Harry Stephen Keeler - Everything is a McGuffin, a meaningless token that drives the plot, everything is, sooner or later, revealed to be irrelevant

Harry Stephen Keeler, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (McSweeney's, 2005)

"Keeler takes the implicit absurdity of the mystery genre and makes it explicit."

«Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967) is one of the strangest writers who ever lived. In his time, he was pegged as a mystery novelist who also wrote some science fiction. Today, if you've heard of him at all, it's as the Ed Wood of mystery novelists, a writer reputed to be so bad he's good. Actually, no genre, nor "camp," can much suggest what Keeler is all about. Take some typical Keeler situations:
A man is found strangled to death in the middle of a lawn, yet there are no footprints other than his own. Police suspect the "Flying Strangler-Baby," a killer midget who disguises himself as a baby and stalks victims by helicopter. (X. Jones of Scotland Yard, 1936)
Someone killed an antique dealer just so he could steal the face - only the face - from a surrealist painting of "The Man from Saturn." (The Face of the Man from Saturn, 1933)
A woman's body disappears while taking a steam bath. Only her head and toes, sticking out of the steam cabinet, remain. (The Case of the Transparent Nude, 1958)
Because of a clause in a will, a character has to wear a pair of hideous blue glasses constantly for a whole year. This is so that he will eventually see a secret message that is visible only with the glasses. (The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro, 1929)
A poem leads the protagonist to a cemetery specializing in circus freaks and the grave of "Legga, the Human Spider," a woman with four legs and six arms. Legga was born in Canton, China, and died in Canton, Ohio. (The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, 1934)
A disgruntled phone company employee calls every man in Minneapolis, telling him the morning papers will name him as the secret husband of convicted murderess Jemimah Cobb, who runs a whorehouse specializing in women with physical abnormalities. (The Man With the Magic Eardrums, 1939)
Every resident of "Idiot's Valley" is mentally retarded and packs a gun. (Several novels; Idiot's Valley is Keeler's Yoknapatawpha County.)
Keeler's plots are so go-to-hell weird, they sound like a certain type of "serious" literature. But they're not!
... He did write plenty of sure-enough mysteries. Be warned, though, that his work bears no more relation to Christie or Hammett than does the phone book of Idiot's Valley. Although much of Keeler is steeped in the tradition of classical puzzle mysteries, woe to the reader who thinks he is going to guess the denouement. The Ace of Spades Murder is a whodunit in which the character who will be revealed guilty is introduced, for the first time, on the third-to-last page of the book.
Incredibly, Keeler tops that in X. Jones of Scotland Yard. The guilty party is not mentioned until the last sentence of the last page of this 448-page story.
Keeler wrote other genre fiction: thrillers, historical romances, and science fiction. In the latter category is a remarkable short story, "John Jones' Dollar." The premise is that a guy puts a dollar in a savings account where it grows, through compound interest, to such a fortune that, centuries later, it is used to found a socialist utopia. This is possibly Keeler's best-known story and would rate extensive anthologization if the writing wasn't so bad, even by stiff Keeler standards of badness. I don't know enough about the history of science fiction to say if this clever idea was original with Keeler, but he wrote it in 1914 and the idea is now a sort of s-f cliche (Douglas Adams spoofs it in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe).
... Keeler created, and was seemingly the sole practitioner of, a genre he called the "webwork novel." This is a story in which diverse characters and events are connected by a strings of wholly implausible coincidences.
That's interesting because, well, you're not supposed to do that. Most Western literature avoids coincidences. The author is permitted a single unlikely premise, and then everything is supposed to follow inevitably from that. Keeler's stories are coincidence porn. Coincidence is very much the raison d'etre.
Towards the end of the novel, all the subplots mesh together to produce a stunning surprise ending. In order to that achieve that effect, Keeler throws plausibility out the window. He uses what amount to plot "wild cards." A crazy clause in a will requires a character to [fill in the blank!] in order to inherit a fortune. An obscure religious cult believes such and such. A nutty law requires something else. Now don't think that Keeler worried himself about whether there really was such a law or belief, or whether the will could stand up in court.
Keeler took the webwork novel seriously enough to turn out a detailed manual on webwork plotting, complete with insanely confusing diagrams. Did anyone actually read this and try to use it?
Keeler's narrative style is no less incredible than his plots. Indeed, the two can scarcely be distinguished, for his writing is essentially all plot. Characterization, description, dialog, and use of language hardly exist in the conventional sense. Every paragraph hits you over the head with new and implausible information. There is little room for anything else.
In many of his later works, Keeler takes this daft aesthetic a step further. Despite this total concentration on plot, almost nothing happens within the time-frame of the narrative. It's all digressions about what happened off stage! Again, that's not something they advise you to do in writing courses. The effect is so baroque that it goes way beyond usual notions of "bad writing." It is more in the spirit of Oulipo than commercial fiction, good or bad.
Keeler's characters are mechanical contrivances. I mean that not, particularly, in a pejorative sense. It is simply the way a Keeler story works. Each character is a compressed spring poised to serve its role. Free will hardly exists. The perfect Keeler character is a clockwork automaton; the perfect Keeler plot is a pinball machine.
In one novel, there's a character named Suing Sophie. Sophie goes on transpacific cruise ships, striking up an acquaintance with a single man on board. When the ship gets into port, Sophie bids her male friend farewell by loudly exclaiming, "Yes! I'll marry you!" then rushing off. Now the man has not proposed marriage. But Sophie has made sure that there are plenty of witnesses to her farewell. Soon afterward, the man is greeted with a breach of promise lawsuit for failing to marry Sophie. In the settlement, Sophie collects a huge award, which she then uses to travel to the cannibal isles of the South Pacific; specifically to islands whose inhabitants have recently been converted by Christian missionaries. There Sophie convinces them of the errors of their recent conversion, and reconverts them as practicing Jews.
