Miles Klee - A fictional New Jersey suburb called Ivyland is a lot like our own– except caterpillars run wild, policeman are shot down in ice cream trucks without consequence, and a pharmaceutical behemoth peddles a drink called Adderade

Miles Klee, Ivyland, OR Books, 2012.

"Debut novelist Miles Klee takes a landscape of drugs, decay, loss and, perhaps, hope, and manages to make the ensemble wryly funny: something only a few notable contemporaries such as Jeff Vandermeer and Michael Chabon have been able to do. Post-urban New Jersey is instantly recognizable in this interlinked series of short vignettes.
Populated by a bumbling, murderous citizenry of corrupt cops, innocents, ravenous addicts, lovesick geniuses, and cynical adventurers, Ivyland operates in the shadow of a giant pharmaceutical corporation that thrives on people’s weaknesses... and may have an even more sinister agenda. It’s our world, only a bit more extreme, and lovingly, precisely depicted with the adept skills native to a master of dark humor.
It’s spring in Ivyland . . .. . . and Lev’s living room is puddles of water and sun, and a bunch of those furry caterpillars are hauling themselves from surface to surface."

“Delightfully manic and sharply intelligent... Klee is undoubtedly a formidable talent in the making—he can make sentences crackle with an intensity and humor not seen since David Foster Wallace.” —Publishers Weekly

“Ivyland is a harsh, spastic novel about drug-addled misfits clawing their way through a wrecked future that feels disconcertingly familiar. As if that wasn't enough, it's also got evil caterpillars, flung jellyfish, great prose, new drugs, sharp jokes, a stolen ice cream truck and a miracle tree.” —Justin Taylor

“Miles Klee’s fiction is not only devastatingly smart; it’s also ruthlessly hilarious. But I love it most for the manic comedy it manages to wring from despair: that’s a talent that’s likely to be more and more valuable in the coming years.” —Jim Shepard

“Apocalyptic, word-drunk, inventive, hilarious--and that doesn't begin to cover Miles Klee's exuberant first novel. His catastrophic caterpillars alone are worth the journey; both the vision and the language delight.”—Andrea Barrett

