Michael Allen Zell - Cabbies, Tarot, Women, New Orleans, Confidence Man, Murder, Crocodiles, Dirt

Michael Allen Zell, Errata. Lavender Ink, 2012

 
michaelallenzell.com/

A young New Orleans cabbie named Raymond Russell is so shocked by the intensity of a crime that he cannot write about it directly. He can only let out the occasional hint to prime the engine of his mind for what he must reveal. Errata is Raymond’s 22 day attempt at correction of his seeming culpability, an ambitious neo-noir meditation on isolation and sociability, wisdom and madness, symbol and text, innocence and guilt.

I swear, the text, the actual typed text of Errata itself seems swollen with meaning not simply the humid atmospherics of New Orleans. Swelled up, bled and run together into this concoction of pulpy fictive essaying. Michael Allen Zell’s text is evocative, efficacious, effortlessly magical. These are words making love to words, wrapped up in sheets of steamy grammar all transitive, diagramed to hell and back. Come for New Orleans, stay for new oracles. -  Michael Martone

It seems that Michael Allen Zell took a page from Joyce in constructing his novel, following the idea of writing a simple story in a complex matter. Though instead of burying a narrative in puns, homonyms, invented words, syntactical buggery, and so on, Zell let’s the narrative of his novel Errata wind and turn much in the same fashion that the books protagonist, Raymond Russel (an homage to Roussel for sure), drives his taxi through the city of New Orleans: never from point A to point B, as most fare would expect, but rather in methods that involve spelling out his own name by looping through streets, taking roads that are less visited and more lonely, deviations upon deviations, until finally arriving at his point. And it is in this construction, the simple narrative interrupted by diversion, that the book holds its strength.
Errata‘s narrative is casually described as neo-noir on the back of the book, and to summarize the book rapidly this would, indeed, suffice, but to reduce the book to this cliché–clichés existing only in language, not in the narrative of life, as our narrator remarks on the last page of the book–takes away what it is that makes the short book so pleasurable. It’s filled with asides, asides on literature, mostly on Melville’s Confidence Man, Schulz’s “Street of Crocodiles,” Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers, and of course, oh yes of course, the ever present Borges. Aside from literature there is much discussion of beards, of a life being lived casually and hermit-like, to the enjoyment of simplicity; all outside of systematic structures that dominate the 20th century. Though it’s set in the mid-1980s there’s little to indicate that outside of a few passing phrases, there is no cultural nostalgia here, and similarly the location of New Orleans seems but a moot point to what’s happening: there is a girl, there is a man, there is a life lived to only a certain degree, there is a climax: Call the burial, dirt rest.
Zell’s book approaches the text as a reader more than a writer, aware of what brings the author pleasure in reading, this pleasure is in turn passed on to the reader, “Raymond, do you want to look back on your life and think at least I watched a lot of television??” There’s a three page rant about how printed dialog is a futility; there are cues that make me think of what a friend said about writing, how most readers simply confuse the idea of “character development” with authorial intent, a terrible habit picked up in reductive literature classes offered in primary education, these early moldings of the head when we learn to be taught what exactly makes “good literature.”
But the story, buried beneath everything else, is simple and solid. There is a plot that the narrator becomes involved in. There is an excessive amount of insomnia, which leads, in turn, to the writing of the notebook that we, outside of this textual diegesis, are reading, Errata; there’s a meta-text that doesn’t wink at the reader, rather actually probes & functions on the level of affect. This is, perhaps, one of the smartest contemporary novels that I’ve encountered, and because of that, I ultimately appreciate it being written. As a nod to the novel’s protagonist, I consider it the highest honor to now be using the book, which I’ve finished, to prop up my crooked desk, which formerly would shift back and forth, rocking like a boat on the gentle sea as I typed letters and words and numbers into this machine. A book as infrastructure, something solid. -Impossible Mike

The end of the year is in sight, and with it the urge to clean up everything left undone. I’ve done a poor job of writing about my reading here, largely from lack of leisure; but I also haven’t felt compelled by that many books this past year. This one probably goes on that short list. Errata arrived in the mail as comb-bound ARC some time over the summer, chiefly notable for how amateurish it looked. I’m not sure why I received the book, as I’d never taken notice of Lavender Ink’s books (although Bill Lavender did pop up in the news shortly thereafter); but I put the book in my bag and, after a while, ended up looking at it while on a cross-town bus delayed in traffic, hoping that I could decide that it wasn’t worth bothering with, toss it, and thus accomplish something with what seemed to be a wasted day. The book, it soon became clear, was interesting; the alternating alliterations of cs and vs in a sentence on the first page was enough to stop and take notice:

I crave calming veins of vicarious titillation, the caricature of civilization kept viciously certain by every scanner burst, its randomness cutting through this vexing cloister. (p. 7)

