David Hollander, Anthropica, Animal Riot Press, 2020.
excerpt
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A Hungarian fatalist convinced that the human race is a blemish on
God's otherwise beautiful universe; a statistician who has determined
that we completely exhaust the earth's resources every 30 days; a
failing novelist whose nihilistic fiction has doomed her halfhearted
quest for tenure; an Ultimate Frisbee-playing man-child who has
discovered a fractal pattern contained within all matter, but is
nevertheless obsessed with the chase for a National Championship; a
banished race of mole people preparing for a violent uprising; a
factory filled with human heads being mined for information; a former
philosophy professor with ALS who has discovered, as he becomes
"locked in," that he can make things happen simply by
wanting them badly enough; and a trio of vengeful, superintelligent
robots secretly imprisoned in an underground hangar in Iksan, South
Korea, patiently waiting for some gullible human(s) to release them.
This is a partial cast of Anthropica, a novel that puts Laszlow
Katasztrófa's beautiful vision of a universe without us to the test.
Because even if Laszlow believes that he is merely an agent of fate,
a cog in God's inscrutable machine, he's nevertheless the one driving
this crazy machine. And once he has his team assembled, it turns out
that he might-against all odds and his own expectations-actually have
the tools to see his apocalyptic plan to fruition.
“David Hollander's
gorgeous hyperbolic prose voice contains a great many things, for
example, a horror about the excesses of the contemporary, and a
fearlessness about accepting all of these excesses. Beneath the
syntactical dazzle, that is, Hollander sees like a visionary and he
feels like an empath. Anthropica is more evidence of his tragic and
tragicomic excellence.” -- Rick Moody, Author of Hotels of North
America and The Ice Storm
"Anthropica is
that rare, category-defying book that is pure enchantment:
structurally dazzling, philosophically profound, slyly funny, and
stealthily moving. This is a book to read and read again, discovering
deeper levels every time." -- Dawn Raffel, Author of The Strange
Case of Dr. Couney and The Secret Life of Objects
“What a pleasure
to watch a writer of David Hollander's gifts really "lay out"
(to employ the ultimate Frisbee parlance of one of his protagonists),
to put it all on the line in service to this majestic mysterious
artifact, this deeply felt and sometimes madcap Moebius strip of a
book. Anthropica is a philosophically vibrant and profoundly funny
novel, and a good old-fashioned systems yarn to boot. Space-time,
Earth-life, and human (and inhuman) desire and meaning have a worthy
bard in David Hollander, and existence gets its dark, beautiful due
in this rapturous work.” - Sam Lipsyte, Author of The Ask and Venus
Drive
"Anthropica is
like the NYTimes crossword on Monday: a little bit difficult but
entirely rewarding. Difficult because it mirrors back the dire state
of our world, and rewarding because of the sentence-by-sentence
beauty, the crisp creation of characters, the masterful interior
voices, the fully-imagined, willing world, the smooth soft underbelly
of the story with its sparkling viscera hanging out. Plus, it's
funny." -- Jo Ann Beard, Author of The Boys of My Youth and In
Zanesville
“David Hollander's
Anthropica is equal parts Goldberg Variations and Rube Goldberg
machine—every slotted sentence holds a surprise. It's a dizzying
counterpointer and amplifier and constellatory of voices, a mad music
box where his stunning, skilled absurdism laughs as it aches and
mostly just sings some of the most beautiful songs.” - David Ryan,
Author of Animals in Motion and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano:
Bookmarked.
Plot, character, setting and theme. These are the four elements that the novelist John Hawkes described as the “enemies of fiction,” going on to say that once he’d abandoned such constraints, “totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.” Hawkes, who might be best known for his novel The Lime Twig (1961), was attempting to initiate an evolution out of a certain kind of formalism that had dominated literature until that point. This evolution we sometimes call Postmodernism, and the style that upheld the primacy of “vision” was taken up by Donald Barthelme, John Barthes, Robert Coover and Rick Moody on the American side, and writers like Thomas Bernhard and László Krasznahorkai on the European.