"Putting aside the question of nature versus nurture and focusing on the (semi-)recent ruling in New York regarding gay marriage, it is possible to imagine proud parents George Saunders and Philip K. Dick (using Margaret Atwood as a surrogate mother) raising Miles Klee’s Ivyland (OR, 250 pages, $16.00) as their own lovechild. The features of all three great authors (and doting parents) can be found in this first novel: a somewhat dystopic present/future; mandatory and recreational drug abuse; nature gone wild; protagonists prone to accidental violence; shadowy government and corporate agencies; miracles; terrorism; New Jersey.
Mr. Klee, 26, whose prose has appeared on The Awl and in McSweeney’s, Vanity Fair and various other very hip publications (including this one), has tackled—successfully—an oversaturated subject: his generation’s obsession-with-slash-suspicion-of the pharmaceutical industry. (Full disclosure: The writer of this review is familiar with Mr. Klee through New York publishing circles, and once punched him at the Brooklyn bar Last Exit.) The book is set in Ivyland, N.J. (no relation to the real borough of Ivyland, Pa.). Some of this plays out in the grand tradition of science fiction satire: children are required (or advised) by the government (or a pharmaceutical company called Endless) to get a quick, painless procedure—the Van Vetchen operation—which uses a patented brand of anesthetic gas called Hallorex, produced by Endless.
The VV surgery protects against a (supposedly) dangerous chemical contaminant in the water supply, but this is one of those cases where the cure can be worse than the disease: while nobody knows whether or not people have actually gotten sick from bad water, Hallorex has the tendency to turn a percentage of first-time users into drooling mental patients. Those who aren’t allergic to the gas are addicted to it, getting back-alley surgery just to get a Hallorex fix. “There’s no weekend warriors on the D,” said a character in Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly. “You’re either on it … or you haven’t tried it.” The drug D in Darkly had the same unfortunate cognitive side effects of Ivyland’s Hallorex.
But besides huffing gas, the New Jersey natives have other substances to take the edge off their menial jobs. There’s Adderadde, an unsubtle soft drink allusion to America’s favorite Schedule II amphetamine, and Belltruvin, described obliquely as an addictive antidepressant/antianxiety medication. Alcohol, however, is impossible to get hold of, which isn’t so different from the irony confronting today’s teenagers, for whom scoring weed or Ecstasy is easier than attaining the fake ID they need to buy beer.
Ivyland’s story is told through the eyes of its citizens. The community has fallen into a state of disrepair and abandonment that is noticeable even to the youth who have grown up in the declining dump. Endless has bought everything in town (including the street names), and the cops have become as anarchistic and mean-spirited as the roving bands of teenagers (who look menacing after impromptu cheekbone implant surgery involving beer coaster implants). Things have taken a Turn for the Worse, though we’re never exactly told why or when; the novel jumps around in time with every chapter, so it’s not evident whether outside influences are to blame for turning Ivyland into a ghost town, or if it was headed that way all along.
To say Ivyland is dystopian would be inaccurate, since it’s hard to imagine what an ideal version of future New Jersey would look like. And it’s unclear if Ivyland is even meant to be set in the future; this could just be a parallel version of the present. No one drives around in a hover-car, or refers fondly to “the good ol’ days” of Barack Obama’s administration.
There’s also a dose of the natural fatalism of ecotopian fantasy in Ivyland—lightning strikes the same spot twice, while hoards of writhing caterpillars overrun the town—but Mr. Klee isn’t content with merely presenting an alternate reality. The bulk of his writing is inadvertently a study in chaos theory. What happens when two best friends from Ivyland decide to skip town after hijacking a police-appropriated ice-cream truck, and tour the country on a Hunter S. Thompson (via Pynchon)-esque never-ending road trip? What if two young men stayed in Ivyland and experienced its slow crawl to death as it is being overridden by a plague of bugs, Big Pharma and religious zealots? What if one of these Ivyland residents was slowly dying in a spaceship headed toward the moon, rebuffing the advances of his only companion in that sterile death trap?
None of these twosomes are the same set of people, but they might as well be. Mr. Klee has spent so much time creating his weird and fantastical world that he doesn’t leave much room for character. The protagonists who escape Ivyland (DH and Lev) have the same voices and dynamic as the two who don’t (Aidan and Henry). Aidan’s older brother Cal is the one floating in space, and though at one point the novel tries to differentiate the siblings’ personas by having them simultaneously recount a childhood trauma, it accomplishes the opposite. Neither Cal nor Aidan can muster anything like human emotions, and apart from Henry, the main characters in Ivyland are almost pathologically unlikable; their motives unknowable; their boredom and cynicism as endless as Endless.
Which very well may be the point Mr. Klee is trying to make. The flattening of affect and dulling of emotions due to overmedication could be one long, heavy-handed allusion to today’s pill-popping culture. But like any child who lives in the shadow of esteemed parents, Mr. Klee’s work can’t live up to the brilliance of its familial influences, all of whom wrote through characters we might not have liked, but could at least identify with. By the time DH, Cal and Aidan recognize a semblance of humanity in themselves, its too late for them, and too late for us to care.
Then too there’s the issue of Ivyland’s narratives. Presented from individual characters’ points of view, they never quite come together like the jigsaw pieces they presume to resemble. Several of the chapters come from the perspective of individuals entirely superfluous to the Ivyland chronicles: they stand on their own as interesting vignettes, but never fit into a larger picture. And despite the road-tripping adventures of DH and Lev (who happens to be the son of the creator of the VV procedure), the world outside the New Jersey town remains vague.
Which is not to say that Ivyland is devoid of emotion or resonance. The novel does radiate with a core layer of pain, hidden under attempts to mute it through various habits. The protagonists could be anybody’s burnt-out druggie friends, the kind who might have meant well but gave up long ago on trying to fight for any sort of understanding of the world around them and are, essentially, waiting around to die. Are their stories worth telling? Sure. But that deadened mentality is also the book’s weakness: since its characters don’t care enough about the Big Questions, they never get answered.
After hitting so hard on some key elements of drug life in Ivyland—the effects of the different medications, the slow loss of sanity, those damn caterpillars—the novel is less sure-footed in other areas that seem equally (if not more) important than the arrested development of its spaced-out characters. What is the connection between Endless Pharmaceutical and the VV surgeries, or the shadowy syndicate society behind the company that may or may not be conducting human experiments? What group is responsible for the often-referred-to-but-never-explained bridge explosions (acts of terrorism, really)? And why is one chapter inexplicably devoted to an Ivyland professor and his wife whom we never encounter again?
Mr. Klee’s first novel opens the door to a world that is fascinatingly mundane (if such a thing is possible). But unlike in the works of Mr. Dick or Mr. Saunders, here the bizarreness of the world the characters inhabit distracts from, instead of complements, the plot. Ivyland teases us with glimpses of marvelous and terrifying scenarios for life in the post-prescription age, but spends most of its time focusing on a coming-of-age story in New Jersey, and that ends up feeling wasteful and unsatisfying. Though in that respect, Mr. Klee has captured the essence of life in that state better than a Zach Braff film ever could." - Drew Grant

