Hob Broun - a writer less of conventional “sentences” than of freewheeling, aphoristic riffs. Intense, eccentric fictions

Hob Broun, Inner Tube,  Open Road, 2013.

After a family tragedy, a man chases consolation—or is it oblivion?—by traveling through some seedy locales of place and spirit

Early on in Hob Broun’s second novel, the mother of the unnamed narrator, a failed actress, commits suicide by putting her head through a television. That fact, together with our hero’s desire for his ex-girlfriend’s older sister, prompts a radical departure as he quits his job cataloging old television shows and sets off on a westward journey. Pursuing solace in unlikely places, he embarks on a string of just-as-unlikely romances, including ones with a motel maid and an archaeology professor. But can anything distract him from the painful emptiness within? In the desert, finally free of society, a self-reckoning awaits.

Bracing in its vision, Inner Tube is a fearless and often bitingly funny novel about what happens when our civilized veneers are shed.

Hob Broun, Cardinal Numbers, Open Road, 2013.

Cardinal Numbers is a posthumous collection of brilliantly enigmatic short fiction by Hob Broun, written with the aid of a respirator when the author was paralyzed from the neck down. Witty and full of minimalist surprise, these stories flirt with fragment, fabulism, and collage. In “Rosella, in Stages,” an old woman’s experience is movingly charted through the voice of her writing in six different life stages—and in six pages, no less. “Highspeed Linear Main Street,” a standout tale and an artistic credo of sorts, centers on a photographer’s fixation on highway life, while the surreal “Finding Florida” features a Che Guevara who becomes struck with longing for a librarian and receives some unwelcome news from a fortune teller.

Powerfully felt as well as mordantly funny, Cardinal Numbers is a freshly singular contribution to the American short story.

“The denominator common to these vignettes is their combination of intellectual fancy and up-to-the-minute fact—the echoes of centuries-old poetry synchronized with jazz, cinema, the slipstream of jets. Precisely detailed as to time, place and activity, they cannot fail to pique the curiosity."—Publishers Weekly

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Hob Broun, Odditorium, Open Road, 2013.

A pro softball player, an alcoholic husband, a drug deal out of town, and buried treasure—the postmodern and vibrantly pulpy debut novel from Hob Broun

The heroine of Odditorium is Tildy Soileau, a professional softball player stuck in a down-and-out marriage in South Florida. Leaving her husband to his own boozy inertia, she jumps at the chance to travel to New York with Jimmy Christo, only recently released from a mental institution, and make some much-needed cash on a drug deal.

Adventure is just as much a motivating force, though, and Tildy quickly gets involved with a charismatic drug dealer; meanwhile, in carrying out business, Jimmy is dangerously sidetracked in Tangier. By the time the two are back in Florida, a financial boon greets them, but here, too, trouble is in the wings. Formally daring and full of jolts of the unexpected,Odditorium is an addictive romp through shady realms.

This year I re-read the short story collection Cardinal Numbers by Hob Broun. Broun died in 1987 at the age of 37. This collection and his novel Inner Tube, edited by Gordon Lish, remain touchstones for me. These stories play with form and genre while also delivering us to deeply felt and often devastating places. Broun wrote with real wit and heart. Favorite pieces (and titles) in Cardinal Numbers include, “Ruby Dawn, Private Duty Nurse,” “Ice Water,” “High Speed Linear Main Street,” and “Fryed Cutlets.” Here’s the opener of “No Smoking”: “Joan was having a birthday the way other people have flu. She’d turned thirty-seven five days ago, but those forlorn and morbid symptoms still hung on. The ferries tripled on Friday and everyone already on the island took deep breaths. She passed the scone shop and the book nook and toggery. She passed Ramona’s sidewalk tables, where trust-fund carpenters sat with their imported ale. They wore jaunty little hats. They discussed timber prices and dilemmas of wiring. The dogs at their feet were stuporously pictorial.”

 Then there is Broun’s beautiful story “Rosella, in Stages,” which follows a woman’s life from her toddler days at the turn of the last century to her senility and death eight decades later, all in six brief sections over six pages. Broun had some noteworthy difficulty writing this book and much of Inner Tube: he was paralyzed from the neck down after a surgical procedure. He wrote by puffing into a plastic tube attached to a computer. Every word was hard-won. - SAM LIPSYTE

Heywood Orren (or “Hob”) Broun (1950-1987) published three books in his brief lifetime, none of which are widely known today. But Broun’s intense, eccentric fictions ought to be more than a mere footnote to modern American literary history.

His first book, Odditorium (Harper & Row, 1983) could ostensibly be called a “novel,” although it digressively destabilises “character,” “story,” and almost all other hallmarks of the form. A seedy, pulpy pinball game of botched drug deals and bungling gunplay, the book’s pleasure lies in its unpredictability; to read it is to watch it run off the rails.

