bright guy and he did a great job. His vision is unusual and creative. I’m blessed to have ended up with him. He understood the project incredibly well.
Not to make this a theological interview, but are you very interested in religion, and stories from the bible?
- I’ve always wanted to write a sequel to the Bible. There’s a poppy, grindhouse aspect to it, crazy things are always happening—Lot’s daughters, Job, the Tower of Babel, the death of Moses, Christ, etc.—it’s terse and violent and engrossing in the same way as, like, zombie movies or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I knew there was some overlap between what I was writing and that uncanny tone and pace. The reportage is so deadpan and the stories are so old the reader ends up in a place of incredulous belief. The prose makes its own kind of truth.
When I started writing The Avian Gospels, not long after 9/11, the news had that same weird quality. Some guy with a beard in a cave hatched a plot to fly airplanes into buildings? I abetted him whenever I bought gas? I figured it was true, but as someone from a suburb in the midwest, I found these interconnections inconceivable. The book was an attempt to reckon with the feeling that we were suddenly part of history in a way we didn’t understand, that we were all inadequate to the task and that our old social narratives only left us more confused. A lot of 9/11 books focus on people finding their inner children, or discovering that their lives before the tragedy had been fatuous, and that a new and more productive, almost spiritual way of life had been revealed. This is wishful thinking, really. As James Ellroy says, “Closure is bullshit.”
How long did it take you to write the book? Did you write both parts at the same time?
- It took about three-and-a-half years to write the book, a year to find an agent—the indefatigable Susan Golomb—another year of re-writes, and a year to find a publisher. I don’t want to know how long that is. When Barack Obama got elected, I thought there might be unity and the book would be obsolete, but it didn’t seem to work that way. Just two days ago, I read that anti-masturbationist Christine O’Donnell once ate dinner on a blood-slaked altar to the devil. I guess I’m a realist.
What are you working on for the future?
- Right now, I’m writing a novel about Perseus and Medusa. I’m pretty sure it’s called The Gore and the Splatter. Like The Avian Gospels, it takes place in a world that’s half mythic past, half the 80’s suburbia I grew up in.
What gives you the willies more: avian influenza or the movie The Birds?
- The avian flu seemed like a hoax to me, but swine flu scared me shitless. I was teaching at Long Beach City College at the time, which is not the kind of place where folks have health insurance, and my students and I had this feeling of inevitable doom, even though, in the end, none of us got sick. I kind of feel like I might die in a plague.
I like The Birds, of course, but trendy viruses scare me more. Have you heard of Morgellon’s Disease? The victims grow colored fibers from their skin! Doctors mostly refuse to admit this disease exists—no cause has been determined—but it’s a big hit on Youtube, and many people insist they have it. The internet can make me believe anything for, like, five minutes." - Interview with Jason Diamond

Interview with Katherine Krause

Kate Zambreno – Suburbs at their most hauntingly grotesque. Feeling better is a deception: Think pink! Don’t think at all!

Kate Zambreno, O Fallen Angel (Chiasmus Press, 2010)


'It doesn’t give us tools to build a better world so much as show us how the tools we do have suck'

«Like Angela Carter’s fairy tales, Kate Zambreno’s O Fallen Angel deftly exposes the psychic brutality that lies underneath the smooth glassy surface of parable. Set in Midwestern America in approximately 2006, Zambreno’s character/archetypes—a Mommy who names her golden retriever after Scott Peterson’s murdered wife Laci, a daughter who signs her suicide note with a smiley face and a doomed psychotic prophet—are all agents and victims of disinformation, but this doesn’t make their pain any less real. In Zambreno’s SUV-era America, unhappiness doesn’t exist because it can be broken down into treatable diagnostic codes. As she writes, “Maggie wants to be FREE but she also wants to be LOVED and these are polar instincts, which is why she is bipolar, which is a malady of mood.“» - Chris Kraus

«O Fallen Angel is the first novel by Kate Zambreno, and, if she continues in this vein throughout her career, she’s going to start a lot of fights.
The novel describes a older suburban woman named Mommy, her suicidal daughter Maggie, and a homeless and insane man named Malachi. The characters don’t have conversations, and there is no conventional dialogue at all, but Zambreno uses what amounts to different languages for each of them. Mommy gets the longest, most complex and satisfying sentences, such as “Mommy wept tears and tears for Laci more tears than she has ever wept for her own daughter but Mommy doesn’t want to think about that no Mommy doesn’t even want to talk about that Maggie has dug herself into her own hole and she will have to dig herself out of it it’s called Tough Love! It’s a parenting technique. Like guilt and manipulation.” The long, rhythmic and unpunctuated switchbacks of these lines will be compared to Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek—and their frequent, joyous obscenity reminds of Kathy Acker—but the sheer inflammatory shallowness belongs exclusively to Zambreno, as does the comic timing of lines like, “There are angel soaps and little angels on the guest towels (which you are not supposed to use)…” One expects a novel’s major character to be sympathetic, especially one named “Mommy,” but the biggest impression of O Fallen Angel’s Mommy is how utterly loathsome she is. In other words, Zambreno quite deliberately slays one of our era’s most sacred cows.
Maggie’s section is perhaps a bit schematic in comparison, but it better represents the book’s agenda to obliterate received wisdom about everything: character, gender, the so-called traditions of the novel, etc. Instead, for example, of writing scenes with Maggie’s therapist and developing them both over time, she opts for “Maggie is broken because Maggie cannot articulate why she feels sad or why she feels angry and that’s why therapy does not go too well.” This scorn for narrative convention stumbles when Zambreno wanders into cliché—“Because the first cut is the deepest”—or tautology—“Maggie is Ophelia”—but succeeds when it remembers to be ironic, as with the line “Maggie fucks boys and pretends it doesn’t matter because Maggie is empowered!” At such times, O Fallen Angel lays waste to swathes of phony consolation, and feels genuinely troubling. It doesn’t give us tools to build a better world so much as show us how the tools we do have suck.
The third section reads like a mix of holy rage and paranoia, and seems like an unexpected middle ground of the other two. One’s enjoyment of O Fallen Angel depends on how much provocation a reader can take, but it’s a virtue that Zambreno spends exactly zero time making her book seductive. Her idea is to make a work free of empty solace, and this, as we know, is exceptionally unusual, especially for rookies. The book does not make one feel better, it shows how feeling better is a deception, and it asks, why this need to make one’s self a fool? Not everything we read will act like this—and if this book came up in a workshop, the instructor would spontaneously combust—but those that do perform the essential social task of undermining piety. O Fallen Angel is absolutely fearless, and, in its way, it is devilishly fun.» - Adam Novy