"Dystopia and apocalypse are narrative tools of the political fantasist. Almost without exception they invoke a political and social order in crisis, refracted through the lens of a fictional society living through the extreme negative outcomes of that crisis. We are certainly living through one of those upheavals, and Miles Klee’s often frustrating, occasionally brilliant debut novel Ivyland offers glimpses of what a postcrisis world could look like if the various political and social movements of the left fail.
Ivyland, by Miles Klee, is published by OR BooksThe global resistance to austerity politics has thus far functioned to “change the dialogue” and invigorate the left, and it has even begun to break down the broad conception that there is no alternative to capitalist democracy. But in policy terms, austerity continues apace. For an extreme, even dystopic example, Greece, which has seemed at times within hours of full-on revolution, continues to sell off national assets, lay off hundreds of thousands of government employees, and roll back vital social services to continue to receive loans to pay back earlier loans. As a result, Greek workers haven’t been paid in months, Greek youth are unemployed at 51%, and suicide and starvation are way up. Given this state of reality, only the occasional sci-fi element makes the violent, desperate landscapes of Ivyland seem totally fictional.
In Ivyland Klee points toward both dystopia and post-apocalypse, but unfortunately commits to neither, and as a result ends up producing a strangely ambivalent and underformed Hell. Ivyland, New Jersey, is a near-future college town within sight of Manhattan, all but owned by a pharmaceutical company called Endless. It’s is the kind of place austerity dreams of, where all services are privatized in exchange for total corporate domination, down to product-tie-in street names and the replacement of alcohol with Endless’s subtly named stimulant cocktail, Adderade.
As a result of Endless domination, the novel’s inhabitants take a whole lot of psychoactives, and the writing style reflects their often jumbled mental states. The action can be hard to follow, particularly early in the novel, as locations, names, and images collide with one another more than they unfold narratively. Witness the novel’s second paragraph:
She’d meant to see the miracle tree. Lenny passed it on a morning run to the nameless liquor place just beyond Ivyland’s border and had nothing to report save the drive by profanity he’d loosed on the jobless and devout gathered there. Hecuba laughed at that tossed-off barb, but more at his faked ignorance of the situation. If he hadn’t known, why call them that? It wasn’t the lucky marriage of enemy and epithet Lenny described, because he wasn’t deaf to people’s fascinations, no matter how little he listened.
This is an example of a very particular conceit, one becoming common among young novelists, in which it seems any introductory exposition has been removed and narrative clarity purposefully elided for poetic resonance. It forces you to slow down, pay close attention — perhaps a corrective response to the quick consumptive scanning of internet reading — but here that style frustrates and stops up the reading flow as often as it rewards.
If Ivyland ventures into experimental territory syntactically, it stays within more traditional bounds with respect to genre. The line between dystopia and post-apocalypse in narratives is not always easy to draw. In their extreme forms, they can seem like distinct genres: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in which a father and son wander a post-atomic-event America fending off cannibals and starvation, is dystopic only to the extent that it would be a total nightmare to live in its world of physical privation and totally absent social order, while 1984 is terrifying precisely for the extreme totality of social control under a regime of permanent war.
But what about Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series, which tells stories of nice Christian children not sucked up to Heaven during the Rapture and left on a rapidly deteriorating Earth? Technically pre-apocalypse, as the Rapture is its scriptural prelude, there is more at stake in the series than just the “dystopian” horror of a world without Christians. Similarly, attempts to categorize Children of Men could lead to Talmudic entanglements: The world hasn’t ended, but the threat of its ending has prompted the dystopic or horrific breakdown of society. So is the apocalypse a matter only of the physical destruction of humanity or does it include also the disappearance of its future? Has the apocalypse already occurred in the moments that the ICBMs hang over the ocean, or does it happen only when they actually detonate over the world’s capitals? Does dystopia need apocalypse, or vice versa, or does the question merely muddle our understanding of our own incipient real dystopia?
The truly great post-apocalyptic works, (e.g.: The Bed-Sitting Room, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro) have critiqued “real world” dystopias by portraying their crude and absurd reconstruction after collapse, while dystopic masterpieces often climax with the apocalyptic disappearance of subjectivity, represented by the protagonist’s psychic death but physical survival (Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, 1984). We could make the distinction that the dystopic work speaks to the psychological or spiritual violence of a society against its individual subjects, while the post-apocalyptic speaks to the structural and systemic violence of social (re)production as a whole. (Although, as Sinatra sang about another pair of similarly coterminous forms of social control, you can’t have one without the other.)
But Ivyland neither focuses on a particular character’s psychic struggle nor provides a wide view of the social totality. Instead, it jumps giddily back and forth through time, from first-person narrator to first-person narrator, chapter by chapter. This works well for the book’s two main characters: the clear self-reflective voice of college student Aidan, going through a quarter-life crisis of sorts, counterpoints nicely with the drug-addled ravings of DH, the gas-addicted antihero on a petty-violence crime spree across the country.
The results are decidedly more mixed when the side characters get a turn at the wheel. Chapters focused on Hecuba, DH’s mother, (and the only chapters told in third person) provide helpful exposition about Ivyland and add a tragic undercurrent to DH’s madness, while a one-off chapter about a professor of Aidan’s is both hilarious and erotically charged, an excellent short story in its own right. Two chapters written screenplay style, however, fall completely flat, as they focus on world exposition in straight dialogue, the format least appropriate to such an endeavor. And an incursion into the mind of Grady, a man struck retarded by an allergy to an Endless anesthetic, is cringe-inducing. (“I was too afraid and looked around. ‘Yeah, pajama pants. Come here.’ But here’s what: everyone is wearing pants and can sleep in them, which means we’re all wearing of pajama pants.”)
Which is a shame, because Klee is capable of moments of breathtaking music. Near the end of a masterful passage of diegetic drug-induced confusion rather than just imitative syntactic play, Aidan, tripping balls, is running out of a beach house behind his best friend, Henri:
… my toes sinking into the cool dry fluid of the sand and movement becomes a joke. Henri has slowed down, too, I can tell, but as I sense the gap closing a weight hits my back, locking my knees and planting me face-first in the sand. I flip over, say something immediately disqualified as language. Phoebe is straddling my chest, a lurid grin plastered on her face. Even in spare light the fiery parts of her eyes move, contort, scary/sexy. She glows star-colored, lit from within. I give in for another moment till she comes too close and runs a perfumed hand through my gritty hair, another keeping me pinned. I clench my teeth when she kisses my earlobe, too, too intense and one-of-my-legs-can’t-tell-which jiggers insanely, thumping like an overexcited dog’s.
Klee has a real skill with the rhythms of consciousness, capturing the intuitive leaps made by a self-conscious mind telling itself the present and feeling how and when those thoughts require breaking grammatical constraint. When he allows himself to sink empathetically into his character’s voice, particularly when discussing childhood, he achieves poetry.
He’s quite funny, too, with a strong affinity for wordplay and deadpan cultural commentary. Here, we’re with Cal, Aidan’s brother, in near-Earth orbit, on a botched attempt to achieve another moon landing. “Truth is, Emma Reyes and I are NASA’s first to die in space … And we know in advance how this thing will run its course—‘mild case of celebrity amplified by death,’ as my brother Aidan once said of a starlet who came to a lurid, newsworthy end.” The problem is, well, why did we have to go to space for that joke?
We didn’t, and the stories particularly of DH and Aidan could be set in the present or in Hunter S. Thompson’s 1970s. There’s nothing wrong with that, there are only so many stories anyway (mythical archetypes, Carl Jung, etc. etc.). But we’re entering a pretty fantastical world, and Klee takes long, frequent discursions into expository tales that don’t always hold up on their own and often connect back to the main thread in contrived ways. These vignettes, like one chapter’s mayhem-inflected drive around town with a privatized and sociopathic police officer, feel like part of a collection designed to weave an atmospheric fabric rather than tell a single, cohesive story.
This would be a fine thing to do, and, one feels, perhaps the way this novel got started. Instead, however, as the novel progresses, we focus in on DH and Aidan, whose stories do not require Ivyland’s near-future nigh-apocalypse setting, making the collapsing society seem superfluous, separate from the story Klee hopes to tell.
The New Inquiry Magazine, No. 2: Youth is available now. Subscribe for $2.As the dystopian world is much more present in some stories than others, the limits of its reach are hard to grasp. A corporate conspiracy is in the works, bridges across the country are collapsing for no discernible reason, New Jersey is overrun with mysterious caterpillars, and everyone is zonked out of their mind on Endless pharmaceuticals. Sometimes it seems sure that the state has collapsed, other times merely its social safety net. Klee successfully produces a heavy sense of dread, but can’t decide whether to foreground the coming apocalypse or tell a bildungsroman over a dystopian background. He twice fails to make a necessary choice: once between dystopian or apocalyptic narratives, and once between a focused storyline or an experimental refracting of multiple stories. This failure to commit leaves both the novel and its vision of America in crisis incomplete, wanting.
Klee’s sharp ear for the rhythms of first person narration and awesome ability to unify flowing sequences of discordant imagery often go underused in the creation of Endless’ nightmarish regime. Sadly, a more focused vision of privatized dystopia may soon be unnecessary, as Klee’s next novel might present a similarly dreadful society merely being set in the present." - Willie Osterweil

