Eric Raymond, Confessions from a Dark Wood, Sator Press, 2012.
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Ken here. I don't often laugh, cry, and spit food on my computer screen simultaneously, but this book made that happen. You'll meet Nick, a hapless pawn in the world of global capital brand management consulting. And his girlfriend Sadie Parish, the first domestic suicide bomber. And his boss, emperor of bullshit, Pontius J. LaBar. And PJ's dreaded orangutan. It's a hilarious, heartbreaking, painfully smart satire that guides you through the high dollar swamps of modern industry.
1. The book begins with a section of “Advance Praise.” Among the quoted, all characters from the story about to unfold, is the deceased father of the author (or co-author, we are told), who gives what is perhaps the first indication that the world you have entered is not only darkly satirical, but propelled forward by something urgent and deeply felt. We may not yet recognize this as the complicated love between father and son, but we catch a glimpse of it and it startles:
“Oh, so you finally have a book. You must be so proud. Congratulations, son. You know, in the afterlife, books are our toilet paper. I’m saying we literally wipe our asses with books. Go figure.”
2. There is little sentimentality here. We meet Nick Bray at his father’s memorial service, which he likens to a church tag sale. He describes what has been left out of the haphazard displays of the artifacts of his father’s life. An empty table, he tells us, “might have stood for all that was omitted from a memorial, i.e. a few decades of filching undergraduate panties, a pyramid of Miller Lite cans, a tape loop of doors slamming around our house, and the amputated legs below the knee, which had shuffled off this mortal coil six years ahead of my father.”
3. At this memorial, a stranger approaches Nick with a potentially lucrative, albeit mysterious job offer, which he dismisses.
4. Back home, after he is fired from his job at an internet porn company where he writes promotional copy, he is forced to assess his situation. He is aimless. He dresses poorly (consider the white Cuban shirt and slip-on shoes he wears to the funeral). He is broke. He reconsiders.
5. One of Nick’s new coworkers is an orangutan. I am not speaking in metaphor. “Shelby” is an advisor to Pontius J. LaBar, CEO, LaBar Partners Limited. He has his own office, of course.
6. Full disclosure: I consider Eric Raymond a friend and fellow traveler although we know each other almost exclusively through twitter. I had coffee with him once at Four Barrel on Valencia. There was a taxidermied moose head that was later stolen. It was nice: the coffee, the moose head. In this book, there is an unflattering portrayal of a Korean adoptee. I am trying not to hold it against him.
7. I am a Korean adoptee.
8. Friend or no, unflattering representations or no, it is difficult not to be drawn into this bizarre world, to be seduced, as Nick himself is, into a surreal landscape of glittering surfaces.
9. After the limousine rides and the custom-made suits; after the commissioned “superfixie,” the apartment overlooking the city, the DuMol Viogner, Nick is well on his way to his new life of airports and minibars in highrise hotels. Expect jargon-laden client meetings and self-annointed brand experts. Expect furious email messages at all hours of the night from the buffoon Pontius. Paranoia. Buffoonery.
10. What do you do when you open the door to the airplane lavatory only to find your dead father waiting for you? If you are Nick Bray, you ask him for advice and then watch as he flushes himself down the toilet.
11. Did I mention that Nick meets a girl? In the waiting room of the porn company from which he is unceremoniously escorted by security, Nick meets a girl, Sadie, whose life ambition is to be the country’s first domestic suicide bomber.
12. If every story is, in fact, a love story, what is it that Nick loves? He loves poetry. And Sadie. He loves his father.
13. And he loves San Francisco: “Praise Indian Summer in San Francisco. Praise bare bodies in Dolores Park, praise the marijuana truffle man winding through the crowd. Praise the bums debating bum politics on the overlook up on 21st. Praise guys cruising on the high lip with the J-Church snakes up the hill…
Being in San Francisco again was like being amongst a crowd divinely pardoned back into the Garden of Eden.”