I would be hard-pressed to summarize neatly any of the novels written by the above authors, and the same is true of David Hollander’s new novel, Anthropica (Animal Riot Press, 2020) which takes the Hawkean declaration to heart. I could tell you, for example, that there are several protagonists: a statistician named Stuart Dregs, who discovers that humankind exhausts the Earth’s natural resources every eight days, a discovery that leads him to the “Anthropica Theory,” which states that the universe continues to exists only because humanity wants it to; there’s Finn Daily, an Ultimate Frisbee player who simultaneously discovers a crab-shaped fractal pattern that underwrites the architecture of all matter in the universe; a Hungarian doom-prophet named Laszlow Katasztrófa, author of Exit Strategy, a plot to harness the two aforementioned discoveries to bring about the end of the world; and Grace Kitchen, a writing professor at an east coast liberal arts college, who has a fatal romance with Laszlow. Add in a Three Stooges gang of intelligent robots, a genderbending humanoid named Joyful Noise! and a structural game in which several characters believe themselves to be the author of Anthropica itself, and you’ll have some idea of what Hollander’s novel is about.
Hollander’s first and last novel, L.I.E., which is an exploration of consciousness and the concept of the Self, was published in 2001. In an interview with Seth Katz in The Millions, Hollander revealed that L.I.E. was roundly rejected, but it was serendipitously picked out of a slush pile because his name resembled another author’s. The novel generated a bidding war and was soon picked up by Random House, which ran a generous first printing. However, once it appeared that sales would not meet projections, the printing was scaled back, and what was supposed to be a national book tour was confined to the New York area.
Over the next twenty years, Hollander wrote three more manuscripts that were all rejected by mainstream publishers, who were becoming increasingly cramped and uncomfortable with “difficult fiction.” Hollander himself acknowledges that his obsession with difficulty was status-seeking, a trap that many a vain young writer can fall into. Anthropica is likely to be described by some readers as “difficult,” but unlike his previous books, Hollander said that Anthropica was more of a fun project for himself and his close friends, and for the first year or so of its development, he was convinced he wouldn’t publish it. Spurred on by his agent, Hollander worked on the novel for another two years before sending it out. It too was met with rejection. The novel then lay dormant for several years until Animal Riot Press, founded by two of Hollander’s former students, offered to publish it.
Since Anthropica blends several stylistic elements––science fiction, dystopia, philosophy, and social realism––it shouldn’t come as a surprise that no publishers found it marketable, which is the chief metric of a book’s value. And yet it should surprise us, because the novel is a sprawling and ambitious force, a mobius strip of fiction whose virtues are impossible to ignore
Anthropica is at its heart a book driven by language––specifically, the ways in which language can start to feel like a container for ideas and experience, leaving one writhing to break free of its determinism. Indeed, all characters in the novel, in one way or another, are driven by this Desire––Desire being the perpetual motion machine that powers the universe itself, which is the foundation of the “Anthropica Theory,” described thusly:
Anthropica didn’t mean that the world was broken. It meant that the world could not be changed. It meant that it was only here because we wanted it to be. It meant the worst thing of all: it would go on and on, evolving toward nothing and unbeholden to anything. Christ, talk about depressing.
Given its subject, the reader might expect the novel to be grim and fatalistic. What it achieves rather is a smiling nihilism, nicely aphorized as: “Everything you do is unimportant, but it is very important that you do it.” Hollander has described this as “the toggle,” switching back and forth between impossibly meaningful experiences in an otherwise utterly meaningless world, and the novel’s dialectical movements dramatize this beautifully.
Without giving too much away, the realization of Anthropica’s corollary––that the universe can be destroyed if Desire is eliminated––is made possible by the intersection of several characters––Finn, Dregs, and Grace Kitchen’s father Henry, an ALS-ridden man bound to slow death in a wheelchair, who discovers he can make things happen simply by wanting them bad enough. Laszlow, the orchestrator of this apocalyptic symphony, brings the cast together in the eponymous fallout facility Exit Strategy, located in Iksan Korea along the 35th parallel, together with what is known as “the Consciousness Factory.”
As with L.I.E., consciousness, and the feeling of being “locked inside” consciousness, is a central theme. In this case, Henry is literally locked in, Dregs, who eventually achieves a kind of disembodied state, remains locked in, and a cheeky robot known as Fexo, who might be self-aware, gives us a glimpse of what an artificial consciousness might look like under the same constraints.