"Ivyland a fine looking book, all red and shining pink—so fine that I would have loved to translate it into an outfit. But soon, reader, you will realize that the plastic oxygen mask on the cover represents so much of the book that to interpret it in wool and cotton would not be right.
In Klee’s future, in a fictional New Jersey town run by omnipresent pharmaceutical company Endless, many of today’s less fictional problems appear, just slightly shifted or exacerbated. The promo that runs on loop in an Endless funded bus explains:
We’ve turned the tide in the War on Drugs, our isotope signature research allowing authorities to stamp out origin and distribution points for many illegal intoxicants. Our innovative development team has produced Belltruvin, the most successful over-the-counter anti-anxiety medication in history, and Adderade, a groundbreaking beverage that spells the end of unfocused energy. We have entered sure-footedly that transhuman era when at least we can break free of DNA….
The trouble is: we’re not transhuman, not in this dystopian future. Belltruvin and Adderade and an unnamed medical gas—that occasionally causes violent allergic reactions and ruins quite a few lives, whether by allergy or by addiction—only become more fuel for greed to abuse. Hence the oxygen mask cover, a quiet reminder that, in Ivyland, everything has gone to shit.
Klee’s characters are drug-addled or hospitalized or vicious and scalpel-crazy or being chased by the police or are the druggy police or are severely damaged after a bad reaction to the gas or are suffering from an inexplicable illness that involves electricity or are haunted by the town’s caterpillar plague or, in possibly the worst case, are stranded in a defunct space shuttle (in space, not Ivyland, but that’s pretty bad). In every chapter, the narrative shifts time and speaker, which takes some time to sort out. Yet, each voice is very different and engaging and believable. Grady, whose mental capacity was stunted from a gas allergy, speaks in childlike, grammatically inaccurate blasts: “I axed him an easier way. He says, ‘Shush, space shuttle news is on.’ He’s a weird one, but he’s trying you know.”
They’re all weird ones and troubled; within each character’s personal hell, Klee teases out elementary human principles, those that do not change no matter what drugs we’re on or fictional city we’re in. And what do we do when everything is trashed? We reach. We reach for intoxicants. We reach within ourselves and analyze our lives. We reach for each other. We see all of Klee’s characters doing this in some form, but the novel takes most of its shape from the dual stories of brothers, Cal and Aidan. The other stories revolve around them, anecdotes within their lives.
In the brothers’ separate chapters, they rarely speak of each other, yet the undertone of their conjoined lives lies there. Other characters repeatedly mistake Aidan for Cal and ask why he isn’t in space (Cal being the one stuck in the space shuttle). In one of the book’s most moving and illuminating chapters, Klee juxtaposes their two narratives next to each other, a very risky technique that only works here because of the importance of the brothers’ bond. They are both reaching for each other as their lives collapse.
As Cal floats in space—alone but for one other astronaut, just a freeze-dried ice cream and suicide pill away from eternity—he reflects on what led him there, becoming the internalized and reflective half of the brothers’ duality. He says,
We don’t know what happened; I assure myself that no one does. Malfunction. Nonfunction. It began with the lights dozing, dimming away. Preoccupied, we blamed our minds. Lines of communication scraped away to useless hums, hums then exchanged for thicker silence.
And he could easily be speaking about his relationship with Aidan and how, despite growing up together, they have literally drifted apart: Cal replaced by Aidan’s oddball friend Henri and an obsession with Cal’s ex-girlfriend, Aidan replaced by anger and escape.
Once I grasped onto this relationship, the novel began to coalesce. Without it, the jumble of characters would float formless, interesting but lacking. Klee is best when he allows his characters to fall into philosophizing about the state of their lives and about Ivyland. The plot does not support this book: the characters and their relationships, strained and filled with passion, do. The novel’s poignancy relies on the author’s ability to draw characters who, just as they reach for each other, pull away; they cannot give much of themselves. Aidan desperately wants Cal’s ex-girlfriend but can never find the words, and, when he gets close, he remembers that Cal has been there before. Pulls away.
It seems doubtful but not impossible that the denizens of in Ivyland can bridge the gap between themselves and others. One of the character’s philosophical gems haunts the story (and me): “Hell is a Paradise you can’t share.” Whether Hell is Ivyland or oneself, I’m still not sure." - booksmatter.tumblr.com