«It is tempting to read Zambreno’s novel as a satire - and the blurbs on her book suggest that we should - but the text actually has little of the cool comic detachment found in such satirists as Swift and Godard and Flannery O’Conner, that sense that we are looking through a microscope at the lives of various characters. Instead, O Fallen Angel is more of a grotesque parade of certain social “types” and clichés taken to their furthest degree. The book reminds me of early Robert Crumb, a great deal of Jeff Koons, and even some of John Waters, other artists fascinated by the kitschy, grotesque underbelly of American culture. And like those artists, Zambreno finds this kitsch exhilarating. The overriding tone of the novel is oddly joyful; and while the book is very funny, it's not coolly so - in fact, there is nothing cool or classical about this book at all, and the novel in general brings to my mind certain Dogma 95 films where the camera plunges right into the action, making it purposely difficult to get our bearings. There are no establishing shots here.
The most vivid charater in the book is Mommy - though to call her a character is misleading. Rather, she’s the demonstration of the Mommy-principle. She consists of many of the cultural associations that we have of suburban American womanhood from the past fifty years: she loves the color pink (“Think pink! Don’t think at all!”), she’s largely a-sexual, she prides herself on her housekeeping skills, and she believes children should be thoroughly shielded from the world as well as themselves (“It’s best for grandbabies to sit still or they might hurt themselves!”). If anything, there’s something surreally retro about her in our world of Desperate Housewives and Cougar Town, television shows whose humor is premised on how little the sexually confident and stylish suburban female leads have in common with the June Cleaver archetype, and Martha Stewart, whose image relies heavily on her being the uber-mother or grandmother, but who no one, either defenders or detractors, would describe as being docile. Zambreno’s Mommy is a Mommy of cultural free-fall, an American Mommy certainly, but neither exactly of the past nor exactly of the present.
An example of this not-quite-present-not-quite-past quality can be seen in an early passage in the novel that discusses the Mommy’s rising obesity, and the love of butter that is to blame. “Butter in everything!” the Mommy thinks. “Butter and lard! That’s the American way!” A more modern suburban mother would seemingly spread margarine or some other highly processed “fat” on everything; most of the recent health gurus have been trying to get us to go back to butter and lard. But Zambreno, like John Waters, is especially attracted and repulsed by the 50’s image of the mother because, again like Waters, she’s interested in the suburbs at their most hauntingly grotesque. And the association of “Mommy” with “butter” is so strong that Zambreno takes it on anyway, regardless of its retro-ness (or maybe even because of it). And yet she isn’t purely of the 50’s either. She shops at Sam’s Club and names her dog after Laci Peterson. The Mommy here, then, is a POP Mommy, and I see this book as a whole as not so much a condemnation of the suburbs, but rather the suburbs (circa 1951 - the present) made into POP art. A few months ago, I wrote a post about how I considered Chelsey Minnis’ Bad Bad to be a POP poetry collection: I see Zambreno’s novel as a prose equivalent to that type of writing. (As I mentioned in that earlier essay, I by no means intend POP here to be a derogatory term. I mean it in the spirit of Deleuze when he said his philosophy was a POP philosophy. POP as a way of writing that doesn’t burrow “deep” but instead is frantically making connections, creating surface effects, and then moving on - a rhizometic method of writing.)
The other characters are POP types too - types written with such force that they become gargoyles. Mommy’s daughter Maggie, for instance, is a “good Catholic Midwestern girl,” and the fallen angel of the title. She leaves her suburban home for the wilds of the city, where she sleeps with brutal young men who look like Marlon Brando and begins to experiment with drugs. She is a slightly older version of Natalie Wood’s iconic Judy in Rebel Without a Cause. Like previous suburban runaways, Maggie feels hollow and alienated. But Zambreno raises the volume to this pain, making it almost Beckett-like in both its extremity and its inclination toward self-satire. She writes, “Maggie is a public wound… O a more tortured soul than Maggie there never was.” She later interestingly thinks, “How lonely it is for Maggie to be so adapted to disguising her SECERT SELF.” And the fact that “secret self” is in bold seems to imply that there is no “secret self” here in the realist sense, but rather the “secret self” certain characters torment themselves over in particular types of melodrama. Not to belabor a point, but it’s a POP “secret self.”
Books like this sometimes fall between the cracks, and I hope this one doesn’t. Some readers, who don’t pick up on the suburban POP-gothic sensibility of this book, might find the characters too familiar; other readers who simply want a book to attack suburban lifestyles, SUV’s, red state mentalities, and other soft targets could overlook where the real energy of the book is coming from - i.e. its wonderful Crumbian/Koonsian eye for the acutely ugly, the kitschy, and the American grotesque.» - JP at exoskeleton

«For Mommy, one of three main characters in Kate Zambreno's novel, the way to keep dark thoughts and evil at bay is to dote on a granddaughter (because girls are sweeter than boys), watch TV (even Oprah, who's black yet articulate and gentle), collect angel figurines, and wait for the moment when "hubby pulls up in his chariot." Mommy doesn't like to dwell on her runaway daughter Maggie, a bad girl who lives in the depraved city of Chicago. Maggie, we're told, has become a cutter and a bulimic to relieve her suffering. She has little defense from the pain of daily life except violent lovers and pills prescribed for her bipolar disorder. "Maggie is trying to externalize the demons she has deep inside. That is why she wears all black and has black nail polish. That, and she enjoys making her mother deeply unhappy." When the last lover rejects her, Maggie spirals down from waitressing to selling sex. The third main character, street prophet Malachi, was inspired partly by Malachi Ritscher, who immolated himself near the Kennedy Expressway three years ago as a protest against the war in Iraq, and partly by Septimus Smith, the suicidal veteran in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. For Zambreno's Malachi, there's nothing to mitigate the pain of insanity, confusion, evil, and a heedless populace. Not much happens to any of the three until the very end, when their lives converge. Still, I found myself mesmerized, mostly by the rhythm and occasional whimsy of the prose. Zambreno breathes life into her characters with language alone.» —S.L. Wisenberg