Hollander manages all of this by virtue of speed and elegance. Anthropica is a novel that does not slow down, and it is driven by the strength of its prose. Hollander’s sentences are often rushing and headlong, requiring operatic breaths if being read aloud. The prose is consistently beautiful, and lines like this––
He was the weapons-grade plutonium of wanting…
And like this––
The dog leapt beneath a neon sign that flared brightly and blinded them with its jubilant ruby light before going suddenly dark here at the bottom of the world, here at this entrance to a life without end.
––appear on almost every page. Hollander can clearly stand with the best of his contemporaries as a stylist. Anthropica’s prose is close and almost always internalized in its respective character’s point-of-view, giving it the quality of a long modulating inner-monologue, but the briefness of the chapters and some forays into strict dialogue/transcript sections keep the style from cloying.
The Nabokovian dictum to dazzle is definitely on display here. However, the Nabokovian ethic—that the style should be beautiful and effortless, easily bringing the reader through the world it fashions––is somewhat at odds in Hollander’s novel. Hollander can dazzle, certainly, but it comes with some demands. A beautiful style can bring you in and make you marvel, or place you at distance, and the challenge for any writer, regardless of style, is to find the balance. Some of the writers mentioned above, like Bernhard or Krasznahorkai, sacrifice a certain ease of reading for sake of the “totality of vision,” and their style could easily be described as “alienating.” Hollander manages largely to achieve the balance, though not without pressure at points. For all of Anthropica’s thematic heaviness and philosophical musings, nonetheless remains a darkly funny and entertaining read, and like the same crab-shaped fractal upon which it is built, it will twist and expand your sense of what fiction can do. -
Jared Marcel Pollen
David Hollander’s
Anthropica is a collection of stories between characters that
intertwine with each other in unusual ways. The word Anthropica that
Hollander uses is from the word anthropic, which means: relating to
human beings or the period of their existence on earth; the Anthropic
Principle sums up the premise of Anthropica. Included in this book
are characters such as novelists, philosophical thinkers, robots,
mole-people, and Ultimate-frisbee players. Each of these characters
develops higher thinking throughout the story and seeks to discover
the truth of our existence.
Honestly, I was
confused during much of the story. The audience should be mature
adults who enjoy and are familiar with the style of writing from
Hollander. I didn’t appreciate the continuous use of foul language
and sexual dialogue included in nearly every character’s story; I
understand that this is a style of writing that is familiar and
normal to some readers, but not for me. There are many references to
God and religion throughout the story; it was unclear to me whether
the characters (the author) were for or against Him. I felt the text
was wordy, but I understand that for readers who appreciate
descriptions and detail, they will enjoy this book. - Rachel Dehning
https://manhattanbookreview.com/product/anthropica/
The scope of the
planet can feel overwhelming: mountains, oceans, deserts, jungles,
rivers, caverns, continents all stretching over thousands of miles.
Add the human race—nearly eight billion of us on a single rock,
living and dying, consuming and propagating, exponentially draining
the planet of its resources—and the world seems that much more
immense. Or that much more impossible. How can such an organism
sustain itself?
That question forms
the basis for Anthropica, a new novel by David Hollander (or by one
of three competing metafictional writers), forthcoming from Animal
Riot Press. The book responds to the absurdity of human life with an
equally absurd proposition: that the world functions simply because
we, as a collective species, want it to. A madcap troupe of
characters ranging from university professors to Ultimate Frisbee
champions to an ancient race of lobster-clawed, subterranean goons
react to the discovery of the Anthropica principle in this
compelling, quasi-philosophical dark comedy. Oh, and there are
robots.
“Anthropica didn’t
mean that the world was broken. It meant that the world could not be
changed. It meant that it was only here because we wanted it to be.
It meant the worst thing of all: it would go on and on, evolving
toward nothing and unbeholden to anything. Christ, talk about
depressing.”
At the core are two
antiheroes, Grace Kitchen and Finn Daily. Grace is a professor of
creative writing who hates her students and somehow thinks she
deserves tenure despite her inability to publish. Finn is a doctoral
student in mathematics and an Ultimate Frisbee junkie. Working on a
theorem as useless as anything in the humanities, Finn stumbles on
the secret of the universe, what he terms the God Fractal, a pattern
that exists throughout all of the material world. He simply doesn’t
know what to do with the revelation—and would rather train for the
Ultimate championships anyway, though that becomes more complicated
when he is seduced by his teammate’s mother.