Broun’s next text, Inner Tube (Knopf, 1985), was acquired by legendary editor Gordon Lish, whose stylistic influence can be felt throughout Broun’s subsequent work. By now Broun had become—a little like Barry Hannah, another author from Lish’s stable—a writer less of conventional “sentences” than of freewheeling, aphoristic riffs. But beyond this, Inner Tube displays a brilliant strain of misanthropy that is all Broun’s own. The book begins with the narrator’s mother committing suicide by putting her head through a TV screen. Compelled to escape this constitutive trauma (plus his incestuous lust for his sister), he flees into an increasingly fractured, ersatz social world. Along the way, man is revealed as merely

an over-evolved creature whose most dangerous enemies come from within… Imagine the first useless panic, the first nightmare, the first crushing turn of anomie. Ten thousand generations later, all we can do is palliate. Misery abhors a vacuum, and history is a list of sedatives.

Eventually Broun’s narrator escapes from this failed civilization, leaving to live alone in the desert. Inner Tube’s plot provides no palliation; instead it presents a pessimistic awareness that “we are animals. All the consoling fabrications must be waived.”

Six chapters into writing Inner Tube, Broun underwent emergency surgery to remove a tumour surrounding his spine. He lived, but was left paralysed from the neck down. As he said to his agent at the time, the surgeons had “snipped every God-damn wire.” From now on, Broun’s very breath was brought about by a respirator. His deep depression during this period is perhaps easy to appreciate. What is remarkable, however, is the way in which he overcame it—willing himself, against all odds, to go on writing.

Broun finished Inner Tube, and wrote the stories collected inCardinal Numbers (Knopf, 1988) by means of a mechanical prosthesis: an oral catheter (known as a “sip-and-puff device”) connected to a Franklin Ace 2000 computer, running a customised word processer triggered by Broun’s breath whenever a letter flashed on the screen.

It’s worth remembering how much he resented this set-up: had he “had hands,” as he put it, he would rather have written on a 1948 Remington, a picture of which he kept pinned to his wall. Nonetheless, this method suggests a rich metaphor for the role of “technique” in recent American writing. Academics like Mark McGurl have remarked on an implicit “technicity”—a technological turn of the imagination—in the way certain writers conceive of their craft. Ben Marcus, for instance, describes writing as “a delivery-system for feeling,” a machine that mediates emotion using rhetorical mechanisms. This terminology is echoed in the title of the course he teaches at Columbia: “Technologies of Heartbreak.” In a sense, Broun presents an extreme (and, of course, tragically enforced) example of this emphasis on taut, fraught, high-stakes execution.

In Marcus’s formulation, the flipside of technique, or technicity, is raw emotional urgency. And this, above all, is what matters most about Broun. Among more well-known writers, his linguistic manoeuvres most closely resemble those of Sam Lipsyte—another author profoundly shaped by Lish’s painstaking approach to sentence construction. Each writer, in his way, illustrates the Lishian dictum that “every morpheme, every phoneme counts.” The point, though, is that such stylistic exactitude mustn’t be misread as emotionless. Observing my interest in what could crudely be called the “Lish line” of fiction, a friend of mine once claimed that he couldn’t see any “angst” beneath the pyrotechnics; any “existential” pressure. Broun’s prose provides powerful proof of why this is wrong. Without doubt, here was a writer, as Lipsyte has said of him, for whom “every word was hard won.”

Broun’s best book by far is his last, the story collectionCardinal Numbers. Written in clipped, compressed sentences, these stories share a surface similarity that some might mislabel as “minimalism.” But Broun was only a minimalist in the simple, quantitative sense of being able to squeeze nineteen stories into 150 pages. The fact is that Cardinal Numbers gleefully runs the gamut of literary forms, from fabulism to free association. The standout story, “Highspeed Linear Main St.,” is a shifting, swerving improvisation about modern art and sensory overload. At one point its manic narrator pauses for breath and announces: “modus operandi: montage, collage, bricolage.”

As with other books on his list at Knopf, Lish himself wrote the jacket copy for Cardinal Numbers. In 2013, it’s hard to imagine any commercially-minded publisher countenancing the ecstatic rant that graces this book’s flaps. As is made abundantly clear here, Broun’s stories arose from

a tension quite special to those whose lives must be lived in the face of calamitously punishing circumstances. Such conditions of existence produced in Hob Broun a living instance of the Beckettian principle I can’t go on; I must go on, and accordingly made of his fiction a kind of literary embodiment of these opposing statements. To be sure, it is this very irony that suffuses the stories in this book, and that imparts to them the heartaching air of hope struggling between moments of its being successively suffocated and set aflame. These entries should be read as a map of the will of their author to keep on.

This will is what’s behind the lasting value of Broun at his best. Stymied by life, he brought life to his words; the writing of fiction was, he once said, “the focus of what I’m surviving for.” To pour all of oneself into writing; this is the challenge his stories set for any would-be author who reads them. And it’s why they still stand, decades later, as urgent, ultimately exuberant examples of how writing can address what Lish has called “the problem of being alive.” In its audacious inventiveness, Cardinal Numbers measures itself against the life its author could not live. Any paralysis, it seems to say, can be briefly escaped in feats of verbal velocity; in fiction’s reach for freedom.

The papers record that Hob Broun died in 1987, accidentally asphyxiated when his respirator broke down. He was 37 years old. “Ice Water,” the opening story of Cardinal Numbers, was recently reprinted in New York Tyrant, one of America’s leading literary magazines. At the time of his death, Broun had begun work on a third novel, reportedly called Wild Coast, Wild Coast, which, to our loss, no one will ever read. - David Winters