"Let’s play the Ivyland drinking game. What you do is, you search for a review of Ivyland online, and every time they mention Pynchon you have to take a drink. Pynchon’s shadow (drink) falls on Ivyland. Pynchon’s influence (drink) is, as I believe the Troggs suggested (though they might have been talking about something else, thinking about it) ‘all around’.
Which, depending on your thoughts on Pynchon, (drink) is either a good thing or a bad thing. Happily for me, we are talking here of the Pynchon (drink) of The Crying of Lot 49, not the Pynchon (drink) of, say, Mason & Dixon. The prose is thick but the book isn’t. Ivyland weighs in at under 250 pages. This sounds like an astoundingly ignorant observation but if your method is to try to push the methodology of the short story to the length of a novel, size does matter.
Ivyland is a broken, twisted novel. When it shines, it shines gloriously, but the reader does spend time trying to weave its splintered narrative into a whole, doing long division with plotlines when they should be concentrating on the story. It is not a novel for reading in five minute bursts. It demands your attention. Chapters are headed “Last Winter” “Thirteen Years Ago” “One Year Ago” “Last Summer”. Time flickers. Landscapes bend and shift as if seen through a trick mirror. People are moulded and remoulded, viewed through pharmaceutical and philosophical filters. Plotlines embrace each other in double helixes and stretch out to the horizon.
Ivyland is a good novel but, as with Pynchon (drink), I find myself thinking it would make a better collection of stories.
A fair proportion of the chapters of Ivyland would stand quite happily independent of the main narrative. They have a mystery and a shimmering version of reality that the short story can support easily. The novel though, perhaps, needs to be slightly more grounded than Ivyland is prepared to be. It needs to invest in the reader just as much as the reader invests in it. It cannot afford to flirt as brazenly as Ivyland does. The short story can play at being femme fatale, but the novel must, at some point, at least pretend it is willing to go steady with the reader. This is Ivyland’s only fault really, that it won’t commit.
I know that suggesting The Crying of Lot 49 is better than Gravity’s Rainbow because it is 600 pages shorter practically makes me Ernest Hemingway (or something equally ghastly) but…
I know that being even slightly negative about a book which features a joke about a clown practically makes me Virginia Woolf (or something equally ghastly) but…
Any Cop?: At times Ivyland is exhilarating, but its steadfastly postmodern stance would have played more comfortably over a series of smaller narrative threads." - bookmunch

"While they say that “the past is a foreign country” (and by “they” I mean people who quote L. P. Hartley's killer opening line in The Go-Between), we don't have an equally pat way to describe the future. I guess you could use “the future is now,” which we've kind of been saying over and over since the mid-fifties. Or maybe William Gibson's got the best contender for the go-to pithy line: “The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed.” But if both of our handy phrases tell us that we're already living in the future, well, I want a new one. So does Miles Klee, I think – hopefully not the terrifying addict's nightmare he's envisioned in Ivyland, controlled by Big Pharma and afflicted with a pandemic that may not exist.
Ivyland is about a group of guys who went to high school together in an alternate New Jersey. Jumping around chronologically, the novel is divided into sections written in different voices, an amphetamine-fueled heteroglossia. The world of its characters is run by Endless, an all-powerful pharmaceutical company that keeps changing Ivyland's topography, renaming and rerouting streets at will. Aidan and his childhood best friend Henri live together in an old house, and the book opens with their former school bus driver trying to make a pilgrimage to the newly formed miracle in their front yard, a tree struck by lightning that has taken the appearance of the Virgin Mary. Aidan tries to manage the cult forming in his yard as Henri languishes with a semi-psychotic illness that may or not be the H12 pandemic. Elsewhere, addicts are performing risky illegal surgeries that ostensibly inoculate the public against the virus. There doesn’t seem to be too much technological or linguistic innovation in this near-future, though, aside from a general anesthetic that somehow doesn't even put you out, just blocks your ability to perceive pain.
Klee is a fine writer. His prose often tickles – I certainly laughed out loud a few times – and one chapter in particular, where Aidan and his astronaut brother Cal simultaneously narrate a family memory, proves to be an especially exciting experiment with the ways language and time and memory work in tandem. Other experiments left me feeling a little cold, like the chapter written from the perspective of Grady, an adult with a cognitive deficiency that leaves him living perpetually with the thought-processing power of a four-year-old. Ivyland is at its strongest when Klee is writing close to his characters as they think about family, about love. When Aidan reflects on how long he's know Henri, or on his feelings for his high school crush Pheobe, or when Cal remembers a troubling childhood scene at a parade and how his mother had reacted, the book almost feels alive.
But Ivyland doesn't strike me as being quite dystopic enough. I realize I'm being kind of selfish, but that's just how I like to read. For me, for pleasure, etc. I wanted the book to take more joy in the invention of a new world, to play with details in a different way. I wanted technological terror, or something more satirical, I think. Dystopian fiction, speculative fiction, extrapolates from the present into an extreme future, whereas Klee's strange Ivyland seems largely disconnected from the world we actually live in. (That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you.) He's so focused on the perils of an increasingly muddled divide between corporate power and public life, and a population that appears semi-lobotomized by pharmaceutical dependency, that at times it kind of feels like you're reading a novel published by Adbusters. But, like, if Thomas Pynchon wrote for Adbusters." - Emily M. Keeler