You know all this and more about Sophie; before it's over, Keeler probably gets more plot mileage out of Sophie than Flaubert does out of Emma Bovary. The difference is that Sophie does not appear in the action of Keeler's novel at all. Other characters just allude to her.
In Agatha Christie at her sharpest, everyone is a suspect. In Keeler, everything is a McGuffin, that is to say, an essentially meaningless token that drives the plot. Because the webwork novel is so fundamentally phony, everything is, sooner or later, revealed to be irrelevant. A typical Keeler plot is a fractal shaggy dog story, filled with digressions, and digressions within digressions, that are themselves shaggy dog stories.
As in a shaggy dog story, the truest synopsis of a Keeler plot is: Never mind.
... Much of Keeler's writing is genuinely hilarious. You are never given the luxury of being sure it is supposed to be. Take some of his character names:
Criorcan Mulqueeny [corrupt political boss]
Screamo the Clown [dead clown]
Scientifico Greenlimb [science-fiction writer]
Wolf Gladish [evil circus impresario]
State Attorney Foxhart Cubycheck.
These are funny in a subtle way: You get the impression that if a stupid person was trying to come up with "funny" names, he might come up with these names -- which are funny because they fail to be funny. You're laughing at the idea that someone would think these names are funny, rather than at the names themselves.
Of course, in a larger sense, these names are funny, for the reason above. The question is whether Keeler is the true naif, or the comic impersonating a naif. It's hard to say, and the answer may not be 100 percent either way.
Keeler sometimes supplies detailed road directions or family histories and has the characters recite them in full several times during a novel. Often this ends up being marvelously funny. That's tough to pull off, and I suspect that the humor must be intentional.
I am pretty sure that Keeler did not see himself as being in the business of turning out parodies of the mystery genre, though. He took his writing seriously enough. Some of what strikes us as funny (skulls in novel after novel) almost surely wasn't intended as such.» - William Poundstone

«Harry Stephen Keeler wrote prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically. Perhaps too ecstatically for popular tastes; though Dutton published him until the early ‘40s, by 1954 his books were appearing only in Spanish and Portuguese translations. His ostensible whodunits contain tales within tales, digressions on everything from the halftone process to Ouspenskian philosophy, and detours into the outer districts of dialect. (His 765-page The Box From Japan, by some lights the longest mystery novel ever written, features a monologue by a German-Mexican descendant of a Russo-Japanese War hero.) Even his plain English—the sturdy phonemes of his beloved Chicago—is none too plain. A typical sentence from The Mysterious Mr. I (1938) reveals certain punctuational fondnesses:
And here was I—at 4:20 in the morning—with not less than the tail-end—if not the tail itself!—of certain information by which $100,000 might be made to change hands—if andmaybe, to be sure!—sitting in the office of MacLeish MacPherson, M.D.!
Yet there was method to his madness, if one believes his extended 1928 study, “The Mechanics and Kinematics of Web-Work Plot Construction.” Serialized in eight numbers of The Author & Journalist, it may be the most impractical how-to ever written, a reminder that those who can (and do) shouldn’t necessarily teach.
The piece has its outrageous charms. In technicalese that betrays his engineering background, with illustrations that look like geometry proofs or parsing sticks gone haywire, Keeler explicates his “web-work” theory, anatomizing the “15 elemental plot combinations,” from a simple two-thread affair (a Venn diagram close-up) to the Scheherezade plot (a sort of runic hootenanny). A brief account of a character diverted from a route is rendered unhelpfully as “His path has changed from B-B’ to B-B”.” He decrees the “Keeler Law” (protagonist must have numerous interactions from start, thus providing threads for later weaving). On a metaphysical level, Keeler (depicted as a spider on one A&J cover) suggests that the doing of web-work “fills the gaps in one’s spirit which rebels at the looseness of life as it apparently is.”
The showstopper is a two-page graph of The Voice of the Seven Sparrows (1924), his first published novel. This skeletal representation looks like a subway conductor’s nightmare—timetable and station chart rolled into one. Lines—parabolic or straight, solid or dashed—represent characters (“Sarah Fu”) or objects (“Sheet of carbon paper”). Though the narrative clocks in at roughly four days, Keeler considers its chronology to begin with Confucius—and thus locates the left margin 500 years in the past. A detailed key to the 80 intersections (“And then Absalom!” reads plot point 76—did Faulkner subscribe to A&J?) itself reads like the short story of some itemizing postmodernist.
The public response could be characterized as one of irked bewilderment. (Perhaps Keeler sensed this earlier; in installment four he states, with a hypnotist’s conviction, “Your reading this very article is changing your course and mine by measurable degree: either your ideas are being modified and shifted to some extent, or else you are evolving antagonism toward my theories.”) Keeler does point out, albeit in the very last chapter, that he himself didn’t actually diagram his stories in this way—a pedagogical misstep, to be sure. Professional authors piped up in later A&Js, with the aptly named Oscar Friend tendering an olive branch entitled “How About a Compromise?”
What’s absent in “Web-Work” is the author’s motivation for writing in the first place—the Jamesian donnée, Nabokov’s “cosmic synchronization.” What got Keeler’s silk glands spinning? In 1947, he revealed “My ‘Million-Dollar’ Plot-Inventing Secret!” to Writer’s Digest; it involved extracting a sizable “chunk” from a finished story and weaving a new book around it—a potentially endless cycle of self-borrowing, the literary equivalent of a sourdough starter. The writer and law professor Francis M. Nevins, a seminal Keelerite, told that this practice is quite visible in Keeler’s manuscripts—long passages lifted from one novel appear, sometimes nearly verbatim, in a later MS.