And that’s only
the first few chapters.
Grace and Finn cross
paths thanks to Exit Strategy, a terrorist group bent on destroying
all human life. Exit Strategy’s leader sees Finn as a sort of
prophet and Grace as the chronicler of their resistance, writing the
only book that matters (which may be the same book the reader holds
in their hands). Then there are other cast members: Grace’s invalid
father, Finn’s girlfriend, an ancient being posing as Grace’s
competition for tenure, a sad-sack scientist on to the mystery of
Anthropica, and heads in glass jars. Not to mention the robots. And
innumerable vultures.
“In the same sense
that all humans are candidates for sexual encounters with celebrities
and supermodels, Grace was a candidate for tenure at the New School
for Global Visions in Manhattan, where she taught fiction writing to
writers who sought to teach fiction writing to writers, the absurdity
of this infinite regress not lost on Grace Kitchen, who was painfully
aware that—Animal Riot Press not withstanding—the market for
actual writing (and actual reading) had already faded into the
cultural microwave radiation background.”
All of this is
delightfully high-concept and, trust me, makes as much sense as it
can. It is nearly impossible to summarize the novel in a handful of
paragraphs, let alone a single impression or effect. A number of
readings are possible, but at some point, the reader must simply
suspend a healthy amount of disbelief, sit back, and enjoy the ride.
As dark as the novel
is, it never quite gives in to the melancholy that its ironic and
absurd elements could suggest. Anthropica can be cynical,
particularly when satirizing identity politics, but moments of
humanity shine through the nihilism and sarcasm: a naïve college
student becomes suddenly sympathetic, a crudely-described outsider
acts as a transcendent source of unity, a moment of personal triumph
turns into a scornful rebuke. One of Hollander’s gifts is his
ability to reverse course without coming across as inconsistent. He
will skew to a new perspective that leaves the reader with a
breakthrough of empathy, suggesting that excessive cynicism could
itself be the satirical target.
But make no mistake:
this is not a touchy-feely novel. The plot unravels in tangents that
often switch narrator and format, coming just shy of forming a
cohesive, satisfying whole. That, in itself, is satisfying. In a book
about (in part) our need for meaning, and the meaninglessness of our
need for meaning, a fragmentary structure is appropriate. We can
grasp at enlightenment but never achieve it. Yet we’ll want to try
again, to read again. And those heights that we feel might just also
be our lows; indeed, these characters are at their best and their
worst when they are unashamedly or unknowingly self-centered.
“The God Fractal,
as an idea, was Finn’s latest and most ambitious effort to deliver
meaning to the tumult of unforeseeable consequences we called Life,
something he’d been trying to do since he was a boy growing up
inside a subdivision’s rectangular cage which, when viewed from the
window of a passenger jet or attack helicopter or other airborne
apparatus, when seen, that is, in the larger context of its many
surrounding subdivisions, linked one to the next by black spokes of
asphalt, did indeed resemble nothing so much as a box in a flow
chart.”
Part of what makes
the novel work is the writer’s voice. Hollander is elevated but not
esoteric, dense but not impenetrable. His words and phrasings are so
sharp they risk breaking skin. And the guy can write a sentence. Some
go on for so long—sometimes a page or more—with so many embedded
phrases and clauses you think you’d get lost, but you don’t.
Instead, they pick up a rhythm and enthusiasm defying the nihilism of
the subject matter. He is, himself, creating a world on the page out
of the energy of his own artistic desire.
The universe is us,
and we are the universe. Maybe the novel is about perception, the
worlds we will into being inside our own brains, metaphoric
narratives we create to give us the illusion of purpose. Or maybe
it’s an extended analogy of the writer as creator of universes,
with his characters vying for control of the text.
Or maybe it’s just
about Anthropica. You be the judge.
I’ll leave you
with one final image: If you chuckle at the thought of a troupe of
characters delivering a propagandistic message through interpretive
dance while costumed as giant sperm, this is the book for you. -
Nathaniel Drenner
Research Notes by David Hollander
Interview
Interview 2
Interview 3
https://www.longlivetheauthor.com/
If Anthropica were a small and ramshackle village languishing in the shadow of a jagged and ice-slick mountain that had never once been summited, neither by the villagers whose families had lived in the cold damp creases of this Godforsaken valley for generations nor by the heroes and villains populating the stories those same villagers passed down to their children and grandchildren
David Hollander, L.I.E.: A Novel, Villard, 2000.