"Ivyland is a vision of Eastern New Jersey in the near future, featuring friends Aidan and Henri. Everyone else is connected to them some way. It’s a grim vision with lots of plotlines that matter less than the landscape itself does. America sends some more people to the moon, finally, big pharma gets bigger, crowds form around an image of the Virgin Mary in a dead maple. People care about each other in complicated, compelling ways.
Ivyland is a violent book. Addicts botch surgeries, fathers beat their children (“you can tell”), one woman gores another with a butterfly knife, children hit strangers, hit their mothers. “I seize the hand and bunch its bones.” Klee does this well: the interpersonal violence is calmly juxtaposed against the sinister indifference of the pharmaceutical company that’s at its root. Endless Pharmaceuticals looms over the whole book. It’s a human story where characters matter — this dystopia isn’t straight allegory — but Endless’s presence is total and consuming. It’s bigger than TV, it’s bigger than the Internet. In fact, the Internet is conspicuously absent: the only mention of it this reader noticed was in the context of a job at Endless (“Brand Fortification”). The main characters don’t tool around on it, no one gets news from it, college classes take place on campus and not online. Technology is not to blame for the bleakness of this landscape. Nihilism, drugs, and traffic take care of that.
Chapters skip around in space, time, narrator, point of view. The chapters aren’t long, either, so it’s easy to become unmoored. All of this is very metafictional. (There’s also a paragraph in rhyme, a few chapters that are written like transcripts or plays, and one with two characters simultaneously narrating in each column. That last one works okay, but tricks like that are usually too cute to be really effective.) The dialogue is absolutely perfect. Hilarious, touching, believable. The only fast food restaurant anyone goes to is called MexiLickin’SurfHog. The book feels like New Jersey: there’s incessant, unrelenting traffic in a town where everybody knows everybody; there are deer all over the highway even in the future. New York City creeps — Ivyland is “The Gateway to New York,” but it’s on Route 22, which terminates in Newark. That feels like New Jersey, too. Ivyland is a druggy book, where pills and booze and gas feature prominently, so the writing in spots is druggy too. It coils around and disorients. It isn’t always clear. Ivyland isn’t a book for people who don’t like drug writing, or who want something plot-driven that won’t make you re-read at least a paragraph or ten, or who hate adverbs. Solid B, will read again, would recommend." - Lenore Beadsman

"At some point in the near future, the threat of a viral pandemic has led Americans to submit to a bizarre surgical procedure said to immunize them. But the procedure has grotesque side effects, and the corporation that provides it has become the country's de facto governing body. Drug use and crime are rampant, and infrastructure is collapsing—even the Statue of Liberty has begun to slump over.
In jagged, non-chronological chapters, Mr. Klee follows a group of boys from a New Jersey suburb called Ivyland (likely meant to evoke Princeton). Their exploits play out alongside harbingers of End Times: anarchic violence, insect plagues and messianic cults.
Mr. Klee depicts the chaos with verve—he reads like J.G. Ballard zapped with a thousand volts of electricity. One drug trip yields a Book of Ezekiel-inspired doomsday vision of "Zeros spinning in the sky. Wheels, gears, interlocking in pairs and pairs of pairs, scrolling mosaics, transparent geometries brushing vision." For all the flash, though, Mr. Klee is attuned to the individual behavior of his characters, who either try to preserve some measure of common kindness or speed the decline through amorality and solipsism.
With its compelling depiction of these human impulses, "Ivyland" is a stand-out among a recent spate of dystopian novels. Mr. Klee seems to be issuing a kind of despairing plea on behalf of a young generation about to be given custody of a crippled planet. "I'm just a member of that delicate new caste," a character laments, "the generation least prepared for a nation's backslide and nonetheless assigned to halt it."
But there is no halting the downward spiral in "Ivyland." Like Ms. Groff, Mr. Klee seems best prepared to dramatize entropy and apocalypse. Are there any writers out there interested in showing us how to rebuild civilization from the ruins?" - Sam Sacks