There’s prolixity there, maybe worrying, but controlled rhythm as well, so I read to the next page, where there was a smart consideration of Nabokov, discovered that page to be the end of the first chapter already; a second chapter, almost as short, started the narrative again and revealed the name of the narrator to be Raymond Russell. There wasn’t much that I could do to stop myself at that point; and this is a short book. I don’t think that I was stuck on public transportation that day long enough to read the whole thing, though that’s not outside of the realm of possibility.
What happens in this book is easily laid out: the bookish narrator drives an unlicensed cab in New Orleans in late 1984. He becomes involved, glancingly, in the life of a woman, Hannah Spire; they are mixed up in the death of a corrupt police officer, the Pelican. The book’s twenty-two chapters are subsequent attempts at writing what happened for posterity. The story is simple (though with nice details); but it’s how the story is written (or, as the narrator announces, “how I’ll tell the story around the story”) that makes this book especially worthwhile. Zell’s literary references deserve special: the book swims in Bruno Schulz, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Herman Melville, Josef Váchal, tools that the narrator uses to think through the problem of addressing his problem. His house is slowly sinking; he props up the foundation with stolen and read books, almost an image of Neurath’s boat. Harry Mathews pops up – this book is related to The Journalist – as does Mallarmé’s Livre and Valéry’s style of dialogue. Roussel is hiding in the background, making the occasional appearance:

More recently, I’d also been told rumors from faves about the 5th District cop who literally pistol-whipped out the teeth of neighborhood men, collected them, and then, referring to his nickname Half and Half, wrote 1/2 as a teeth mosaic in the dirt of empty lots by their sidewalks to remind the residents of his brutality. A civil servant who wore his ethics the way buildings wear rain. (pp. 45–6)

Textual puzzles litter the book. One of the epigraphs, for example, comes from a “P. Reyval”; rearranging the letters reveals Valéry, the reason the quote seems familiar; but on scrutiny, what P. Reyval says is rearranged from what Valéry said. The reader is rewarded for paying attention, though there’s also easy pleasure to be had from the surface of the book. Consider this paragraph-long discussion of Melville and facial hair:

Many men have many minds, so shouldn’t many men also be permitted an assorted masquerade ability to wear several varieties of facial hair or none? The first clause of the preceding sentence references a chapter title from The Confidence Man by Herman Melville, which is appropriate because his writing wasn’t always appreciated throughout his lifetime, but his beard certainly was and is, what with the iconic photographs of the bearded Melville remaining his prevailing visual impression. He knew the power of sporting one’s own Spanish moss during an exceptionally hairy era, using over two dozen different words or phrases of beard description in the novel White Jacket, published when he was barely into his 30′s and his writing career was waning, requiring him to pursue another line of work. (pp. 33–34)

Excerption doesn’t quite show how beautifully this paragraph’s precise deployment of trivia wraps up the narrator’s discussion earlier in the chapter of his own problems with work and shaving as a correlative for that; it foreshadows a point later in the book where the narrator becomes a beard. The Confidence Man hangs over the book; we are reminded that the steamship in that book is sailing for New Orleans.
In a sense Zell’s novel is perfectly common: a literary young man attempts to explain a story with reference to his personal history, his reading, and his education. It’s told in the first person. But this is a book which is always deeply conscious that it is a book, and that the act of writing is fundamentally at odds with living:

Life is not a document. Life cannot be documented. Documents cannot be lived. The writing process is at odds with reconciling life and living sensibly. All I can do is immerse myself and write with abandon to make sense of the situation, and literally try to scrawl myself to sleep, the errata notebook a line to grasp onto for the sake of saving my neck and to be pulled back to my previous reality. (pp. 22–3)

By itself, this philosophizing might become tiresome; attached to a swiftly moving narrative, it works well. Halfway through the book, a chapter is mostly devoted to a consideration of the place of dialogue in fiction, with the narrator supporting the position that dialogue in fiction functions to the detriment of fiction itself, which becomes an argument for telling rather than showing. This sort of explaining shouldn’t work; usually when I come across this sort of thing, I react badly. Zell makes it work.
This isn’t a perfect book; we’ve seen the female characters before, though it’s entirely possible that’s intentional. But the greatest defect of this book is a strange one: it’s not long enough. It’s not that the form isn’t correct for the size; 116 pages wraps the book up perfectly. But like the stories of Kleist, one wishes for more. A book so enjoyable to read shouldn’t be so short, though it does lend itself to re-reading. I’m curious to see what Zell does next.- withhiddennoise.net/

Michael Allen Zell’s slim debut novel includes a buried body, a crooked cop, a French Quarter stripper and an unhinged cabbie. But don’t worry, “Errata” isn’t a run-of-the-mill crime story. Zell dissolves the familiar dross of New Orleans noir in the potent solvent of his imagination, an alchemical process that yields literary gold.