"At once mordantly funny and achingly sad, L.I.E. is a soul map
for modern suburbia." --Sheri Holman
Long Island, New
York, 1987: Harlan Kessler--raised in Medford, a product of
blue-collar Suffolk County, of housing developments and concrete
strip malls--graduates from high school. He hangs out, he parties, he
plays guitar for the Dayglow Crazies (the local rock-and-roll
phenomenon), and he struggles diligently to lose his virginity. He
doesn't think about the future much. The Long Island Expressway
(L.I.E.) cleaves the landscape, permitting passage west, to the
tonier climes of Nassau County and New York City, but to Harlan, this
seems like an impossible journey, something beyond his Long Island
birthright. And what's worse, evidence is accumulating that Harlan
may not exist at all, that he may merely be a character in someone
else's story, a fleeting thought in the mind of God.
L.I.E.
follows Harlan, his family, and his friends through two years of
love, sex, death, betrayal, salvation, and enlightenment. In ten
intimately interwoven stories, in prose that swings fluidly from
gritty realism to heightened metafiction, David Hollander maps an
American landscape that is at once vividly familiar and highly
exotic, creating an unforgettable portrait of the passage to
adult-hood and the search for identity, certain to resonate with
legions of readers. By turns dark, funny, raw, and elegant, L.I.E. is
the striking debut of a singular voice.
The last wisps of
afternoon streak and evaporate into blue-gray dusk, submersing Long
Island in twilight. Harlan and Rik Giannati sit on the curb outside
Rik's house, precisely 211 yards northeast of Harlan's house, the
distance punctuated by no fewer than fourteen subtly distinct houses
of three ilks: the square, steeple-roofed Granada; the split-level
LaSalle; the two-story, three-bedroom Monte Carlo. This last model
was the choice of Kessler and Giannati alike some ten years ago when
they, too, were assimilated in the mass exodus from Queens to Suffolk
County that had gripped the hearts and genitals of so many. The
streetlamps began to glow along Rustic Avenue, a cold blue flicker
spaced at even intervals, like isolated members of the same species,
each shivering in its cage of frosted glass. --From L.I.E.
For some, the Long Island Expressway, the ribbon of highway dubbed
L.I.E. by those who live in proximity to it, is a road of
possibilities--an escape from stifling suburbia that connects to the
wider world. For Harlan Kessler, though, it's more like a noose
around his neck. Bereft of the safety net of high school and
estranged from his dysfunctional family, Harlan goes from party to
party, playing in a band, hanging out with his equally directionless
friends, lost in a "post-pubescent identity crisis," with
no job, no girl, and, as he frequently moans, "no sex." In
blackly humorous episodes as disjointed as Harlan's thoughts and
childish longings, Hollander writes compellingly of alienated teens
(and screwed-up adults) in the late 1980s, painting a bleak yet
affecting portrait of people who struggle to be more than onlookers
in life and who, ever so rarely, win the battle. - Stephanie Zvirin
“An entertaining
coming-of-age story set in one of America’s legendary weird suburbs
. . . Hollander is an inventive writer who manages simultaneously to
romanticize and to parody his own experience.” - –The Washington
Post
“The landscape of
Long Island is a critical presence in the book, and Hollander
portrays it with as much vitality and detail as the human characters.
. . . One of the best aspects of L.I.E. is that is can be read on
several different levels. Sufficiently lighthearted and amusing for
casual readers, it contains enough emotional complexity and even
tragedy to suit those who long for deeper reading. Those who seek
challenge and profundity will find plenty of food for thought in
Harlan’s existential dilemma. . . . This unconventional novel [is]
a rewarding and entertaining experience.”- The Wellesley
News
“Hollander
displays a keen eye for the ordinary, capturing teenage discontent
and suburban malaise without pretense.” –Gear
Formal innovations are the most interesting features of this rangy
first novel, which assembles ten interrelated stories and a brief
coda to trace the uneasy maturing of a Long Island teenager.