«Kate Zambreno goes for the throat. Or at least her language does, in the manner of those who came to wreck not by demanding, but by will. Her debut novel, O Fallen Angel, (which won the Chiasmus Press ‘Undoing the Novel’ contest) arrives in the grand spirit of Acker, Artaud, Burroughs, but where these are A and A and B, Kate is Z in full: her own, slick, squealy, and of another light. As well: Fun, funny, fucked, freaklit, surprising, terrifying, gorgeous. Her words are a meat we surely want more of, quickly.
The copy of the back of O Fallen Angel says it was inspired by Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The images in that painting are quite striking, esp. in that I didn’t look it up until after the text. The orange and white contrast, with the odd body shapes on pedestals as if vivisected and mutated bits of humans stuck on gross smooth forms really resonated in retrospect with the three rotating voices of your text, and made me realize a lot about it in seeing, applying the imagery to the residual effect of your words. I wonder if you could talk about how that image struck you as a way of opening the door here, what effect it had in a process sense, and perhaps how it continued to inform the structure or tone of the book.
- I’ve been really haunted by that triptych. For a while I lived in London, really when I first started writing I worked in fiction at Foyle’s bookshop and read all of this experimental fiction for the first time—Ann Quin and Elfriede Jelinek and all the Peter Owen books, Jane Bowles, Anna Kavan—and ran the cult fiction section. I would go to the Tate Museums to the Francis Bacon room in the Tate Britain where they had that first major triptych. I worshipped and gawked at that first triptych, that orange gruesome horror it filled me with such violence and ecstasy. Those three gruesome distorted bodies, the open mouths in Bacon, the silent scream. I’m really interested in the silent scream how we are muted in society, Bacon’s mouths, Helene Weigel’s mouth wide open screaming an empty loss in Mother Courage, Munch’s Scream. I guess that’s some of what I was writing towards in O Fallen Angel, what I’m really always trying to write towards, those who are dumb and deaf but inside writhing with unwordable agony, and are diagnosed as selectively mute, those who lack language so they commit violent acts, they are only given language that is banal and well-behaved , the need to burn burn burn but they cannot so they set fire to themselves, they self-immolate (as one of my characters does literally and the other does symbolically). The spectacle of this, of the wound, to borrow an idea from Mark Seltzer’s cultural study of the serial killer. And we gather around this wound, this trauma in our talk-show society, but then we also suppress it, the anguish, sadness, we medicate it. I also really love how much a reader Bacon was and we both share a passion for the Greeks, the Greek tragedy really inspired O Fallen Angel, especially The Oresteia, the choruses threaded, some of the imagery, and Malachi is a Cassandra figure, ranting, raging, never believed.
And I guess I’m writing towards these figures, pondering Bacon’s figures, often when I’m writing I have all these visual images that inspire me around me, for O Fallen Angel it was various Bacon images and then some paintings by Marlene Dumas and then Durer’s gorgeous severed wing, which kind of was repurposed for the cover. I’ve been reading Deleuze on Bacon, especially the Hysteria chapter, which brings in Artaud, D&G’s inspiration for the body w/o organs and Beckett, both writers who wrote the silent scream, who were struggling against muteness. And I am really interested in the idea of writing hysteria, not only writing to the Bacon figures but also Freud’s hysterics like Dora kicking and screaming, and I love what Deleuze writes about the nervous systems of Bacon’s figures, also their cruelty, and in many ways O Fallen Angel is a very theatrical book, a very cruel book, and my three figures are hysterical, full of such anguish and violence, really such open throbbing wounds, such nervous systems. And I think of the mutiny against muteness in Thomas Bernhard, “the words that we hang on to because we became crazed by impotence and are made desperate by madness.” The epigraph to O Fallen Angel is from Buchner’s Woyzeck, “Every human being is an abyss. One grows dizzy looking down” a very Bacon image, us being fragmented, frenzied, hollow, and the play is basically about a guy who becomes really paranoid and kills his wife, and throughout the play he keeps on going to this doctor who just tells him to be an upstanding man of society. Which kind of connects to the other big influence on the book, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and my Malachi is the Septimus Smith figure, and my Mommy is Clarissa, and they are all hysterics, Malachi traumatized from the war, Mommy and Maggie traumatized by existence and the last two medicate their unhappiness and kitschify their thoughtstream. And you know what I really like about Bacon’s title is that it’s “A Crucifixion” not “The Crucifixion” and I guess I see my Maggie and Malachi being criminalized, crucified. And both works are set during war, and are about a war, being blind to others’ suffering, my Malachi self-immolates in protest of the war, which is inspired by a real person, Malachi Ritscher, who did just that in Chicago, although my fallen angel is and is not Malachi. And Maggie enacts her own war, her traumadrama, on her body.
Before writing the book I watched Last Tango in Paris, which is alluded to often in O Fallen Angel, Maggie’s penchant for Marlon Brandos with stringy hair, for these completely destructive abject love affairs, and at the beginning of the film Bertolucci shows two Bacons side by side. And I was really disappointed by the film, I didn’t get enough of her in it, maybe (although I just found out the other day that Agnes Varda wrote the woman’s dialogue, so maybe I should go back and reappreciate it) but so much of it seemed not really erotic, that’s just me, I far prefer Night Porter, however kitschy it is, to me it’s a better film about masochism and cruelty in love, how we cling to those who destroy us. But anyway since then I’ve been kind of obsessed with the idea of writing writhing Bacon figures in a room, clawing, cruel, craven, and of course the idea of a triptych, as O Fallen Angel is three figures as well (Mommy, Maggie, Malachi) and they rotate in kind of a rhythmic way. In O Fallen Angel I don’t have my figures really interact, they’re really isolated, in the current text I’m writing, another triptych, another family romance, there’s more love or at least touching, even if it’s violent touching or cruel touching (which kind of actually follows Bacon’s trajectory in his paintings, from figures alone in a room to figures kind of communing although still in isolation). But besides the figures in Bacon, these portraits of human suffering, I’m really interested in the spaces of Bacon, these claustrophobic, contained cells. The idea of cells we are trapped in, these small rooms, small minds, our bodies. Also the ambiguity of the cell. Is it a torture chamber? A hotel room? I love that uncertainty. And in O Fallen Angel there’s Mommy, the hysterical housewife, kind of a Jeanne Dielman figure, trapped in the house, she is literally the house, and then there’s Maggie, who’s kind of straitjacketed by her diagnosis on the DSM-IV and mind drugs, and Malachi, my martyr-terrorist, who is trying to be free of the confines of society. Both Maggie and Malachi are trying to be free. But also trapped by the cliches of language.
Interesting to read here about your dealing with the cliche of languages at the same time while handling such ornate and interesting imagery. I was struck in the book by the way that carried through, in that it’s a very clean and spare language most of the time, but handling some very heavy and haunting images. It seems like something that had been cooking in your oven a while and then came out crystalline. Is that true, or just an impression resulting? What were your habits of particular time and setting and making over the time the book was composed?
- I’ve often been so jealous of this model of the writer as one frenzied, one possessed—like Nietzsche, or Flaubert (Madame Bovary was a huge influence on O Fallen Angel, Flaubert who despised cliches, characters that were cliches, but also voluptuously loved cliches). I go in phases. Sometimes I am really frenzied. O Fallen Angel did just kind of come out of me—it’s funny you noticed that. It was the easiest thing I’ve fucking ever wrote, although it is drawing on ideas and in a way rewriting characters I’ve written before or characters that have been sitting in my mind for a while. I think all of my writing is just rewriting, retracing obsessions—maybe a lot of writers are like this. Also, I think it was an easier project than others I had taken on that I had basically figured out while I was writing it. I for once had a structure that was confining, contained, I had the triptych, I had these three characters haunting me—Maggie is in many ways a grotesque carciature of another character I had written before, Ruth in an unpublished novel Green Girl, a sort of postfeminist libertine who’s also quite passive and tragic, sort of like if a Jean Rhys heroine was alive now or Clarice Lispector’s Macabea. I also stole some of my former college journals for Maggie—a few scraps here and there—and I just gagged on how silly I was then, how green, there are a lot of really smart self-aware people at the age of, say, 21—I wasn’t one of them, I hadn’t yet come to any sort of consciousness. And then I had been obsessed with writing monologues of contained women, hysterical portraits, and Mommy was my attempt at this, she is Dora’s mother suffering from housewife psychosis, my Jeanne Dielman, my Molly Bloom, my Winnie in Happy Days (I am hoping to write more of these, actually). And then Malachi is directly inspired by two characters—Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway and Malachi Ritscher, a Chicagoan anti-war protester who self-immolated off a highway. They are all my hysterics, my fallen angels. And so yeah it was a bit of a possession, it became at times an incantation very repetitive and rhythmic. The writing was in a way automatic. I wasn’t aware of what it was, or whether it was successful. Because it came out of me so easily, like a fever dream. Like I had been planning it for a while, but I wrote it in a couple weeks, and edited it over a summer. My other manuscripts have taken years, are still unpublished, have been rejected countless times. But I just wrote this and didn’t know if it was good enough and sent it off to the Chiasmus contest, I had once read this short story “Loving Dora,” by Lidia Yuknavitch, the publisher of Chiasmus, also an FC2 author, and thought if anyone would get the text it would be her. It’s a weird thing. How easy it was. Compared to my other projects.
I love the notion of the funny unfunny funny again. I feel like often readers are so used to the grotesque being morbid or nasty that they can’t take it in the laughable way, that these jokes must come from pain and so are therefore painful. This happens a lot in my own writing: I think I’m putting down something that is cracking me up and when I read it to others or in publication the jokes get so buried in their context that people forget that laughter is even allowed. That is the best laughter, to me, the no laughter that is deleted laughter, because you are afraid. I see that all over your book, especially given the gift of you saying so: “Maggie is into Xtreme Love like Xtreme Sportz. Maggie needs to wear kneepads because of all the rugburns.” This happens too to the Von Trier and to Bataille (I find him hysterical, even when talking about fucking underage girls), and yet there is a remove there, maybe because the face is not in the house. It makes me wonder, then, about how a book is surrounded by the self, and in leaving the self takes on a wholly other air than if those words were somehow presented in the author, as it is in the author’s mind. This doesn’t happen very often, maybe with like people who remove so much context in presentation that you have to laugh, such as Harmony Korine, or Andy Kaufman, but I wonder how you see your author body in relation to this text? We’ve talked a bit before about bodies, and how gender functions and is or is not important, and especially in relation to this book I wonder if you are interested in talking about gender roles, the two females and then the (I assume) male Malachi, and how maybe that dissolved context of the body can be given back into a book once that book leaves the author. I’m not sure if this is a question, or how to proceed, but maybe talking about how you see the book as an object outside of you now, and that transfer of feeling in people taking things you meant one way another, especially in these roles, would be interesting to hear more about?