14. Nick develops a love for poetry. He reads as he travels. He meets one of the poets he has read, Jake Hawkins, working the x-ray machine at airport security. He expresses his surprise to find him here.
He tells him: “I have your book – the new one – in my bag.” And asks: “What are you doing here?”
“I work,” Jake tells him. “You are aware it is a book of poetry?”
The moment is funny it that we locate ourselves on the dreadful security line, the improbability of the encounter, of a poet – even a Yale award winner – being recognized as a kind of celebrity.
15. Nick is, of course, aware that it is a book of poetry and it is moments like these – fleeting moments of connection that offer glimpses of Nick’s interior life – that propel the reader forward in an unforgiving book that might otherwise run cold.
16. We don’t ever hear Jake’s poems, or read them. We see Nick attend a reading at a club. He does refer to one poem called “Ode to a Baggage Handler.” I like to imagine it a villanelle.
17. On Sadie: “Sadie and I played a game in the park. We picked people from the crowd and imagined what they would look like when they got old. She projected the subtle slump of a shoulder into the octogenarian’s humped osteoporosis. I predicted how far the chins would recede, the overbite yellow, the eyelids fall.
Who would have the liver spots among the tattoos gone blue?
“Not me,” Sadie would say and wink.
All the thoughts unasked. Did you own horses? Who were your friends? What role did you perform in your high school play? Do you look like your mom or your dad? Did your hamster die when you were six? Who was your first kiss, your first fuck? What did your room look like? Did you lie on your brother’s blue sleeping bag and stare up at Colorado star fields? Did you pretend to be a cowboy, or did you favor the Indian side?
Some you could guess at. But all of these questions of her past were off limits.”
18. On a business trip to Las Vegas, Nick expects to again encounter his ghost father and he is not disappointed: “My father, despite his career as a tight-fisted literature professor, also had a small-stakes passion for gambling. When I was 21, he took me to Las Vegas for my birthday, a trip which had long been promised since the age of about nine.”
19. His father accompanies him to the roulette wheel, coaches him. “I didn’t make a noise when I won, but even in my stunned silence, passersby began to take notice of the mounting chips and the demonic accuracy of the last chip I placed on the table.”
20. “They love you, the universe loves you,” my father said. “People know your name and you’re leading them to easy money.” He keeps betting as his father instructs. He keeps winning. And his father, angry ghost, is just getting warmed up.
21. Nick steps away from the table, knowing that it’s just a matter of time before he is approached by security. Seeing this moment of vulnerability, his father attacks. He calls him a “quitter,” and shouts at him. Nick walks away from the table, leaving his winnings behind.
22. Later, a celebrity client showers Nick with praise and the moment takes on the weight of the approval earlier withheld. Shaun D. Braun, football star and fashion mogul, says to Nick: “You my boy.”
“My boy. A line from a story my father used to teach ran through me head. That’s the best position they is. I sat in on his classes at times, the days when I entertained the life for myself, the precocious professor’s son slouching in the back row, getting the gospel that it mattered. I could see him behind his own podium, his glasses flashing, the chalk dust on his blazer. Grammar undone in the line drive of the bullet. That’s the best position they is.”
23. No spoilers, but: You can’t go home again. No spoilers, but: In a quietly devastating exchange, Pontius delivers a truth to Nick that only the damned can know. Nick, when he receives it, knows it too.
24. This book is circus and spectacle. This book is haunted by bad bosses and tragic love affairs. This book is watched over by lost fathers. This book says many things, but at the points at which I most loved this book, it was saying this: We move around in the world as collections of all that we have experienced, all we have known. We are connected by invisible threads to all those we have loved, who have loved us. We go after things we think we want, or we don’t. We act on the wounds we have sustained whether or not we acknowledge them. Whether or not we can identify the places from which we are bleeding.
There is no fate. There is no destiny. There is only our choices and their consequences.
25. In the end, there is a very literal end. The curtain falls on circus and spectacle. The plane lands. The taxicabs are summoned.
There is also a beginning. And the author meets himself, another version of himself.