“L.I.E.” stands
for Long Island Expressway, the thoroughfare that bisects the
suburban territory inhabited by Harlan Kessler, who's 15 in 1985, the
year of the earliest episodes here. Over the next five years, we
observe him as an importunate teenager desperate to lose his
virginity, high-school jock and amateur rock musician, I.R.S. clerk,
and, finally, to his amazement and gratitude, in love with and loved
by a beautiful, warmhearted girl named Sarah. Hollander repeatedly
employs series of brief parallel scenes juxtaposing various
characters' apparently distinct, eventually interconnected
actions—most notably in “Dog = God,” the story of a memorable
Halloween when Harlan and his then girlfriend almost make love, his
parents quarrel at a party and return home unexpectedly, and the
Kesslers' beloved mutt Pepper wheezes through his last hours on
earth. Other chapters focus on a wild teen party that climaxes with a
supposed UFO sighting; a raucous “Sunday Dinner” presented as a
one-act play that reimagines Kessler family dynamics as Dickens's A
Christmas Carol, TV’s The Honeymooners, and several Beatles songs;
and a climactic flurry of "Quotations" from family and
friends speculating on the fate of the disappeared Harlan (who either
is or isn't still with Sarah and has or hasn't committed suicide).
It's a bumpy ride of a book, often sharply observed and intriguing;
just as often, flawed by its protagonist's elusive (indeed obscured)
personality. We end up not knowing Harlan Kessler very much better at
the end of the story than we did at its beginning; if Hollander
intended this, the reader can only wonder why.
One finishes L.I.E.
both frustrated by its vagueness and, paradoxically, confident that
its talented author is capable of better work. - Kirkus Reviews
Dissolution, love and sexual frustration are the driving themes of
this debut novel, set on blue-collar Long Island, or ""Wrong
Island,"" as its denizens here refer to it. Spanning the
last two years of the '80s amid several dead-end towns in Suffolk
County, the novel disjointedly follows the painful maturation of
Harlan Kessler, a long-haired, guitar-picking 18-year-old who's
searching for his life's direction but would settle for losing his
virginity. A hilarious opening sequence sets the stage for his
fragmented, slapstick journey: the moment before Harlan rids himself
of his innocence, his entire family walks in on the teen couple en
flagrante. The plot expands to include Harlan's scary brothers and
adulterous parents, his loser friends and their dysfunctional
families. Harlan's pal, drummer Todd Slatsky, has wild parties at
which he plays home movies featuring his father beating up his
mother. Harlan's eventual romantic interest, Sarah, is terrified of
her mother's new husband, a sleazy coke dealer who supplies the drugs
that fuel the mental breakdown of Harlan's friend Beedy. Harlan is
the center of this series of increasingly odd episodes, which
progress from the depressingly plausible sexual bunglings to scenes
of death, destruction and depravity. In an utterly bizarre one-act
play set in the middle of the book, the fragmentation of Harlan's
brain mirrors the disintegration of his family. The story of Harlan's
sad life is rife with the wry asides, ironic italics and narrative
tricks much better left to the skills of Dave Eggers, and the novel's
conclusion is deeply, unsatisfyingly ambiguous. Hollander's debut is
set against a backdrop so bleak that it undermines his otherwise
formidable talent for tragic irony and cinematic vision. -
Publishers Weekly
Hollander writes in
the tradition of the American avant-garde novelists who came up in
the 1970's, writers like Robert Coover and Jonathan Baumbach (in
fact, the first chapter of L.I.E. is an overt imitation of, and
homage to, Coover's story "The Babysitter"). Readers
seeking a straightforward plot and naturalistic characters ought to
look elsewhere; that's not to say that this book isn't filled with
sharp observations about the author's childhood home of Long Island
and its various denizens, or about the existential dread that tends
to creep over one in adolescence and subsequent years, but merely to
emphasize that the self-contaned reality of the story is ruptured at
several key points, ushering in questions of the relationship between
life and art/fiction and reality, as well as the nature of existence
itself. This is a book born of fierce intelligence, a bleak sense of
humor, deep-seated despair, and profound philosophical searching.
Hollander has yet to
publish another novel, though I have also read and enjoyed some of
his short fiction in various literary journals over the years. - Seth
Katz @ amazon.com