"Today, OR Books releases its latest, Ivyland, by debut author Miles Klee. The world, which is focused on a fictional New Jersey suburb called Ivyland, is a lot like our own– except caterpillars run wild, policeman are shot down in ice cream trucks without consequence, and a pharmaceutical behemoth peddles a drink called Adderade (it is what it sounds like). The characters, which get their own chapters told from their own points of view, are disparate, ranging from an aging female bus driver, to a man with brain damage, to a callous young man floating in space.
Because the book is told from so many points of view and not linearly, it’s a bit difficult to get a handle on at first. But the crackling prose, dark humor, and well-chosen details draw the reader in, and, once one has gotten used to the back and forth, the book becomes addictive, showcasing the intricate mind of a young author who’s depraved in all the right ways.
Klee brought the manuscript to OR himself, which makes sense if you look at OR’s business model. The publisher is a small one, coming out with only a title or two per month. The texts, which are often political in nature, are printed on demand as well as sold as e-books– and they’re only available directly from OR itself. This progressive look at publishing fits in perfectly with Klee’s unique vision.
What qualities do you think make Ivyland and OR Books a good union?
- OR is a delightful operation—it’s like this sleek little shark. It’s exactly what’s necessary to publishing and no more. So in contrast to the big houses it can gamble on experimental debut fiction, which to many editors is hazardous if not entirely anathema.
What is it about “dystopian novels” that appeals to you? Did you have any specific books in mind as a point of reference? How did you want to make Ivyland different?
- The dystopian novel is where sci-fi meets satire. It takes the attitude that you can both imagine a future and demolish that very projection as a ridiculous exercise. And there’s the matter of humans having only ever lived in unjust conditions … dystopia resonates because what else have we known? At the risk of exposing my imitations, some lights I steered by include the stories of George Saunders, Fiskadoro and Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, plus the lingering trauma of A Clockwork Orange and J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. You can probably guess from the Huxley epigraph that I skew more Brave New World than 1984. The difference may be that I’m less interested in the sweeping concepts than their manifestation at a surface level. I wanted only narrow, pulsing glances at a big unfocused picture, this shadowy state of affairs that nobody can quite get a handle on. Narrative omniscience, a close cousin to know-it-all-ism, was not to be tolerated.
When did it become apparent to you that this story needed to be told unconventionally, in terms of chronology and the number of points of view?
- I had a hell of a time sticking to the main storyline as I then understood it. The more I wrote the more tangential and digressive it became. It occurred to me that, while I didn’t want to write about anything so odious as the Internet, the novel’s form could follow a digital-age logic: we have eight tabs open on our internet browser at any moment, we backpedal and recall and click around indiscriminately, we over complicate our attempts to see the world. Why suffer for the artifice of linearity?
Why caterpillars/moths, crumbling bridges, and space exploration? Do you see any relation between the three?
- They’re three of my greatest fears. But in fiction they can be used to broadly evoke a vengeful planet, national decay and mindless symbolism, not to mention our collective denial over such irritating realities.
The book displays an impressive range of voice. Were there any characters that were exceptionally difficult to write from? Which one do you personally relate to the most? The least?
- To venture outside one’s own demographic seems clearly dangerous—if I write about a white, melancholy, middle-class guy, the worst you might say is we’ve read plenty of that already. But I’d hate to only write what I know. Hecuba, who’d been around longer than anyone, was a challenge: how can we access the opposite gender? Grady, being cognitively scrambled, needed his own imperfect but consistent vernacular, and that too was a thorny problem. In a way, though I shudder to say it, Cal was easiest … one simply had to write what was too awful to say aloud.
In one of my favorite chapters, Cal observes, “Take the worst thing you’ve done, and the best. These are two people with nothing in common,” which strikes me as quite true and one of the more maddening and fascinating things about humanity. Yet Ivyland seems to be a book that focuses largely on the things people do that are selfish, violent and primal. What is it about these base instincts that interests you or feels essential?
- Given enough intelligence, there’s a total horror about the id: that it is what finally controls us, what eventually wins out. Moreoever, we exaggerate our own decency and rationalize our cruelty. So much about recognized ‘evil’—listen to any murder case in court—is an attempt to dodge its influence or explain it away like some Victorian phantasm. I can’t get excited about characters staking out moral high ground, but there’s something perversely fun about watching them try to claw their way up there by unmooring, distancing, excusing themselves from agency in their savage moments. The talent for contradiction—the artful suspension of an interior lie—is, I think, unique. And therefore essential, disturbing, etc.
Have you read anything amazing lately?
- Édouard Levé’s Suicide was mesmerizing. And I’ll never get enough of Kay Ryan’s poetry. I wish I could write anything so spring-coiled.
Have you thought about what you’ll work on next?
- I’m rounding off a collection of short stories, many already published somewhere or other on the web, and revising a novella that may fit in there as well. Beyond that, I’ve just this week begun sketching notes for something longer, a bit more recognizably a novel, one that burns at a cooler temperature … it’s a terribly fucked-up idea, however, maybe too fucked-up to be funny … though of course I don’t believe that." - Interview by Julia Jackson

Interview by Kate Perkins


Interview by Royal Young

Interview by Jason Diamond

Excerpt

Read it at Google Books









Miles Klee, True False, OR Books, 2015.


Read an Excerpt


Klee’s last book, his first, was variously hailed as “sharply intelligent” (Publishers Weekly) and “harsh, spastic” (Justin Taylor): we like to think of True False as intelligently spastic, or sharply harsh—disquieting and funny. A collection of stories that range from the very short to the merely short, these forty-four tales evoke extraordinary scenes in an understated manner that’s marked Klee one of today’s most intriguing writers. From the apocalyptic to the utopic, from a haunted office building to a suburban pool that may be alive, a day in the mind of a demi-god Pythagoras to a secret race to develop artificial love, True False captures a fractured reality more real than our own.