But the question of how there came to be chunks in the first place is not addressed. Legend has it that Keeler drew randomly from news clippings and wove the disparate accounts together. (If this is true, his artificial method resembles the procédé of Roussel, who would take two sentences, nearly identical in spelling but not sense, and write the only story that could link the first to the last.) In his novels, this possible aleatory origin is not always well hidden; a Keeler chapter has enough coincidences to make Paul Auster blush.
A critic of an earlier version of “Web-Work” called his m.o. “the last word in formula.” But Keeler’s best novels are his most audacious, freaks of homegrown modernism in which the formula lies buried beneath a barrage of sheer (if spastic) style. The Marceau Case and X. Jones—Of Scotland Yard, both from 1936, offer divergent solutions to the same murder case—one with such improbable details (lawn mower, flying dwarf) as to border on slapstick. You can tease out the interconnections, develop them into a web-work chart if you like, but you will have wasted the better part of your youth. The books have an irresistible drive, a capacity for invention that borders on stream of consciousness, except that there’s no single narrative voice. The books, dossier-like, consist entirely of cablegrams and letters, diagrams and vaudeville ads, scraps of sheet music and penny dreadfuls and ersatz Winchell columns—not to mention photos, including one of Keeler himself, smiling as if caught breaking his own laws.
If the multimedia onslaught of the Marceau books suggests an unhinged U.S.A., then The Mysterious Mr. I and The Chameleon (back in print after over 60 years, thanks to a small press called Ramble House) weigh in as a lower-brow Ulysses. For “ineluctable modality of the visible,” read “$100,000 reward!”; for a single Dublin day, an October 13 Chicagoland of 22-word newspaper headlines and meticulously rendered humor-magazine offices. Our hero, the ne plus ultra of unreliable narrators, gives a different name (med student George Spelvin; guest lecturer Scopester Glendenning) to everyone he meets; the catch is that even the reader can’t pin down his identity. Like an amphetamine Penelope with her daily shroud, he builds up each persona, only to unravel it a few minutes later; Keeler, master of the web-work, reads best when he seems to be falling apart.» - Ed Park

«The candy-salesman hero of The Riddle of the Traveling Skull might be describing his creator's peculiar allure—and the cravings of the Harry Stephen Keeler cult—when he refers to his company's latest product as "a new and weird and engaging candy flavor that caused every tongue over which it trickled to hang out for more, more, more!"
...Aficionados adore Keeler for (a) his prose style, which springs jacks of hyperbole and surrealism from the whodunit's musty Edwardian box; and (b) his "web-work" plotting, which often surpasses the Illuminatus! trilogy for sheer lunatic, self-justifying intricacy. "Keeler does everything you are never supposed to do as a novelist," writes editor Paul Collins, apropos of (a), in his introduction to this snappy new reprint from the Collins Library. As to (b), "Keeler takes the implicit absurdity of the mystery [genre] and makes it explicit." Sober admirers of Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, and their upper-middlebrow ilk might challenge Collins's assumption of the form's "absurdity." And anyway, what's unquestionable—and lovable—about Keeler is that he makes his own absurdity so explicit.
The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, first published in 1934, begins when our hero, Clay Calthorpe, inadvertently gains possession of a satchel containing a human skull. The skull has several unusual features: a metal disc bearing numbers and a name, paper stuffing scrawled with sentence fragments, a bullet hole, and a bullet. In seeking the skull's provenance, Calthorpe ranges over the burgeoning expanse and social strata of Chicago ("that strange London of the West," he calls it), meanwhile detailing characters like Philodexter Maxellus, Ichabod Chang, and Sophie Kratzenschneiderwumpel.
Keeler famously systematized his principles of narration and character motivation in a multi-part article entitled "The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction" (1928). Sample: "It should be evident that in many cases the motiving of a desired incident with respect to that participant in it who is not fixed by the exigencies of the required plot, can and does form part of the motivation for the fixed participant." Skull may represent a later evolution of such theories, as its action functions more on the helter-skelter principle. Which was far from unusual in the pop novel of Keeler's day: His plotting is actually not much more Byzantine than, say, John Buchan's, or his commitment to plausible motivation more marginal than that of Earl Derr Biggers. Improbable yarns and exotic personages, too, were the popular standard in the reign of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard.
As a plotter, Keeler mainly lacks a sense of distribution. Rather than apportioning greater weight to scenes with key value, Skull features protracted pursuits of hunches that don't pan out, elaborate expositions of eventualities that don't occur. There are enough MacGuffins to smother Hitchcock, enough coincidences to render Dickens a chaos theorist. Keeler doesn't always trouble himself to plant essential information early, so that its climactic reappearance will ring both surprising and true: Repeatedly, the rational impossibilities engendered by his own perfervid plotting are simply neutralized by an expedient invention. It can't have been so difficult for Keeler to construct his web-work plots when he knew any dangling strand could be secured, come crunch time, to an explanation conjured on the spot.
Then there's the racism. Francis M. Nevins, whose 1969 serial study in The Journal of Popular Culture sparked Keeler's rediscovery, thought the author "hated racism deeply, but refused to be solemn about the subject and insisted on his right to express himself in a way that could be misinterpreted." Richard Polt, founder of the Harry Keeler Society, has written a more recent defense on the same lines. Both argue that the totality of Keeler's work ameliorates individual cases, some of which they admit are nonetheless loathsome. Skull is one of those cases: At the very least, it is deformed as entertainment by the insistent (therefore purposive) use of such charming locutions as "Cockney bastard," "stinking Chink," "confounded Mick," and "moron negro." Scarcely three pages pass without some malodorous slur; in the concluding chapters, the Chinese and Germans are hit especially hard. Some Keeler novels are explicitly anti-racist, others merely ambivalent about otherness. But gauged on its extremes, Keeler-mania would seem to depend partly on one's willingness to inhabit a universe in which Anglo-Saxon bravehearts are alternately aided or assaulted by a succes-sion of pidgin-speaking ethnics.