- I love freaking people out, the discomfort, the stillborn silence, and I feel I have way more license or permission or freedom to do that in writing than in person (maybe gender has something to do with it in life I feel more of a pressure to be nice? to be polite? to be good? so perhaps my writing for me is an attempt to flee the tremulous glossed smile). I had a pretty strict childhood, Catholic school, must make A honor roll, no ink on the plaid skirts, must keep between the lines, I was an ulcerous highstrung child because of all this, and I knew nothing about music, because I was basically always under house arrest, but some people have said the book is kind of punk rock, and I think, yes, a certain strain of my writing can be a form of rebelling or like the body artists of the 80s sort of flinging body fluids as ink onto the readership. I am reading a book about Marina Abramovic and she had a very strict mother as well , maybe there’s something to that, a sort of rebellious push against the family I’m thinking of Artaud as well, always, Artaud. One of the reasons my blog is called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, Frances Farmer had an oppressive mother, who was always pushing her, daddy Hollywood was always pushing her, and then she just snapped, went feral. But yes writing kind of fulfills the gross-out girl stand-up comic in me, or the performance artist, the Lydia Lunch or Karen Finley (Finley who blurbed the book, I asked, trembling, she typed me something on her Blackberry, she is from the Chicago suburbs like me, maybe why I’ve always identified, although Evanston is a far distance from Mount Prospect in many ways). In my new text l I have been laboring and laboring on it, but then I’ll write a line that really grosses me out and sickens me—although never close enough to Dennis Cooper transgression or Karen Finley transgression or what you pull off in your work—and then I’m absolutely delighted. I love that line you highlighted “Xtreme Love like Xtreme Sportz.” I always crack up when I say it, but I kind of read it very slow and sternly… that is a total example of a line that I find funny but people feel freaked out and want to call a 1-800-Therapist for me, because of course I’m Maggie, which I’m not, not totally, I mean, I’ve never smoked crack, that’s one thing Maggie does that I haven’t, I won’t get into lists of other things, I mean, do we really need a compare and contrast? Although I think characters like Maggie or my new Monkey in my work I’m writing are kind of ids for me, like Janey Smith was Acker’s alter-ego—they’ll say obnoxious taboo things that I sometimes am too political or polite to say in real life, kind of the unrepressed me, also the former me that I’m making fun of. I haven’t read Bataille on teenage girls! I think Roman Polanski is really funny when talking about fucking teenage girls—that line quoted in Playboy—everyone wants to fuck teenage girls! It’s funny in that it’s totally sick. What I love about Bataille is how his theory his erotic/pornographic stuff sometimes reads like purply-prose Harlequins—I love he’s such a wanking fangirl when writing about Wuthering Heights in Writing and Destruction.
Okay. Back to your question I wonder if there is something gendered in readers automatically aligning me with the character of Maggie and thinking Mommy is my mother (she isn’t, I had a very different mother), the work is really more of a social biography than pure autobiography, I mean, Gustave was Emma, yes, but he wasn’t really, he didn’t have the burden, people didn’t say, “Gustave, did you really try to take poison as a desperate cry for help? Gustave, did you really toss your wedding bouquet into the fire? Gustave, it’s really a shame you didn’t keep up with those piano lessons.” O Fallen Angel isn’t autobiographical in the way Piano Teacher was autobiographical for Jelinek—oh man that’s the best mother-daughter relationship ever represented in literature, the sadomasochism of such love, that scene where Erika just climbs on top of her mother and starts making out with her, like wanting to hate fuck her mother, wanting to climb back into her womb….But anyway I use autobiography but in a very refracted way in my writing. I am interested in these toxic girls, but they’re often based as well on many girls/women I have known, roommates, past intimates, students I’ve observed casually etc. I think the other fallen angel, Malachi, is just as much me or more me as Maggie is, and I think that’s where gender comes in, yes at times from the inside of creating but from the outside of reading, maybe in how readers might approach a book written by a woman, as purely autobiographical, I mean, I relate probably even more now to Malachi’s feelings of impotent alienation, and wanting to unravel in the street, wanting to stand in a street corner and scream and scream and yet I am strangely muted because no one is listening, but I (mostly) rein in that aspect of myself in order to be seen as normal in society. Again a mirroring with Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf is way more Septimus Smith than Clarissa Dalloway, she was afraid of seeming mad she didn’t want people to think she was mad so she refracted her autobiography in this traumatized soldier. And is Malachi really mad? I am reading Artaud’s essay Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, while alternately trying to write this: “And what is an authentic madmen? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.” That is what Malachi is to me, and I identify more with that, the outcast, than with Maggie, also a victim of the DSM-IV, a Dora. So when I write characters I do channel them, it is frenzied for me, I become them, I live their lives while sitting at the desk, this has been dangerous for me in the past, I was doing all this research on film sirens who went mad or were seen as mad and institutionalized, actually when I wrote Malachi I was writing Gene Tierney as well, the actress who was in Laura, and there’s eerie parallels between the two pieces, but I sometimes become these characters in a way, Baudelaire writes, “I have cultivated my hysteria with jouissance and terror,” like Vivien Leigh who began to dissolve into madness after playing Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, the tongue and hands cut off, after playing Blanche she too began to troll around red light districts, Flaubert too was the hysteric, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Miller, Breton, they all were the hysterics but they projected that onto their lovely madwomen wives or mistresses who became their fictitious creations. And so a woman is seen as always close to the body from the outside, I must be Maggie, maybe I am Maggie, I am the madwoman, pathologized, I don’t just write a madwoman. So I am not always gendered I guess when I write, I am more of a body dissolving into other bodies, past the limits of my body, I do agree with Woolf that the best writing is in a way androgynous. A woman’s body that is given back to me aware and uncomfortable in the author photo, in all the publicness that goes into publishing, the reading of the work. A story I tell in the Semiotext(e) book that I haven’t finished yet is that I was teaching a public seminar on “Women Modernists and Madness,” I was all dewy and delirious on Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and Jean Rhys, and I was teaching Good Morning, Midnight, and I had just taught Dalloway, which of course was all the old biddies and young trixies wanted to read, because they had heard of Woolf, you know, and read it at their sisters schools, and it was such a chore having to treat Rhys glorious Rhys like some gruel I have to force down their fucking gullets, and someone said of GMM, “I don’t know. I just feel like Ford Madox Ford put a pencil in her hand and said ‘Write. And I’ll just edit it a lot.’” And Blake I was murderous fucking murderous. These texts I carry around with me like under my skin, Good Morning, Midnight is way more of a part of me than O Fallen Angel, which felt like an accidental birth, especially this one text compared to the more precious stillborn babies for me that are not yet published, something I excreted at one time and now I have to carry around these shiny excretions in a box and shill them on the street corner, my baby-bodies, and I have to vomit out the words again and vomit out words in this interview and for fuck’s sake you are asking me so many questions! I have no idea why anything I’m saying is remotely interesting! I am being so vomitous! But I cannot help but vomit, vomit, vomit all the guts out. And everyone says to me “Congratulations” and I can’t help thinking of the lines from Hiromi Ito’s Killing Kanoko “Congratulations on your abortion.” Repeated ad infinitum. But I guess I do desire word-abortions book-babies that are stillborn monsters with three hairy heads. Although don’t know if I’ve managed ever to create such a book-baby. Maybe in the future. I think too this public thing is strange and alien to me an abduction-birth because I’ve taken only one creative writing class, ever, and it was a disaster. I wrote about a seedy living room den for girl-hookers who sat around and watched cartoons speechless while waiting to go out with clients and everyone in the class was kind of horrified with me, and were all shitty that it wasn’t realistic, and the ones who thought it was realistic wanted to stage some sort of Dr. Phil intervention with me, the ones who thought that the girl was me, which maybe she was, maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t, maybe she was, but it’s not a question some writers get.
As a closer, would you tell us about your recently announced book based on your blog writing, and other projects in the pipeline or in your head browser? Powerhouse.
- Four months ago I started my blog Frances Farmer Is My Sister randomly the day after my 32nd birthday, which was also New Year’s Eve , because I was now living in Ak-ron Ohio, because I was reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer for the first time in eons a book I read first when I was 21 out of school doing the midnight shift at a greasy spoon in love with a boy who was basically mute and we looked like twins and we would fuck and then eat burritos from Chipotle and he would snort coke off his Wilco CDs and we had a dog named Rex and I was certain I was going to have comely babies with him suppressing any other feeling of wanting anything else. And I remember being confused and horrified and compelled by all the sex stuff in Miller but years later I had dismissed Miller as a pig and now I was reading him and chasing it with Guyotat and chasing that with some Bataille, and felt like I needed to essay, I felt compelled to essay, to be all Montaigne, so I started writing the first in a series of way way too long essays over the next couple of weeks about the literature I was obsessed with, the artists and literary figures I was obsessed with, everything I was reading. And I had been working on a book for years called Mad Wife – a sort of fictional notebook about a woman writer who’s haunted by Jane Bowles, Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivienne Eliot, Sylvia Plath, who feels like she’s the reincarnation of them, like Anne Sexton thinking she’s the reincarnation of Edna St. Vincent Millay, also inspired by The Yellow Wallpaper and Gail Scott’s My Paris and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, and so I begin to write about these women on the blog as well, in my mind sort of as process for Mad Wife, and I also began to write about my experiences publishing, my thoughts on trying to get published, and that’s when I began to articulate more of my aesthetics, that was in a way oppositional, I began to in this public forum try to negotiate my relationship with the French feminists, with also the American feminists, with the New Narrative writers, with Cixous’ La Genet, with Dodie Bellamy’s Barf Manifesto, I wrote a long essay on anorexic versus bulimic writing in contemporary poetics…And it all became sort of spurting forth and I was ecstastic about it, all I could think about was all of these long weird formless essays I could write on the blog. And Chris Kraus at Semiotext(e), who I had sent my novel Green Girl, my existentialist novel about make-up that’s very inspired by Two Serious Ladies and The Hour of the Star, who rejected it but blurbed O Fallen Angel, Chris contacted me about two months in and asked whether I wanted to turn some of the longer essays into a book for Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series, the one that just published Eileen Myles’ Iceland and her Video Green, so exciting to me because I had just reread Aliens and Anorexia, and what Chris is doing in that book is so brave and raw and emotional and mindblowing. The timing was also kind of funny because at the same time I again got rejected from English Ph.D programs, the second year in a row, the feeling that I was an outsider to both creative writing and academia, and then, of course, sort of glorifying in that exile…So I have to write the book this summer. It’s not going to be bloggy. It’s going to be using some of the essays as raw material, extending them into other essays. I’m terrified. Some times I feel—yes! I get it ! I feel very empowered and sure of myself, and then other times I feel very cowed by not being an academic, by not using the correct language, mostly I babble, my mode of reading is masturbatory—did I already write that? The book is supposed to be a vulgar, angry, hopefully at times quite funny American version of Cixous’ Laugh of the Medusa. With my own posse of criminal or outlaw texts or figures, my feminist version of Miller’s Cunt Portraits. I don’t know. I have spoken too much about it. In that I feel funny putting that much weight on it but it’s a big deal to me, and I’m still about 59% sure I will fuck it up (note to self: interviews on HTML Giant should not be used as therapy).
My other stuff? When Chris approached me only two months ago I was working intensely on Mad Wife and Under the Shadow of My Roof, my incest text, another triptych. Shadow is a family romance/love triangle inspired by the Fritzl case. It’s a spatial as opposed to temporary triptych as in the daugher/mother stuff occur on the same page, a lot of it is about writing a family as a house, also a commentary on fascism, on priest abuse, on Abu Ghraib. There’s the Monkey-daughter, and it’s her notebook throughout most of the thing, Monkey disassociates often into all of these characters, often literary prostitutes, she imagines herself a Sadean libertine cum performance artist, and there’s also Mr. Von R and Mrs. Von R, the matriarch/patriarch. I think I’m a lot more humane to the hysterical mother figure in this work than in O Fallen Angel, I love her more, I read about 200 romance novels to prep for her character, and I have to say, reading those romance novels was the closest I have had to reaching ecstasy in so long. They’re like Valium. They’re amazing. What else? I still haven’t published Green Girl, the novel I worked on forever, or Book of Mutter, my hybrid long monstrous essay text dealing with my mother and also Marilyn Monroe, Henry Darger, the actress-director Barbara Loden, Frances Farmer, (where the title of the blog comes from, I’m big into naming writers as my mothers and sisters, stealing from Artaud, maybe because these writers/figures are a sort of family to me), others. So part of the work is trying to publish, trying to revise. Although at this point I have sent the works out everywhere, I think each have been rejected at least 60 times maybe more. I think Green Girl might have been rejected 100 times. There’s always other things in the pipeline, too many. Eventually taking time to rerewrite my monologues of film stars. A work called I Heart Andre Breton, about Claude Cahun, Nadja and Jacqueline Lamba. I want to figure out how to write plays. In Chicago where I’m from a group of writers I know want to start a theater company and we’ll all write plays and act, maybe put up a Thomas Bernhard play or a Jelinek play or a Sarah Kane play.» - Interview with Blake Butler