Just as I think we all meet other versions of ourselves when we travel through the books we love best. -
Mary-Kim Arnold
Nick Bray, the narrator of Eric Raymond's debut novel Confessions from a Dark Wood, is a modern Nick Carraway—up for banter, full of observations, yet destined to disappear when in the presence of a bigger personality. Upon the death of his father and the loss of his crappy job, Nick goes to work for a soulless capital brand management company helmed by Pontius J. LaBar, a dwarfish grotesque with a certain talent for intellectually bullying prospective clients into submission.
Raymond is a master of deploying consultant blather for comic effect and of finding the grotesque in the mundane. For this reason, the book is never surer-footed than when in the presence of Labar and his jargon surrogate, Randi, who is tasked with making clients feel out of their depths. Her first words to Nick are, "As you've probably intuited, we're in desperate need of someone with cross-channel capacities. Someone who can interpret those innovating digital modalities for our Web 1.0 clients."
LaBar is a man consumed by private demons, but unlike Gatsby, he is concerned not with hiding a former self (that metamorphosis is complete) but instead with beating a rival consulting business (that may or may not exist) by obsessing over the detail work of wowing clients. "Do you think we should arrive in the white-on-white Bentley," LaBar asks Nick before meeting with a big potential client, "or would separate Ferraris be more his style?" And when Nick ups the ante by suggesting they hire a driver for the occasion, Pontius delivers the closest thing he's got to a catch phrase: "I couldn't agree more." The emphasis, for LaBar, like the American one percenters his creator skewers, is always on "more."
Confessions is a book exploding with ideas, and one that would improve if it took all of its absurd conceits seriously. What if Nick's dad existed not only as a witty foil but as a challenge to Nick's assumptions about himself? What if the consequences of the company's internship program were more fully integrated into the story? What if the domestic terrorism plot was initially presented not in a punchline but in scene, eliciting Nick's natural terror and better setting up the poignancy of scenes ahead? I'm more inclined to be horrified if I'm asked to believe all this is truly happening.
To be clear, though: Give me an idea bomb like this one over sad polished prattle any day.
Confessions' twist on the corporate sell-out story is that Nick shows few signs of having had much soul to sell in the first place. He begins the book as an uploader and captioner of robot-on-woman porn, so we are not expected to weep for him when he defers vague dreams of a meaningful life to go work for LaBar. At least it can be said that when he screen-grabbed smut, Nick was broke.
Labar's wants—fame, money, winning—are far less complicated than Nick's, and it is a relief for Nick to judge his pitiful boss so that he may further avoid having to figure himself out. When LaBar is disrespected in a meeting with a celebrity client, Nick gleefully narrates, "Pontius' face flushed and his upper lip stuck to his teeth in the peculiar smile he used as the defense most-high against having a tantrum."
Nick maintains ties to the lost part of himself by befriending a near-broke poet, by chatting with the ghost of his dead father, and by harboring a beautiful underage terrorist who hopes to punish the United States for her brother's death, while in the meantime tattooing her body with the logo of every major American corporation. Nick tries to talk her out of her plans for martyrdom while resenting the extent to which she exercises her free will.
And in Nick's defense, his career as LaBar's lackey does seem preordained. We begin to learn about LaBar and his firm immediately, before the boss even enters the narrative, so large does he loom over Nick's consciousness. And when Labar does show up, the book does not slowly simmer us into the weirdness that is LaBar Partners Limited, but tosses us immediately into the fryer, creating the Shining-like sense that Nick has always worked there.
It's telling when, late in the novel, Nick prepares to step forward and give it all he's got in a speech before a roomful of bloodthirsty gamblers, the power suddenly goes out. God seems to be telling Nick at every turn: This is a story about the agency you lack, not the agency you've got.