But that's scarcely all there is inside this Skull—the novel, or Keeler's cranium. The book is full to bursting with woolly characters, stupefying style, and narrative so convoluted as to be self-consuming. There are addled adverbs ("friendlily," "troubledly") and silly similes ("like a drunken mule with elephants' feet grafted onto his ankles"); oafish constructions ("my own last only chance") and oddball gangsterisms ("muffed his stunt"); antique phrases ("microscopical," "spirituelle") and touching homilies ("People change, as well as styles in dogs"). Exclamation points abound, not only as sentence-enders ("And it was a bullet!") but as chapter-starters ("Filkins the Poet!"). The first-person voice is alternately loquacious and halting: A period will fall onto the page out of nowhere, more or less arbitrarily. In the middle of a sentence. To break it up. Into two fragments. Or three. Or more! It's as if both peripatetic hero and indefatigable author were gasping between wind sprints.
Pixilation enlivens and estranges the dialogue—vide this exchange between the hero, recently beaned from behind, and some Irish cops:
"The minute I went up the steps of No. 1870, and tried to grope around in the vestibule for a push button, the house fell on my head and I traveled through space with the square root of minus one—" "What's that?"
"That's the speed of light, according to Einstein," said the other of the plainclothesmen. "He's persiflageous, Sarge!"
In the manner of the broken clock that's correct twice a day, Keeler will here and there fashion a passage, or merely an aperçu, that is actually, conventionally good. Like the narrator's sketch of a suburban housing development, "with small one-story bungalows laid around within it, and little toy garages with red-tiled roofs in back of each. A single combined driveway and entrance for all the natives to get in. Or to get out." Or his coining of piquant names for imaginary periodicals, such as Hearstmopolitan and Literary Regurgitation. Or his suggestion to a lam-considering criminal that "Canada is as much of a refuge for you as—as a Wisconsin lumber camp is for a lost virgin."
In life and death, Keeler has borne his critics' attacks—the latest being a piece in the December 21 New York Sun by Mysterious Bookshop owner Otto Penzler that is less a hatchet job than a series of shallow pinpricks. ("Keeler is to good literature as rectal cancer is to good health," Penzler writes, in what is ostensibly a review of The Riddle of the Traveling Skull but overall evidences greater familiarity with the McSweeney's press release than with the novel itself.) Indeed, there are sound reasons for disliking Keeler's work. But mediocrity is not among them. Unlike the cults around, say, Ed Wood or Eisenhower-era lounge music—the fetishizing of dullness, the caressing of a void—Keeler's is a cult of the wildly overcreative, the sincerely, bountifully bizarre.
In the words of Skull's Teutonic neurosurgeon, "Life! What a tangle it is, isn't it! Gott! People—objects—all bound together—in all sorts of odd relationships!" That's Harry Stephen, whether you get him whole, halfway, or not at all. But for those willing to look past the racism—a challenge—Keeler is a home-brewed hallucinogen, the literary equivalent of the quackish medical compounds and energy elixirs once peddled by tent and wagon in those dark decades before the all-night infomercial. He had a bent of brain and twist of pen that make him an acquired but irreplaceable taste—not Electric Kool-Aid, but its ancestral counterpart, its Depression-bred grandfather: Voltaic Yoo-Hoo, perhaps.» - Devin McKinney

Matthew Sharpe – History Is A Hilarious Hallucinogenic Jazz-Symphonic Device Of Post-Apocalyptic Karmic Overdose

Matthew Sharpe, Jamestown (Soft Skull, 2003)

«Jamestown is set in a dystopian future when Manhattan and Brooklyn are at war with each other. The Manhattan Corp. sends a group of men in an armored bus down I-95 to Virginia where they hope to find food and oil to replenish their wartime supplies. Arriving in Jamestown, they find strange natives "of a reddish hue" who aren't too friendly. The Manhattanites communications specialist, Johnny Rolfe, is enamored of the sexy and bawdy Pocahontas, while the bus' mechanic, Jack Smith, tries to keep his head about him. Rolfe narrates most of the novel via letters, e-mails, IMs he shares with the Indians' leader's daughter. It's an anachronistic struggle where the 21st century technology could be trumped by a 17th-century civilization. Matthew Sharpe's novel has received mostly positive reviews with the Washington Post saying, "Jamestown is packed with marvelous material, moving and funny and deeply provocative."»

«Few writers since Donald Barthelme have been able to synthesize an absurdist comic vision with true erudition, not even to mention narrating a story which is both hilarious parody and dark, haunting realism. In fact, erudition, one could say, works against comedic ambitions, creating a gravitas which can all to easily undercut other authorial intentions. And if the story-telling is in the hands of a writer willing to forfeit deeper levels of substance for camp and jokes, the work can become tiresome and banal. It is most difficult to apply the lighter touches necessary to political parody these days and even harder to create a narrative that will operate sort of like a hot air balloon and carry its passengers across history, myth and legend, while letting them fly into giggles, as if drifting into fluffy, vaporous clouds. But in Matthew Sharpe’s book, this balance is wonderfully achieved and skillfully at play. “Entertaining” is an under-rated quality in literary fiction, perhaps, and Matthew Sharpe’s new novel Jamestown reminds us how potent it can be.
Matthew Sharpe is the author of two previous novels, The Sleeping Father and Nothing is Terrible, as well as a short-story collection Stories From the Tube. Jamestown draws on the Jamestown legend: how the first American settlers made their first settlement in the New World, driving the Indians off their native grounds. Sharpe has set up his retelling of the Jamestown legend by casting his characters into contemporary voices who alternately parody the standard story of the first Americans and Indians and then weave in their own wild, original adventures and personalities. The novel is written in several different character’s voices, each presented as first-person monologues. It is Sharpe’s impressive skill with language and voice that makes the book so seductive and enchants us. And so, for the purposes of rendering a truly literary appreciation of this author’s gifts, I would like to showcase parts of these inventive, playful monologues, as only describing them wouldn’t suffice or do justice to Sharpe’s formidable talent. The play and echoes of these monologues provide the wind on which his satire flies and they are the reason the work reaches such peaks of hilarity and sting, offering a deftly told political tour-de-force.