  

 Michael Allen Zell set his debut novel, 'Errata,' in New Orleans during the 1984 World's Fair. Christina Deare

Read “Errata” if you’re a fan of the chatty, obsessed, unreliable criminals conjured by Vladimir Nabokov and Denis Johnson; the grumbling madmen of Dostoyevsky and W.G. Sebald. The undertow that pulls you through Zell’s first-person narrative is one of psychological detection: What happened to cab driver Raymond Russell? Why can’t he come out and tell us directly?
“Errata” takes the form of 22 journal entries that deftly mimic the cabbie’s agitated state. That doesn’t always make for easy reading, but, as Zell’s narrator argues, “it’s a pity when writers don’t value words, attempting little beyond a 4/4 time plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk in print.” And “Errata” rewards persistence: Every syntactic stumble in Zell’s headlong prose serves a mimetic function, suggesting the complexities of a scattered mind straining toward understanding.
Zell’s cabbie has an interesting mind: one that easily encompasses references to symbolist poetry and evocations of a rural youth. He’s a small town boy, a New Orleans newcomer who sets up his own gypsy cab business during the 1984 World’s Fair. He loves literature. He enjoys the solitude and routines of the night shift. He has a taste for coded, gnomic discourse. And he gets himself into deep, deep trouble when he falls for one of his fares, a stripper who resembles his bookish childhood love.
New Orleans also feels like a character in Zell’s book: an active presence, instead of a backdrop. And the city is mirrored in every detail. To the stripper, for example, her first New Orleans apartment resembles the town: “You can pay pennies for a neglected room, feel like you're in the center of the universe, but at some point it’ll disappear along with everything you own, only you don’t know when. All you can do is live in the moment and hope for a little joy before the padlock clicks in place. In any case, there’s always another room. In this city nothing ever changes.”
For a reader, Zell’s New Orleans is a pretty good place to be. - Chris Waddington
   

from ERRATA by Michael Allen Zell

DAY 4 The glass implies the bottle, likewise the text implies its author, so today I’ll address the purpose of these 3:00 A.M. writings.  Why jot down an entry a day for just over three weeks and then spend another week rewriting, in a manner of speaking?  Sure, action was necessary.  Dance or drown.  But there are other ways to break the monotony of waiting, buoys to cling to, other means to distract from private purgatory (though apparently no other ways for a sleep aid), but I’m both intending to explain how the situation came to be, as well as to decipher and amend expected misperceptions of my role in it.  Meaning, I’m not guilty.  This is desperation, not an enlightened tactic.  Don’t expect any surprising profundity or for me to unravel the mysteries of the morning.  No clinched business here.  Instead, repair damaged logic.  Readjust my presence.  Maybe help to develop eventual foresight.  In the meantime, this is a serious correction, like an errata slip tipped-in or inserted just inside the front cover of a book, although my errata go beyond the usual shifts of tense, punctuation errors, incorrect articles used, or misspellings.  Instead of typos, I’m attempting to correct evidence that points to my culpability.  Frankly, my concerns have a much larger sense and a necessity of immediacy than book-based errata, and for that reason the reversal of time has become fundamental in the early morning ritual of recording my impressions of these events.  Don’t expect a confession of confidence.  This is a specimen of afflicted truth.  The pain of advancing sour knowledge.  But no vanity of suffering.  No hyperbole of decline.  I fear though that all of this may appear opaque beyond what it actually reveals (Who wouldn’t seek out diminishing transparency after a coarse stab at revealing the tangled garden of a secret life?), that the tenuous letters are more heartily assertive than they initially seemed in declaiming a silent code of which I’m not even aware.  Very well.  Consider this a document of five characters.  Since the text seems to be a creature that launches its maker, let the letters serve as both character and key, because I firmly expect to hit a bend in the road while writing this.  My life is already at another bend, the fold of the paper cutout, which is to say the suspended middle, the in between zone, but which is not to say the roadblock of writing.  Life is not a document.  Life cannot be documented.  Documents cannot be lived.  The writing process is at odds with living sensibly.  All I can do is immerse myself and write with abandon to make sense of the situation, and literally try to write myself back to sleep again, the errata notebook a line to grasp onto for the sake of saving my neck and to be pulled back to my previous reality.  I can’t keep the notebook here in my apartment as a memento of my itch, that much is realized (I thought about using the false-bottomed box that I hide intrinsic-valuables in, but layers are slight and it only takes one person to realize what lies below the surface), but neither does it exist to burn or just throw out.  I understand full well where it needs to go, what its proper role is, but that means returning to the place, the place I shouldn’t return to, but where I need to go back and check.  If I go back to the place for a second time, my nature will likely compel a cycle of going back.  At the same time, it’s the best location for the notebook since both it and the current inhabitant imply each other.  The errata book needs to have time for stillness and rejuvenation as much as I do.  Let the book sleep, have its proper rest.  Call the burial, dirt rest.