Kate blogs at:
http://francesfarmerismysister.blogspot.com

Momus - Bad jokes, dirty jokes are, to my world, what the force of gravity is to yours. I am a character trapped in a book of dirty jokes

Momus, The Book of Jokes (The Dalkey Archive, 2009)

«Imagine a universe where every joke you’ve ever heard is solid, real, and occasionally dangerous—and all happening, one after the other, to the same small group of people. Detailing a series of filthy and ludicrous episodes in the life of a single family, saddled with a super-eccentric, sexually rapacious father, The Book of Jokes tells the story of the youth and education of a bland young boy doomed to record—in an incongruously serious, autobiographical mode—all the ridiculous incidents befalling his household. With their lives dictated by set ups and punchlines, the boy’s family quickly becomes luridly dysfunctional, and he realizes that the only way to escape his tragicomic fate is by trying to take control of the joke-telling himself. Channeling the spirits of Chaucer, Rabelais, Flann O’Brien, and Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, the Vatican secretary who compiled the first known book of jokes in 1451, The Book of Jokes is a happy raspberry in the face of life as we know and tell it.»

"Momus' book is funny - sometimes laugh-out loud, sometimes wincingly - and the humor is delivered in Joycean puns, dry British parody and spoof..." - Los Angeles Times

"He lists Rabelais and Martial among his songwriting influences (with a side of Matthew Barney and Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange), and his music from Brecht to Beck on Moog and simulated harpsichord—is suitably challenging... His songs, by the way, are quite dirty, as might be expected of someone who goes in for the Decameron too." - The New Yorker

«Known primarily for his avant-garde music, Momus (aka Nick Currie) proves that he is no slouch as fiction writer either, easily translating his iconoclastic vision to prose. The novel is a phantasmagorical ride through dirty jokes that, in Momus's twisted alternate reality, dictate the lives of a very unfortunate family. It's all here: bestiality, incest, rape, murder and combinations thereof, as if related in the locker room of a junior high. There is no clear narrative structure; the action meanders through anecdotes told by the narrator-sometimes a young boy, and sometimes his hugely endowed father-who lives in a glass house and is sometimes imprisoned with a pair known only as the Murderer and the Molester. The humor is dark and absurd and genuinely funny (though not for everyone), and the style is reminiscent of Naked Lunch, with puns and coarse jokes instead of caterpillars and otherworldly creatures. This strong and short novel, despite its uncompromising structure and style, is delightfully crude and never ever dull.» - Publishers Weekly

«At the unimagined crossroads of 1,001 Arabian Nights and Truly Tasteless Jokes stands The Book of Jokes, by Scottish songwriter Nick Currie, who goes by the pen-name “Momus.” The speaker of The Book of Jokes, “Sebastian Skeleton,” finds himself in prison, where he’s targeted by a Murderer and a Molester—those are their names—whose dreadful intentions can only be suppressed by Sebastian’s storytelling, which makes him a Scheherazade figure, whose subject is almost exclusively his own family. When Sebastian was a boy, the Skeleton family performed—embodied? experienced?—a particularly gruesome and hilarious array of dirty jokes, as when, for example, Sebastian’s father falls in love with a duck, and then grows jealous of this duck’s duck boyfriend, whose barn he sets on fire, and then parades his mistress duck before his wife, announcing, “This is the pig I’ve been fucking.” And when his wife protests, he says, “I wasn’t speaking to you.”
As Sebastian escapes prison with the Murderer and the Molester, the stories he tells grow complex, self-referential and oblique, and while each one takes the shape of a joke, chapters do not necessarily end there, they press on in unexpected, melancholy forms. Sebastian’s mother, Joan, leaves his father and dates another woman named Joan, while his father subjects him and his sister to escalating abuses I had better not describe, and entertains a priest who tries to exorcise his demons, and who also tells the one about the butcher and the human-eating cat. The Molester and the Murderer confess that they are innocent of their crimes, and later turn out to be lying. Everyone goes chasing their desires and never quite achieves them, and they never really understand themselves, which Momus echoes formally by having the Murderer and the Molester argue throughout the book over whether a man can really be his uncle’s uncle. The Book of Jokes is not a collection of punchlines or tension-building schemes, it’s a flexible and sensitive solution to the problem of how to invigorate conventions like the novel using overlooked materials.
Momus is a slyly articulate stylist with a lovely flair for syntax and the lexical. An example: Sebastian’s mother’s lawyer wears “…a fibule-fastened chiton surmounted by a himation, itself topped off by a jaunty chlamys…” He also has a sensitive instinct for ethics: of Sebastian’s father, he says, “He was consummate hypocrite. Or, as he preferred to put it, a dialectician.” And he finds a way to blend the funny and the horrid into the banal: “My father, meanwhile, spends his time making highly detailed technical drawings with a mechanical pencil. The drawings depict utopian improvements he intends to make to the estate. We know he will never implement these plans, and soon he admits it to himself, turning to his feathered friend instead.” This passage wouldn’t be out of place in Thomas Bernhard; substitute the internet for the duck and you have almost every father in the world.
The Book of Jokes contains scenes of sexual violence that are genuinely shocking, which is Momus’s goal, of course: to transcend every barrier of taste, good and bad. On the other hand, the book offers chances to debate all sorts of questions we don’t usually get to ask, such as, is it worse to describe your father’s coitus with a duck, or your son’s? The Book of Jokes is an absolute gem.» - Adam Novy