The book begins with a monologue from Johnny Rolphe (who will become our romantic interest in the book as he leads his survivors into the swampy South and falls in love with the famous Pocahontas - the daughter of the Indian’s Tribal Chief):
“To whoever is out there,” Johnny Rolphe begins the novel, “if anyone is out there: Today has been an awful day in a run if awful days as long as life so far. The thirty of us climbed aboard this bus in haste, fled down the tunnel, and came up on the river’s far bank in time to see the Chrysler building plunge into the earth...”
Witnessing human chaos as the city pieces fly about, Rolphe’s comic portrayals of the feuds and debauchery inside the fallen New York City fill the beginning pages of the tale. “Some great, quaint pre-annihilation philosopher described the movement of history as thesis, antithesis, synthesis, whereas I’ve seen a lot more thesis, antithesis, steak knife, bread knife” he tells us, then describes how a man holds a breadknife in one hand, a steak knife in the other, vaults from his seat back during the collective journey out of the destroyed city, to slit the throats of not one but two other men, each knife, steak and bread, ready in his hands.
“A few miles out of Delaware a log or rock got lodged in our tank tread,“ Rolphe continues, chronicling the exodus from Manhattan, “I gazed out the dirty bullet-proof window at two plump hares, creatures one sees none of on the island of my birth. ‘Say bullet resistant glass not bulletproof glass because there’s no such thing as bulletproof glass and though this may be a technicality I wouldn’t want to sell this glass to you under false pretenses however slight’ the used bullet proof glass salesman said to me in my role as this trips communication specialist, back at home, three days before the earth swallowed the tower. ‘What will you be using the glass for?’
‘For not dying,’ I said and put my fist in contact with his chin, in modern-day New York. Stepping over his prone form, I put as much glass in my cart as would fit. Don't judge me, if I exist. Show me a man who goes to sleep each night integrity in tact and I will hit him in the chin with my fist and take his glass.”
The eager new settlers, after the arrive in the South’s wilderness are led by a character named John Ratliff. Ribald satire abounds once the books gets rolling. Ratliff’s mother's boyfriend is the CEO of Manhattan Company. The Indians are “redskins” due to their applied use of “sunblock SPF 90”. The story follows the Rolphe’s falling in love for Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, and later in the story, she saves the life of another settler named Jack Smith. Kidnappings, killings, and theft continue to alternate as each first-person account leads us through another verbal thicket of dark comedy and surreal events.
After Johnny Rolphe’s first person account, we meet Pocahontas:
“To the excellent person who is reading this! Hi! My name is Pocahontas,” she writes, “and I’m nineteen, but Pocahontas isn’t my real name. If I say my real name you will die. Anyone who hears my real name will die. Pocahontas is my nickname means “person who cannot be controlled by her father. My dad didn’t make it up, my mom did before she died, and he’s kind of mad because that that’s my name because anyone who says my name name will die., which has been proven, but right now I can’t talk about that because in English, which isn’t my mom tongue, you can talk only about one thing at time, at most” she continues: “Oh, English, how I love to write to you in English, even though its so slow to anything in English because English moves at the speed of talking, whereas my language moves at the speed of thinking. Thinking in English is beautiful sort of in a way it is beautiful to have smoked a big bowl of Busthead.”
Later in the novel Pocahontas delivers a poem for us. She writes:
To the edge of the world I am running
Beyond the land, beyond the sea
I evade my predator with cunning
And so does my virginity
--Pocahontas
As the the novel follows the legendary plot of the Jamestown history. John Ratcliffe, lets the reader know what is happening:
“Dear President Stuart,” begins Ratcliffe’s first person account, “Please allow me to to begin by letting you know how honored I am by the confidence you have expressed by appointing me executive president of the Virginia Branch of the Manhattan Company. I will do my best to execute your intentions to the extent that I understand them. have arrived safely, and have begun scouting the area for a suitable location on which to begin construction of regional headquarters. As surely you must know, our departure took place under less than ideal circumstances due to the unanticipated urban infarction of which you were also no doubt a recipient. (I trust you have found safe ground sir and are prospering!)”
There are also darker places in this book, surprises even as the story becomes more wild, and Sharpe flirts with sounding preposterous. At one point, for example, Pocahontas observes a man with an arrow in his head and speaks of him to her Aunt Charlene:
“That man does not believe he’ll die one day”, she says to Charlene,
“Which one?”
“The one with the arrow in his head.”
“How can you tell?”
“He’s got an arrow in his head and he’s not dead.”
“How could he not believe he’ll die? What a dope.”
“He’s not a dope, he’s smart and strong, in spite of how he looks and acts. And what he says. His unbelief in death protects him. his unbelief in his own death is an attack on death that death is flummoxed by. and by the way, you, too, don’t believe you’ll die.”
“I know I’ll die. I think about it all the time.
“You know and think but don’t believe.”
“And will my unbelief protect me?”
Reading Jamestown I thought of Barthelme’s famous novellas Snow White or The Dead Father. I thought how humor in a skillful writer’s hands can open a door to profundity, to substance, show us places without those depth that are as absurd as they are serious. Absurdity can be enlightening. Jamestown is as much about violence, the exploitation of races, women, corporate avarice as it is a tour-de-force and plain wildly funny. It’s the adroit balance of effects Sharpe strikes makes it exceptional and one not to be missed, I think.