"Miles Klee demonstrates a delightfully prehensile grasp of the more oblique peculiarities of sentience. Very highly recommended." —William Gibson


"Miles Klee is a fresh genius of the American literary sentence, and his every paragraph is aburst with nervous, agitative exactitudes. So much gets itself zanily and definitively rendered in the crackle of his ultravivid prose that True False is not just a joltingly original collection but the essential record of the inner terrors of our hyperurban era." —Gary Lutz


Whereas some writers try out different voices, Miles Klee tries out different worlds. In True False, ghosts come alive, men walk on walls, and love is just a project for the Department of Methods, but the voice is persistent, sometimes to a fault: an intelligent destruction and self-aware deductivity of and with language, all at once. The influence and style is truly one of contemporary means, a collage so dense that it becomes wholly original itself. Pieces of Barthelme and Lipsyte and Lutz and Hempel and so many more are everywhere, with Klee’s imagination gluing it together in the biggest of ways.
As with other literature that only functions properly as literature, these stories are at the will of the medium’s defining characteristics: narrative description, word choice, syntax, exposition, tangential thought, etc. It’s barely Literature with a Capital “L”—I don’t remember fart jokes and bestiality showing up in the canon aside from Joyce’s correspondence and Moby Dick, respectively—but the impossibilities of telling these stories in any other way mean having to invoke the old “dancing about architecture” platitude, unscrewing the light bulbs in your bedroom, and calling it a day for a couple of days.
When Klee gets on a cinematic bent and can shed some of the burden of Literature as Literature and Literature Alone, like in “Waiting for the Chinese,” he’s at his easiest to follow. Stories like that and “Quick” take on an enjoyable emotional center, fully formed by the qualities swirling around it. In “Quick,” it’s triplets starting high school, parents who have no choice but to love their life, and death, always nearby, always lurking in their pool filter. From “Quiet”:

“Come in here if you want to talk,” mom said.

In the kitchen I found her and Kenzie, a folder of death threats between them on the counter. Outside the sliding door was the pool. Wet patches on its plastic cover sparkled for the sunset.

“Why do you keep them?” Kenzie demanded.

“So sensitive,” mom went. She was dicing onions.

“If any of them kill mom,” Byron yelled from the bathroom, “we’ll have a case for premeditated.” The toilet flushed way loud.

“Mack, honey, these people are losers. I’m not the one outsourcing.”

“Murders by assembly line workers are up,” Byron quoted as he came out waving dad’s piece in Newsweek.

“Stop!” Kenzie cried. Mom dumped her onions in a pan and groaned.

“Stop saying ‘stop,’” she said. “You may no longer say ‘stop.’”

If there’s a difficulty to Klee’s writing, it’s that he traffics mostly in assumed context and rarely in unassumed narrative. Not that deception is taking place. Quite the opposite. Stories like “A Few Environments” and “Varieties of Things One Rarely Bothers to Mention” are exactly what you think they are: stray thoughts on a playground and a medicine cabinet and a dirt trail, scenarios involving wisdom teeth and painting a room and informal goodbyes.
For Klee, the idea of narrative moves beyond even the idea of being organic—interesting characters in interesting situations, documented as such—and moves into a special, interpretive style not too far removed from head-shrinking: When I put this picture next to this picture, how does each picture change and how do you feel overall? What about with this picture? What do you see now? How do you feel now? And now? And now?
Stories like “Ibid.” and “Past Simple” exist, much like the other short short pieces that alternate between the longer works, as mere exercise, the kind of story that might need to be defended by someone who really likes arguing about definitions of things.
Perhaps Klee’s wheelhouse is best found in the same way he talks about Borges talking about his artistic lineage, which in itself is part of a tangent in thinking about Roberto Bolaño’s assumed knowledge of Borges, which is actually all part of a footnote about a line from an Octave Feuillet book that Klee hasn’t read. Klee, like Borges and company, is a reader and a digester, and in many ways, he writes only as an extension of the necessities stemming from his infatuation with reading and digesting.
It’s an afterthought to a love affair, the mint in the bowl on a desk in a place he never leaves. Personally, I had the best luck reading this collection slowly, with an eye for the high points, like latter day Barry Hannah or Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes. Keep a highlighter nearby and use it with great regularity so that you can go back later and not have to wade through the book’s length and disjointedness, its two least-favorable qualities.
These stories aren’t so much life-affirming as they are world-affirming, whatever world it may be that Klee takes us to, but also the very real one we all inhabit. There’s certainly plenty of confirmation that there’s a whole lot of space with a whole lot of people and a whole lot of ideas and experience in said mass of people, and if each person and every thing has its own past, present, and future, quite simply, how the hell does the ether stand it? All that weight, that history, that never-satisfied beast of time. True False is either manic handfuls of the ether or the bits that slipped through the cracks.
But that’s the world, painted as fair as it can possibly be painted. As for your life, that’s up to you—should you choose to accept it. - Ryan Werner


More by Klee:
3:AM
Abjective
A Cappella Zoo
The Alarmist
Arise TV
The Awl
The Big Jewel
BlackBook
The Blot
Birkensnake
Brain Harvest
The Brooklyn Rail
Caper Literary Journal
CAP Magazine
The Collagist
Contrary
The Daily Dot
Electric Literature
Everyday Genius
Flavorwire
Funny or Die
Fwriction
Gawker Media
Guernica
Hate the Future
Heavy Feather Review
The Huffington Post
The Indypendent
Lapham’s Quarterly
McSweeney’s
Medium
The Millions
The New York Observer
Northwind Magazine
The Notes
Open Forum
Pinball
Polluto
Review 31
Revolving Floor
Salon
Similar Peaks
Six Sentences
Squawk Back
Storychord
Uncle Magazine
Unshod Quills
Unstuck
Untoward Magazine
Vanity Fair
The Village Voice
The Wa
The White Review
Yankee Pot Roast