«The cult favorite Scottish musician Nick Currie has taken Momus as his stage name, a reference to the Greek god of satire who was banished from heaven after mocking Zeus, and just about every other god in the pantheon. Naming yourself after the most famous god to joke truth to power tips your hand, of course: It's almost like having a bumper sticker on your car that reads "Jokes Are No Laughing Matter." Humor is famously hard to pull off; it's even harder if you think, even for a minute, that what you're doing isn't, at least to some degree, unserious. It's hard to tell, listening to Momus's music, whether he takes himself very seriously or not at all. It's that contradiction that has caused his work to be greeted with devotion by his fans and shrugs by those who don't get it. And nobody seems really sure whether there actually is anything to get.
It's likely that his debut novel, The Book of Jokes, will be received with the same confused reactions. The book is gleefully postmodern, and only a novel in the most technical sense: it's meta-jest, a long joke about jokes, and it is, by turns, funny and horrifying. It's no surprise that Momus turns out to be a talented writer - his lyrics have always been wholly original and sometimes brilliant, and he's worked previously as a journalist. The surprise is that he comes pretty close to pulling off a nearly 200-page-long joke about jokes without coming off as pretentious, precious, or in love with his own voice. It's not perfect. It's overlong, even given its slim size, and it's so convoluted in parts, it sometimes veers toward incoherence. But it's very funny, and even though his literary influences are sometimes apparent - Genet, Calvino, and (obviously, given the subject matter) Rabelais - it's definitely original.
The two protagonists of the novel are (as near as I can tell; Momus, perhaps deliberately, isn't overly clear on who is speaking when) Sebastian Skeleton, jailed with a murderer and a rapist with designs on him, and Peter Skeleton, his son, who tries to explain the family to the reader. The Skeletons live in a glass house - this is probably significant, but hell if I can figure out why - and they live their lives in what seems to be an alternate reality where jokes control the machinations of the universe. Got it? Of course not. Remember that this novel is itself a joke; the premise doesn't have to make sense, which is good, because at no point does anything in this book come close to making sense.
Chapters alternate between Sebastian and Peter. The former spends his time plotting an escape from prison with the murderer and the rapist; the latter recounts his childhood growing up in a family governed by jokes. Here's Peter trying to explain his situation:
'Call it "joke dharma," if you like. Bad jokes, dirty jokes are, to my world, what the force of gravity is to yours. They shape every event in my life, and in the life of my family. I am not sure why it is so, but that it is, I cannot doubt. As a result, I live in a grim mirror world. I am a character trapped in a book of jokes - jokes, furthermore, which are in very poor taste.'
"Poor taste" is an understatement; it is, in fact, one of the only moments of understatement in this book. The jokes that govern their lives involve rape, incest, pedophilia, bestiality, and death. It's uncomfortable stuff - in parts, Peter performs oral sex on his father after Sebastian has raped Peter's sister, and he's sexually mutilated by his grandfather. These aren't the kind of jokes that you actually, you know, laugh at. But by taking the jokes to their logical conclusion - anyone who's been to college and had at least one friend with an unsettling, sick sense of humor has heard these - Momus forces the hand of the reader, asking him or her to confront why we think some things are funny and some are taboo.
Momus's prose is elegant and practiced; the contrast between his somewhat formal writing style and the startlingly offensive subject matter is effective, and maybe the main reason this book succeeds to the extent that it does. And it is funny, in an unbearably grim way. His funniest moments aren't his forays into black humor, necessarily; he's actually at his best when he's a little restrained. (In one of the book's funniest passages - it's almost a throwaway line - Sebastian describes the weather: "The brilliant afternoon began to cloud over now, and a spring chill spread through the air. April is the cruelest month! And it was only March.")
As the book spirals toward its climax, you begin to wonder whether Momus has concocted nothing more than a shaggy dog tale, the kind of joke with a long, elaborate setup, and a punchline that makes no sense. The last several pages make it seem that way. But Momus ties it together with the last sentence of the book, bringing everything home in a totally unexpected way. It's a little heartbreaking, it's very funny, and it's intensely clever - one sentence that actually redeems, and comes close to explaining, some of the more meandering and inexplicable passages earlier in the book. Momus's novel is a lot like his music: It's an acquired taste that I'm not really sure whether I've acquired. I can't say that I understand this novel; I suspect that understanding, though, wasn't what Momus was going for here. And it is, after all, more of a joke than a novel. I'm not sure I get it. But I'm pretty sure that doesn't matter.» - Michael Schaub

«Jokes are a genre of fiction, but the best way to deliver a zinger is to disguise it as autobiography. Comedians know this and the good ones transform themselves into quasi-fictional subjects, weaving long strings of jokes into anecdotal memoir. "The Book of Jokes," a new book by Momus, marries the self-aware comedian to unreliable narrator, joke to plot and filthy humor to experimental fiction.
Momus (a Scot named Nick Currie) is known as a prolific trickster songwriter of farcical dream-pop and literary bedroom folk. He also works as a journalist covering design and calls himself a "polymath-dabbler." "Pop music," he once said, "was what you could scribble in the margins of literature." For his novels, Currie continues to use his Momus moniker, suggesting that his fiction is not entirely discrete from his songwriting. This year has seen two publications for Momus: "The Book of Scotlands," an amorphous fiction concerning "solutions" for alternative Scotlands (its subtitle is "Every lie creates a parallel world. The world in which it is true."); and "The Book of Jokes," which is somewhat more novelistic and understands its own parallel worlds by way of the old-fashioned joke.
In "The Book of Jokes," a nameless protagonist retells his family saga, in which everything that happens to the family is the premise of a joke. His uncles, for instance, are "[t]he Englishman, Scotsman, Irishman and the Welshman." In the way that Robert Coover and John Barth reinterpreted fairy tales and American urban myths in their fiction, Momus uses the folklore of humor.
Also like Coover and Barth, Momus enjoys his postmodern self-reflexivity. The narrator tells his joke-stories while in prison as a way of postponing his own death at the hands of two inmates named Murderer and Molester, who, he explains, "were hated men, but they hated me more." He compares himself to a modern Scheherazade (recalling Barth's "Chimera"), the type of storyteller who knows that she is using seductive narrative as a tool for deceit. Momus writes that, like a used condom, "a used character from a joke is something pathetic and sad, the kind of thing you find abandoned in a forest whose trees are draped with polyethylene bags."» - Ross Simonini

«A few months ago, the editors of this magazine asked if I would be interested in being part of an experiment in criticism. They were curious what would happen if we inverted the standard “anonymous review” formula—if instead of the reviewer having the cloak of anonymity, we were to keep the book under review anonymous from its critic, and thereby shield it from any and all prejudice—whether positive or negative, whether directed at the author, the publishing house, the blurbers, the cover art, etc. I swore several oaths to stay true to the project (Eds.: “No googling”), and soon enough a book arrived at my house. Its covers, front matter, and endpages had all been stripped, and the spine blacked out with a Sharpie. I didn’t know what it was called or who wrote it or who was publishing it or when. I didn’t know if it was the author’s first or twenty-first publication. Fiction? Nonfiction? Genre? Self-published? I didn’t know anything (and at this writing, I still don’t) except that it wasn’t poetry. What could I do? I began to read.
'Dad darkens my sister’s doorway, throws his shadow across the fine-haired skin of her white belly. The lamplighters crane to watch. They will report what they’ve seen to the postmen, and the postmen will report it to the teachers, and the teachers—solemnly—to their classes. Then the school bullies will corner me in a piss-stinky lavatory cubicle and tell me.
But I’ll know already. Because of the taste on Dad’s dick.'
So, uh, not nonfiction then? (Please, please, please don’t let this be nonfiction.)
Soon after, the speaker finds himself in that very lavatory, getting bullied just as predicted. “Do you want to die peacefully in your sleep like your grandpa,” the bullies ask him, “or screaming in terror like his passengers?”
Now wait a minute. I reread the sentence to be sure. Was it? Oh yeah. That’s a joke! A joke I’d heard before! Realizing this made me realize that the line about Dad’s dick in the first scene was, in fact, a punch line. The whole scene was a retelling of an old, gross—but hardly unfunny—joke. I read on, and the jokes kept coming.
The book follows two main characters, the priapic Sebastian Skeleton and his perpetually beset son Peter, who switch off chapters as narrator. They—along with Peter’s sister, Luisa, Sebastian’s estranged wife, Joan, Joan’s current lesbian lover (also named Joan), and two felons named the Murderer and the Molester—live in an X-rated cartoon universe the nature of which Peter explains thusly: “Bad jokes, dirty jokes are, to my world, what the force of gravity is to yours... I am a character trapped in a book of jokes—jokes, furthermore, which are in very poor taste.”
By the time I encountered this explanation (it comes about fifty pages in) I was already thinking about a few other books that have attempted conceits like this: Extravaganza by Gordon Lish, Funny by Jennifer Michael Hecht, and (twice-removed, conceit-wise, but still relevant) No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman. These are the kinds of associations that book jackets typically make for you (“In the tradition of…”; “The best _____ since _____”), so I felt a touch of readerly pride at having earned my reference points unabetted, and this satisfaction was compounded by the knowledge that I had no way to “check” my conclusions.
In a club as small as this one (the joke-book-as-literature), it would be churlish to issue rankings to the membership. This book’s pace is breakneck, and logic holds no sway over the proceedings. Randomness and depravity rule the day, often to great and surprising effect; though occasionally to this reader’s disgust, such as in the scene of the Molester’s great—ahem—triumph. I was sometimes unsure whether the author intended the book as anything other (I hesitate to say “more”) than a joke itself, though this begged the unsettling question of who that joke was on.
As to the sensory-deprivation school of reading, I have to say that it was an enormously disorienting experience. Jacket copy does more than simply entice you to buy. It supplies a framework for one’s experience. It is less a movie trailer than it is a placard on a museum wall, telling you not just how to look at the painting, but what to see there when you do. I found myself freed from the tyranny of the preprogrammed response, set adrift, context-free, at sea with an alien text. Every reviewer—every reader—should hope to be so lucky.» - Justin Taylor