Or as Pocahontas sums it it up, capturing Sharpe’s combustive blend of bawdy parody and sober seriousness:
“What strange fish these are who fear the water that surrounds them. And by fish I mean men, and by men these grim and self-destroying fools among whom I sink down now in illness and despair. But the heck with Shell Knee Craw for uttering the d word, even in her mind, and to no one. She - I - might as well say aloud, seriatum, to her worst enemy - and who dat is she think she know but (ugh!) will not admit - all her killing secret names, show all her secret selves, leave no wall between her outside and her inside, become in other words - nothing.“
There are so many more examples of glistening, inventive, and ingenious writing. John Ratcliffe’s wife writes:
“After we had sex tonight, Jim read aloud a haiku he wrote for me as is his wont, and gave me a copy in his fast and and clear and forceful script:
Manhattan’s dirt in Brooklyn’s eyes
my cock in your ass
Orgasm.”
As the novel stampedes and rollicks towards its climax and inevitable end, Pocahontas takes the narrative reins and provides us with a report of exactly how the famous Indian tribe was dominated and conquered at last by the white settlers.
“Dear fellow grown-up," Pocahontas writes,“First thing I did as a woman was the dishes. Oh no wait, that’s not true. First thing I did was watch two boys flight, and try to break them up and fail. Last night, after I told you about the advent of the menarche, I kind of went into a swoon and passed out in the corn shack awoke at dawn with killer backache. I eased my redass down out the back flap of the shack so as not to be seen by the guys on the bus, in case they were awake, and I tip-toed, real quiet, Indian style, through all the corn stalks all dolled up in dew like girls in rhinestones. Hello, you glorious young woman, they said to me. Corn loves me. Plants in general love. Soil rich in human blood loves me.”
In short, a sparklingly energetic vaudevillian satire becomes a sobering meditation on war, sex, and gender, (or “civilization and its counterparts,” as John Rolphe describes it at the very beginning). Black humor always bubbling, and often raising the boiling point of this narrative stew to reveal the folly and doomed apocalyptic intensity of humankind. This is, indeed, no small literary feat. I think Sharpe is a rare writer, one who freshens the air with new and original work at the same time he re-acquaints us with our past (and too often forgotten) maestros. Donald Barthelme is just one such maestros that this work called to mind, and I do hope readers will enjoy as much as I did the abundance here.» - Leora Skolkin-Smith

«The plain, even soporific titles of Matthew Sharpe’s books belie one of the most energetic and laudably fluid prose styles going. On any given page, Sharpe can swing contagious exuberance (“How unpleasant and interesting it is to be alive!”) and aphoristic head-scratchers, shrewd pop-culture quotation and hairpin dialogue, the brilliant joke and the dumb joke and the dumb joke repeated enough times that it becomes brilliant. His breakthrough novel, The Sleeping Father, engineers a nuclear-family meltdown striking for its luminous sadness, as well as for its buzzing word games. As that hilarious and haunting tale closes, the teen protagonist officially enters adulthood, contemplating with clear eyes “that finite loop of breakdown and consolation known as the future.”
In Jamestown, the future has arrived, and we get that loop writ large: a postapocalyptic Eastern Seaboard teeming with misunderstanding, wobbly truces, Technicolor violence, and moments of grace. But it’s also loopy: In the wake of a massive, undefined “annihilation,” Manhattan and Brooklyn are at war, having recently waged the Battle of Joralemon Street. A Manhattan exploratory party, heading south in search of fuel, encounters a Virginia tribe of ambiguously ethnic Indians (one is named Sit Knee Find Gold—or is it Sidney Feingold?), who use wireless devices and appear to know English. In contrast to the ennobling austerity of The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s recent foray into calamity lit, Sharpe amps up the Grand Guignol and the wisecracking, hurling the “linguistic detritus” of the early twenty-first century at us at warp speed. The story is a laudably freaked-out (and occasionally bewildering) cover version of the early-seventeenthcentury founding of Jamestown (England’s first sustainable colony in the New World), rendered as a narrative round-robin à la As I Lay Dying and reset in a rusted-out day after tomorrow that owes something to the variant futures of Philip K. Dick.
In short, you couldn’t ask for a book more different from The Sleeping Father, which underneath all its verbal wizardry and deft absurdity has the heart of a crowd-pleaser. Sharpe isn’t one to rest on his laurels, and some (if not most) admirers of that book will be turned off by the often deliberately cartoonish nature of this latest offering. (In an inspired bit, colonist John Martin gets an arrow permanently lodged in his head but survives to become like his wild and crazy namesake Steve.)
More than in any of his previous fictions, Sharpe delivers breathtaking sentences, and nearly every page has an example or three worthy of our awe. Similes crackle, and even when they don’t, their not-crackling crackles, as in John Rolfe’s description of the now-destroyed Chrysler Building: “Back when it was built you could stand at the top and feel the clear, clean, cold, blue, crazy-ass air hit your skin like— like— like— like— like— air.” Language gets spun into labyrinths, elegant stalemates (“The bus we thought would take us to our new home may turn out to be our new home”) captured between capital and full stop.
Pocahontas, whose doomed love for the Manhattan Company’s Rolfe constitutes the book’s most compelling story line, writes early on: “Oh English! How I love to write to you in English, even though it is so slow to do anything in English, because English moves at the speed of talking, whereas my language moves at the speed of thinking. . . . When I think of the world in English, or look at the world in English, it moves so slow, like English, and that feels good cuz life’s so short!” In English, she notes, “you can talk about only one thing at a time.” Sharpe’s carefully crafted prose has the freeze-frame effect Pocahontas alludes to, while simultaneously packing so many surprising nuances that at times it’s as if he’s communicating in a different, more advanced tongue—one that his heroine would grasp.