The final chapter is a gut punch that perfectly combines the book's light/playful side and its crushing/tragic side, an ending that makes Nick finally stand out among the outsized characters around him. Still, it's hardest to leave behind LaBar, the inspiration for the book's sharpest lines and darkest laughs, and that's saying something in a book full of both. - Gabe Durham
The Write Stuff: Eric Raymond on the Intersection of the Necessary and the Mystery
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| Pontius J. LaBar |
Eric Raymond is a working writer in San Francisco. His novel Confessions from a Dark Wood is now available from Sator Press, and he may be reached on Twitter @pontiuslabar.
When people ask what do you do, you tell them...?
These days I tell people I'm a writer. From there we fall through the tree branches of the usual follow-up questions until the conversation is unconscious on the ground.
What's your biggest struggle -- work or otherwise?
Maintaining faith that the sustained attention required for writing and reading has value within a society that consistently declares it does not. Sometimes I am afraid they are right.
If someone said I want to do what you do, what advice would you have for them?
I would probably assure them they do not. But if they're determined: Avoid debt at all costs. Keep your overhead low. Read widely and constantly. I did none of these things and it's made everything harder.
Do you consider yourself successful? Why?
Insofar that I am able to keep despair at bay and maintain faith, yes. Hard to know about the rest.
When you're sad/grumpy/pissed off, what YouTube video makes you feel better?
Most recently, this Kilian Martin freestyle video in an abandoned water park:
Do you have a favorite ancestor? What is his/her story?
My father's father, Robert "Bob" Raymond has always interested me, because of his indelible marks on my father. My father's attempts to write about him suggest he could be a real bastard, and yet I'm also named after him (my legal first name is Robert, though I go by Eric). He moved the family around a lot, and when my father was 16, his dad was killed by a train. The story goes that he pulled his car into a malfunctioning railway crossing, but there was always a suspicion that he may have committed suicide. I feel like a lot of Bob Raymond may be in me.
Who did you admire when you were 10 years old? What did you want to be?
I admired those kids who knew how to answer the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I remember lying every single time I was asked.
Would you ever perform a striptease? Describe some of your moves. Feel free to set the mood.
It is 1 a.m., and we're gorging ourselves in a fried chicken/donut joint somewhere beyond the reach of the health department. It is lit by fluorescent light. We are ruinously drunk; we have foregone napkins for sleeves. Do you honestly want me to take my clothes off?
How much money do you have in your checking account?
It doesn't really matter how much is in there at any given time, because I owe 99 percent of it to someone else.
What's wrong with society today?
Increasing income disparity within an economy which rewards people who create nothing.
What is your fondest memory?
One of them, anyway: I surprised my father on his birthday in 2005 by flying to Florida unannounced and dropping in on the regular Friday night poker game we used to play together before I moved to San Francisco.
What would you like to see happen in your lifetime?
A cure for diabetes. The death of advertising. These may be related.
What is art? Is it necessary? Why?
I know it's necessary, but I don't know if I can define it. Maybe art is the intersection of the necessary and the mystery.
When you have sex, what are some of the things you like to do?
Anticipate heavily.
What are you working on right now?
It's NaNoWriMo right now, so I'm built for speed. I'm ripping off Michael Kimball's episodic style in his incredible novel Big Ray to write a vaguely futuristic Bay Area novel. I'm way behind, but I'll rally.
What kind of work would you like to do? Or what kind of writing do you most admire?
Every time I write I'm in search of the work I would like to do. I have a hard time finding it. I admire unapologetic, voice-driven writing that doesn't sound like it was written by a committee of "the vaguely dissatisfied in Connecticut." (Snark courtesy of Dennis Lehane.)
If there were one thing about the Bay Area that you would change, what would it be?
I would like to see the Upper Haight evolve away from self-parody and nostalgic stoner theme park. If the Lower Haight can figure it out, surely west of Divisadero can.
What's the strangest thing you've ever seen?
The first time I saw my dad's casted legs after his amputations.
What are some of your favorite smells?
Orange blossoms through a car window. Night blooming jasmine anytime. Woodsmoke from a distance. Creosote in rail ties.
If you got an all expenses paid life experience of your choice, what would it be?
Probably a year completely unplugged. That's really expensive now.
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