«According to British cultural critic Jonathan Meades, there exists an "Iron Curtain of Irony" in the United Kingdom that charts its course from Liverpool to just south of Grimsby. North of this division, he maintains, the idea of speaking against yourself — of saying the opposite of what you mean — is about as popular as Sydney Cooke. Of course, this statement is but another searing irony. What Meades is describing here (in form and substance) is one of the dominant modes of British humour; his delineation of an imaginary fault line in comic tastes used conversely to describe its shared nature through the deployment of the idiom itself — sarky British patter. Put bluntly, he's just taking the piss, folks, and in time-honoured fashion too.
And Meades makes a good point here, because this fictional division is no more real than the idea that there's a totality of what constitutes humour. We may indeed share certain sensibilities when it comes to having a laugh, but in sharing them such totality becomes impossible, since ownership is never total. This too follows the very trajectory of aural gags; of dirty jokes told by old men in public houses that everyone knows the punchlines to but concede to hearing anew nonetheless. Humour, like fiction, is a landscape wrought by the friction of familiarly imagined subjects and imaginary settings. It may seem plausible, for example, that the chicken crossed the road. But for what purpose? And ultimately, why the fuck is the conclusion funny at all? These things are never fully explained. Comedy therefore occupies a truly opaque space, where its object is revealed at the end but never quite reasoned. It's a territory where delivery and timing rule supreme, and a site that Momus (also known as the Scottish musician Nick Currie) explores in The Book of Jokes, until very little is left uncharted.
Or so it would seem. Confluence and ambiguity are all prevalent in this, Currie's second novel, narrated at turns by a paedophilic father called Sebastian Skeleton and his abused son, Peter. Here, the imaginary and the imagined conspire against the reader through its form, which is essentially a series of standard skits distorted into the original framework of a novel. This too, however becomes uncertain due to the similarity of the father and son's narrative purpose. On the one hand, the former is doomed to retrace his offence by agreeing to escape from prison with two men simply called the Molester and the Murderer, who form a glib pact to enact the crimes that they were incarcerated for, and so vindicate their original prison sentences, of which they believe themselves to be innocent. In the latter, Peter is condemned to recount his father's criminal perversion using jokes, which he explains away as some sort of grim psychiatrist's coping mechanism, based on the spiritual principle of Dharma.
But is that really the purpose of humour? This is the question Momus raises and his answers are stark; or rather, obscene. To take a leaf from the stand up comic's handbook, there exists an unwritten rule in the trade that jokes about kiddy fiddlers are out of bounds. Yet this is exactly what Momus is gunning for here, and social transgression couldn't be further from his game. What this book is satirising is this duplicity of, on the one hand, maintaining that by making light of the world's ills we are able to understand them and find them less terrible and, on the other, telling us that certain things can never be laughed at, no matter how unreal we make them.
But make no mistake — The Book of Jokes is not mere tatty pornography. Its target here is authority, not your own personal sense of decency. It is a piece of moral philosophising that takes aim at hypocrisy and fires at will with the deftness of Flann O'Brien's tongue and B.S. Johnson's imagination. In his 2005 documentary, Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog essentially suggested that the powerful should not avert their gaze, and Currie certainly does nothing of the sort here. If that upsets you, then you should probably avoid reading this tome and take to living underneath a rock.» - Huw Nesbitt

«"I think it took me a while to realize that novels could be low and disreputable," said Momus when I e-mailed him last week, explaining why he'd finally sat down and written a book. As is fitting for a 49-year-old man whose nom de guerre is taken from that of the Greek god of mockery, The Book of Jokes is more or less what it promises to be. The title and some of the gags are lifted from a book of the same name by the 15th-century Italian humorist Poggio Bracciolini. The plot, a complicated allegory of incest, bestiality, and an improbably large penis, mostly takes place in the "intellectual Sodom" of a Scottish farmhouse. The Salzkammergut municipality of the Austrian Alps, Bell's Hinge-Backed Tortoise, and a book of poetry titled Copulating Gorillas at Longinch feature heavily. Some characters disintegrate mid-narrative; others address us directly.
Momus—whose work as a Genet-checking, electro-pop cabaret songwriter was the logical preamble to the book he ended up writing—is, in a way, fulfilling a certain kind of art-rock destiny. Highly literate pop, from the Decemberists to Mission of Burma to Talking Heads, has been something like its own genre for approaching five decades now. The only real surprise is that more musicians from this scene haven't written fiction. "I was always basically a cantautore, a singing author," Momus says.» - Zach Baron