The book begins as a perverse epistolary novel, in which Rolfe and Pocahontas send messages into the ether, first electronically and then, it seems, mentally, with no specific recipient in mind. Pocahontas addresses her first missive with the hopeful “To the excellent person I know is reading this”; Rolfe’s greetings range from the dubious (“To the one whose existence I doubt”) to the ornately Stevensian (“To nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”).
Are they simply writing into the void? Any blogger, faced with depressingly low site traffic, has had to ask this question. And those of us living in the midst of the wordwild Web have pondered the impermanence of it all, not to mention the exact date the book will die. Sharpe exhibits the virtuoso’s simultaneous and contradictory infatuation with, distrust of, and fear of language. “Talking is dangerous. Writing more so,” Pocahontas decides. “Best not to.” This is shortly before she publicly blurts out an off-the-cuff prophecy that the strangers from the north will defeat the tribe. “I can’t believe what I just did. I opened my mouth and changed the world.” You can choose silence, if only it were a choice. If you know how to write, you write.
The mutual ignorance that the Manhattanites and Indians harbor for each other’s cultures could correspond with this country’s current stagnant occupation of Iraq, the citizens of which remain opaque to many of us, and vice versa. Pocahontas reveals that what the northerners thought was a welcoming song actually translates to “Fuck You, New York Shits”; in a sly reversal of the notion of the Other, it’s the men from Gotham whose identities merge, their sturdy Anglo names less distinctive than those of their native counterparts. That the book is set in Virginia and New York suggests redstate/ blue-state tensions ratcheted to their absurd zenith. Jamestown both is and isn’t about this. As Rolfe (“GreasyBoy”) puts it in an e-mail to his inamorata (“CornLuvr”): “Art, though sometimes nice, has always been perfectly useless against war.” - Ed Park

«Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown is defiantly not a historical novel; it is a brazen back-to-the-future plunge into the present, mixing period details with anachronistic abandon, and charting the decline of civilization—namely, ours—with an anarchic glee fueled by moral outrage that eventually eases into bemused resignation. Amid the ear-shattering awfulness of so many contemporary American discourses, from the geopolitical to gimmick techno-talk, Sharpe squeezes poetry from gadgetry and jerks. "I'm reclining on my bunk," notes one of a band of colonial brutes, "caressing the small, soft qwerty keys of my wireless device."
The Sleeping Father, Sharpe's sleeper lit hit of 2004, portrays dysfunctional suburban family dynamics through seamless perspective shifts and language often tragicomically ill-suited to communication. In Jamestown, which makes landfall exactly 400 years after the founding of the actual colony (and arguably the swampy start of the U.S.), Sharpe has composed a jazz symphony of a novel out of American voices and violence, exchanging suburbia for the sprawl of history and apocalypse.
The settlers in Sharpe's version of his-story (a narrative very much about the afflictions of males) are a group of men escaping New York City down I-95 in a beat-up bus. Behind them, the Chrysler Building has collapsed, the city's water and food supply are contaminated, and the boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan are locked in a fierce war over who knows what, exactly, but resulting in the bleak black comedy of archly mock-historical lines like: "I was surprised to encounter Chris Newport... whose left arm, you may recall, Sir, you severed with your Glock on the last day of the Battle of Joralemon Street."
Johnny Rolfe, one of the book's two principal narrators among many, and the clan's "communications specialist," reports to us, his unseen and possibly nonexistent readers, via the aforementioned portable qwerty device. Life on Rolfe's bus is dominated by violence and dread. "I don't like a bus of guys," he deadpans after yet another bloody altercation among his fellow men. "Is there any bus of guys on which a man can hug and feed another soup without first having sliced his face?" Don DeLillo once suggested that his novels might be grimly unreadable without their flashes of humor. Throughout Sharpe's graphically brutal scenes, the violence is rendered in visual gags reminiscent of hardcore slapstick—a Jackass for the Jacobean set—and framed in ironic lines of whiplash humor. When the first attack by the natives (would-be Indians, it later turns out, reddened by sunscreen abuse) launches, the arrows "sprang into being in other guys' body parts—hands, beards, knees" like Wile E. Coyote getting barbed by the natives.
A few sentences later, our communications man Rolfe reflects: "They did with their bows what I'd been trying to do with my wireless device: send a message, instantly and invisibly, across a vast amount of space." Historians and aficionados of Jamestown lore will recognize Rolfe as the real-life 17th-century tobacco planter who, despite all the Captain John Smith/Pocahontas soap opera mythology promulgated by Disney (the novel calls him 'Jack Smith' and sometimes 'Jack's Myth'), wed the most famous pop-cultural icon of Native America—Pocahontas—variously identified in Sharpe's pages through gleeful, wise-guy deconstructions as 'Poke-a-huntress' and... well, use your imagination. Rolfe may be the novel's designated communications specialist, but Pocahontas is its Great Communicator, the whirling dervish at the center of the book, and perhaps Sharpe's greatest creation thus far.
Subchapters alternate between voices, with Rolfe and Pocahontas at the center, and concentric rings spiraling outward to include prodigal son John Ratcliffe, his sexy mother back in Manhattan, Smith himself, analyst and spiritual adviser Sidney Feingold and his aggressively erotic part-Japanese wife, Charlene Kawabata Feingold, and others. But Sharpe's Pocahontas comprises the book's heart, soul, and sometimes bleeding body. She comes on like a hurricane, blogging for all to see ("To the excellent person I know is reading this," she begins), full of yearning, fearlessly recounting her first period, her entanglements in lust and self-loathing, and her love/hate/sadness toward men, particularly her own sleepy father, Powhatan, oversized embodiment of "patriarch," chief of his tribe. The voice of Pocahontas is the novel's most melodious and warmly Whitmanesque, singing of puberty, the stupidity of humanity, the banal brevity of life on earth, and the need to celebrate it. Through Pocahontas and Johnny Rolfe, we get a love story, an unlikely and comical courtship via Instant Messages and e-mails that nonetheless edges the story toward genuine longing, as both parties seek to transcend the imposed exoticism of their lusts.