«In a black-and-white snapshot taken at the Canongate Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh in 1980, the shamanic German artist Joseph Beuys delivers a lecture-cum-performance entitled "The Jimmy Boyle Days" to an audience of local artists, students and art teachers. Some are rapt, a few suspicious, others flagrantly bored. Most still sport the hair and fashions of the decade just gone by. But one figure stands out in the front row: a fair-haired youth of fey but awkward mien, in austere spectacles, heavy sweater and Doc Martens. He is Nick Currie, a 20-year-old Bowie-obsessed virgin and aspirant fop, a literature student with art-school envy and an urge to ingratiate himself into Scotland's post-punk scene. Within a few years, he will have reinvented himself as the louche and erudite singer Momus, and begun to describe an eccentric orbit of the pop world.
Currie's career – if that is what it is – surely ranks among the oddest in pop; the Beuys photograph neatly captures his Zelig-like presence at the edge (or is it the heart?) of the culture. The suspiciously fragile and well-read singer-songwriter of the mid 1980s – schooled on Bowie, Brecht and Brel – was rapidly emboldened, and his lyrics frankly empurpled, by the influence of Serge Gainsbourg. In the 1990s, while others essayed unsubtle variations on his sound and sense, Currie almost gave up poised and sibilant perversion for a brief but lucrative tenure as songwriter to one of Japan's most successful pop stars, Kahimi Karie. His own records subsequently leaped from homemade techno-melancholia to trickster raids on folk, glitch-pop and synthesised "analogue baroque". Somewhere in the hall of mirrors of his current activities – Currie is also an art and design critic, blogger, lecturer, performance artist and, most recently, a novelist – there lounges one of pop's most scurrilous and brittle lyricists, still capable of raising blushes and laughter in the same breath.
In a sense, the persona Currie contrived on his early records was born out of exactly the milieu pictured in that 1980 photograph: a self-conscious amalgam of a very British pop-lust, dreams of the continental avant-garde and the new, grey dawn of post-punk. If his records sometimes sounded like the Pet Shop Boys trying to describe Leonard Cohen, the Momus character (as also the fact of Currie's self-invention) was curiously indebted to the bruised and sly romantics of post-punk: Howard Devoto of Magazine, Billy Mackenzie of the Associates, Bid from the Monochrome Set. His first solo album (after a short stint as singer with the Happy Family) was released in 1986 on the impossibly arch and elegantly art-directed label El Records. Circus Maximus is for the most part a skewed reading of certain classical and biblical themes. The urgent, whispering Currie professes himself a masochistic St Sebastian ("preferring the ache to the aspirin") and sings of "The Rape of Lucretia" like a Morrissey who had not stopped at an enthusiasm for Oscar Wilde but mined the whole decadent tradition: Pater, Swinburne, Huysmans.
Circus Maximus is an audacious debut, but still somehow a projection of the scholarly, retiring Nick Currie rather than the divinely scornful monster that is Momus. (The name is not only derived from the Greek god of satire and censure; there is also a Herr Momus in Kafka's The Castle.) An EP followed, on which the spirit of Brel pressed harder on Currie's delivery and lyrics. In "Three Wars", he recasts adolescence, middle age and decrepitude as scenes from the 20th century's great wars: "The first war begins with the testicles descending, / And desire assassinating the child that you once were." A second album, The Poison Boyfriend, was released in 1987. In "Flame Into Being", Currie flaunts his reading (in this case, John Berger and DH Lawrence) in a hymn to radical self-invention: "I'm in love with everyone who knows it's hard to build a way of seeing, / Who knows that nevertheless that's the only way to flame into being."
It was on his 1988 album Tender Pervert, however, that Currie put the finishing touches to the Momus mask. A sort of ravaged innocence is the theme of several of its songs, their images shamelessly compiled from fragments of The Picture of Dorian Gray, André Gide's The Immoralist and Ian Buruma's A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture. But even the least worldly of his characters evince a strain of gleeful cruelty, while icy parodies of contemporary chart pop (Prince, Pet Shop Boys) threaten to overwhelm the album's more delicate acoustic arrangements.
Lyrically, Tender Pervert is conjured out of a world that is part fin-de-siècle exquisite, part 1980s mundane. As a satirist, Momus skewers precisely the Britain of the Thatcher years, with its Aids-panicked homophobia and left-wing musicians' feeble stabs at a cultural alternative. "Love on Ice" reimagines Torvill and Dean as gay martyrs. "I Was a Maoist Intellectual in the Music Industry" is the doleful memoir of a failed musical revolutionary: "My downfall came from being three things the working classes hated: / Agitated, organised and over-educated."
But obvious satire was only one of the strings to Momus's faux-gilt bow; the more beguiling songs were those that conjured a world of decadence and near-depravity in which his frail protagonists were at once victims and perpetrators. The narrator of "In the Sanatorium" keeps his beloved institutionalised and enfeebled: "Half in love with easeful death / I cloud the mirror with your breath / Half in love with this disease / That keeps you close to me." "The Homosexual", meanwhile, concerns a heterosexual serial seducer who pretends that he is harmlessly gay: "I love women, but I take them by surprise / Pretending absolute indifference to their breasts and thighs."
None of which should suggest that the early Momus records are merely eloquent and ironical, though a deliberate slightness and detachment is assuredly as much part of their allure as Currie's lyrical deviousness. At the same time, he clearly craved mainstream success, and for a time seemed as though he might achieve it with a series of singles – notably "The Hairstyle of the Devil", a radio hit in 1989 – that set his dandified wordplay against dance beats modelled on (or even sampled from) the Pet Shop Boys. Indeed, for a time Momus seemed to become a sort of para-Pet Shop Boys, replacing Neil Tennant's deadpan narratives of love and loss with lurid fantasias based on JG Ballard's Crash and paintings by Balthus.
Momus records of the late 1980s and early 1990s sound as though they might have been huge hits, catapulting Currie from relative obscurity to the kind of outright adoration that, among the indie icons of that era, only Morrissey attracted. In truth, though, Momus was the anti-Morrissey. They may have shared some literary tastes and a morbid aggrandising of their own animosities towards the cultural mainstream, but Currie could never perform outright sincerity in the way that Morrissey could; in the end, he was too smart and too ambiguous. Still, by the mid-1990s, it seemed that Currie's faith in his own inauthenticity might have paid off, at least in terms of influence. Acts such as the Divine Comedy, Babybird and Belle and Sebastian all owed him much, though they rarely attained his metaphysical wit or risked his psychosexual complexity. Only Pulp, in the svelte, imperial phase that surrounded their 1995 album Different Class, came close.
By that time, Currie had more or less abandoned the pose of haggard and lustful aesthete for a no less self-conscious (but lyrically much simpler) sci-fi aesthetic. Albums such as Voyager and Timelord saw him contriving a homemade digital sound that matched his tales of extraterrestrial ennui: the dandy Des Esseintes stranded at Tranquility Base. He himself seemed happily adrift under the new 1990s micromarketing regime, content to treat his cult status as a digital cottage industry. (He wrote rather presciently in 1991 that in the future everybody would be famous for 15 people.) By the end of the decade he had left London for Paris, then Tokyo and New York, before settling in recent years in Berlin. He has never stopped recording and performing – a new album, Joemus, a collaboration with the young Scottish musician Joe Howe, was released late last year – though lately his extra-musical activities have been more visible than his albums.
For more than a decade, Momus has been a tireless and provocative presence on the internet; he was one of the first pop performers to blog with anything like articulacy, never mind elegance and wit. His essays and blog posts, which now appear daily, have covered everything from his own medical catastrophe (he lost the sight in one eye in the late 1990s) to the cultural motif of the Pierrot, the end of postmodernism to the aesthetics of tiling in Athens. If he tends (and intends) to infuriate with his consistent cultural opportunism – a long-standing erotic fascination with Japan invariably angers interlocutors on his blog – he is also a commentator of rare imagination and insight, even when one suspects his opinions are as changeable as his eccentric attire.
For some time, his eyepatch and charity-shop get-up have been a familiar sight at the edges of the art world: he writes for several art magazines and has performed the role of "unreliable tour guide" at the Whitney Museum and elsewhere. What Currie has not been until now is a writer of books; his first, The Book of Scotlands, was published this summer. It's a typically playful volume: a numbered list of possible parallel nations, devised, he has said, in the hope of influencing the culture of a future independent Scotland. There is Scotland 166: "The Scotland in which four hundred years of profound influence from Calvin is replaced by four hundred years of profound influence from Calvino". And Scotland 870: "The Scotland in which every schoolchild can recite by heart the tabletalk of RD Laing". There is the Scotland (689) to which Alan Lomax and Alfred Kinsey travelled in 1954, intending "to compile data on Scottish masturbation". If The Book of Scotlands reads at times like a knowing amalgam of Calvino, Donald Barthelme and Georges Perec, it is also not wholly removed from the whimsical world of Ivor Cutler; one can quite imagine a future in which Momus grows older and odder and more essential in the same way.
The second Momus book The Book of Jokes is notionally a novel, in which one Sebastian Skeleton is forced to tell stories to a murderer and a molester who will otherwise set upon him. This Arabian Nights structure soon ramifies into a pattern of overlapping and invariably obscene tales: there is much violence, blasphemy and sex with innocent fowl. The Book of Jokes is perhaps not what enthusiasts of Tender Pervert might have imagined the neurasthenic troubadour might produce as he neared the age of 50: his youthful persona presaged either a turn to more rarefied literary pursuits or a slow and lurid decline in the Gainsbourg manner. But Currie's has so far been both a more mercurial and less evanescent career than one could have predicted. Having escaped fame on others' terms more than once, he seems singularly well placed to bend the mainstream to his frail, lewd, egomaniacal and tender visions.» - Brian Dillon

"In 1957, Roth v. United States brought a ruling that obscenity had to be »utterly without redeeming social importance«, thus rewriting America’s notion of censorship. Formerly banned works, such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, would suddenly enjoy circulation. Moral turpitude ceased to be an issue, so long as redeeming social value were identifiable in a work.
Momus’ first novel, The Book of Jokes, jauntily weaves through a universe opaque with bestiality, incest, rape, and murder, all in the context of the Ineluctable Joke. The premeditated rape and murder of a young girl is a breezy affair, when contrasted to the novel’s insurmountable adversary — Jokes, with their »punch lines« hovering like death. Momus’ delivery is gentle yet with a note of urgency obviating clear narrative structure – »a gripped kind of note, like the sound of someone playing a cheap rubber clarinet while wearing a high-quality pair of welding gloves«, as the Murderer, one of the book’s characters remarks.
Jovial narrator/protagonist Peter Skeleton ushers us through unrepentantly ribald family anecdotes. He lives in a glasshouse with his well-endowed father, named Sebastian, and his tetchy sister Luisa. Life’s unfolding must adhere to Jokes, with which all thoughts and utterances pullulate. In earlier times, when the family lived on a farm, his mother Joan, »a woman as well-endowed with intelligence as with beauty«, left his father for a secret look-alike lover also named Joan, after his father confessed to an affair with a goose. It is monotony that prompts young Skeleton to stonewall and prevaricate, hoping to short-circuit Jokes. For reasons that do not become apparent, Sebastian Skeleton is imprisoned. He and his two cellmates, the Murderer and the Molester, are innocent. Together they escape so that each may carry out his alleged crime, thereby conferring honor on their respective sentences, and justly return to the cell. When the trio bands together as fugitives, the reader is toured through Skeleton’s life –dreamily, in the manner of Annie Hall, where Alvy brings Annie not only to his childhood home but to dramatic childhood scenes therein.
Chapter 33 examines an owl joke told by a country lady serving apple pie to the Skeletons. The three Skeletons’ interruptions, probing the joke’s cumbersome details, transform the rustic scene into a productive Rorschach.
»There were three mes,« she said, »on an expedition in search of the source of the Lumbeezee River, deep in the jungle.« »Three yous?« echoed my father, puzzled, waving aside clouds of cream steam. »Yes,« said the lady. »The over me, the me, and the under me.« Luisa blushed slightly as the lady pronounced the words ›under me‹. It was an odd story, but the lady continued it, placing three hot bowls of sweet white food in front of us. »Suddenly the three mes were surrounded by an owl.« »Surrounded by an owl?« asked my father, his consternation growing. »How so?« »Have you never been surrounded by an owl, when there are three of you?« asked the lady. »No,« said my father …
Jokes needn’t be dogmatic. We live within the psychosexual framework of Jokes, and they needn’t be repeated verbatim. Jokes may be dismantled, thus augmenting our breadth of experience. Peter’s father, Sebastian, carries on a lengthy secret affair with his ex-wife’s lover, Joan.
Joan (my mother) was wearing a diplax hymation and powder-blue mantile in Thracian style. Joan (her lover) had on a double-girded pink chiton, kilted at the knee.
We find Momus heroically drawing ponderous chapters to a sensible close, his insights creatively captivating and intellectually challenging. The Book of Jokes, in examining tufts of familial discord, heuristically moves the reader to cheat Eternal Recurrence through
exemplary aleatory revisions of the Joke." - David Woodard