The plot moves deathward, toward the failure of colonization (think Iraq), toward the nightmare of hegemony (think 9/11), and toward the absurdity and desperation we all live with today: the dream that technology—in the shape of hybrid cars, broadband access, white noises—might stop a Greenland iceberg from melting us into oblivion. Jamestownis relentlessly contemporary, because we are brutally, even stupidly, historical.
In a novel of broad-stroke ambition and reach, there is the occasional overextended joint—the pages of ping-ponging dialogue that volley a tad too many times, for example, or wordplay that comes off as clever or coy. But as I leaf through the heavily dog-eared pages of my review copy, it's hard to find a page that doesn't afford dollops of pleasure, of pain—and the hard-won pathos of a people, like us, going mad with grief.» - Roland Kelts

«You know that guy in ninth grade who was always reciting Monty Python skits to himself? Somewhere, in his parents' basement, he's now committing chapters of Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown to memory. This hilarious, poignant and often annoying novel reimagines the first permanent English settlement in America as a modern-day dystopia, an absurd hybrid of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Walt Disney's "Pocahontas." Sharpe calls Jamestown "an ahistorical fantasia on a real event," which seems as good as any description we might devise for his psychedelic tribute to the 400th anniversary.
The more you know about the actual history, the more you'll be amused (or horrified) by Sharpe's weird transformations, but there's plenty of broad, scatological humor here even for those who couldn't find Virginia on a map. In Sharpe's zany version, the United States has collapsed, the environment is dead, and the survivors are starving. The ruler of Manhattan - in the midst of a ruinous bombing campaign against Brooklyn - sends a group of settlers (half of them "early-release convicts") down highway I-95 to Virginia to search for food and fuel on the Autobus Godspeed, a bulletproof vehicle that "differs from jail only insofar as it's more crowded and volatile, smells worse, and what surrounds it makes most of what goes on in jail look like a walk in a field of poppies."
The story comes to us through a series of short entries by different characters, such as the group's craven leader, John Ratcliffe; the indefatigable, often chained, frequently condemned-to-death Jack Smith; and even "A Couple of Fops" who are dying of their wounds. But the primary narrators are "the irreverent scamp" Pocahontas and the settlers' communications specialist, Johnny Rolfe. In real life, they eventually married and had a son. But here they fall in love at first sight, and their letters, e-mails, IMs and telepathic communications make up most of this story of disastrous cultural contact.
Despite the incongruous elements of modern technology, the old chestnuts of the Jamestown story are here: Pocahontas interrupting Smith's execution, a couple of horny settlers lured to their deaths by Indian girls, and negotiations collapsing into deadly skirmishes again and again. But it's all run through the meat grinder of Sharpe's freaky sense of humor. He plays with the names like a naughty, brilliant child: "Rat Cliff," "Poke-a-huntress," "Jacks Myth." Native American customs and language are subjected to the kind of politically incorrect comedy that could get a writer who cared burned at the stake. Pocahontas is a linguistic acrobat whose feminist wit skewers Indian pretensions as readily as it punctures Anglo cliches. Watching one of her friends prepare for the hunt, she writes, "If a man could dance and have a heart attack and an orgasm all at the same time, [he] would resemble that man." Later, spotting the settlers' bus, "I tiptoed, real quiet, Indian style, through tall corn stalks all dolled up in dew like girls in rhinestones."
But the settlers come off far, far worse. Beneath a torrent of sophomoric vomit jokes, sex jokes and fart jokes, Jamestown is an anguished lament for the whole bloody history of Western conquest, the stupidity and cruelty of invaders then and now. Back in Manhattan, their crime boss, Jim Stuart (think King James of the house of Stuart), lays waste to the city and tortures his mistress with bad erotic haiku after sex. One of the most vicious (and therefore successful) settlers survives having his legs hacked off and an arrow shot through his head, which he keeps there, à la Steve Martin, while being carried around through the rest of the novel by two muscle-bound bodyguards in their underwear.
Sharpe's wit relies primarily on the juxtaposition of profundity and silliness, tragedy and absurdity, a kind of Catch-22 about the 17th century for the 21st century. Jamestown is packed with marvelous material, moving and funny and deeply provocative, but Sharpe is determined to cram the pages with allusions and fragmented quotations till you feel like you're stuck in an elevator with Dennis Miller: Here's Plato, Tennyson, Beethoven, Whitman, Kant, Shakespeare, Wang Yang-ming, William Morris, Otis Redding, Judy Garland, even Gary Coleman - it's enough to make you stop googling and cry "Okay! Okay! You're the cleverest writer in the universe, but just stop it, for God's sakes!"
Needless to say, a little of this goes a long way, but Sharpe is a consistently surprising writer, who puts as many crazy demands on the English language as it's ever endured. Like those original profiteers and thieves, if you venture into Jamestown, you'll find more than you could have imagined - some of it inane, some of it wonderful. Beware and Godspeed.» - Ron Charles

«Is the history of America a hopeful tale of fresh beginnings, or the same damn thing all over again? In a way, this question - whether it's ever really possible to make a better place in the world - lies at the heart of most of our current political arguments, and Matthew Sharpe's novel, Jamestown, takes it down a long, rough road littered with disappointment. A work of hectic brilliance and immense sadness, Jamestown is a post-apocalpytic retelling of the settlement of America's first colony. It takes place in the future, but it's also set in the past.
The story begins with the collapse of the Chrysler Building and the departure of an armored bus, stuffed with an unpromising mixture of ex-cons and political appointees, from the embattled island of Manhattan. The expedition has orders to set up an outpost in Virginia and establish relations with the Indian tribes there, with the ultimate end of seizing some of the resources lacking up north - namely, food, water and fuel. After a catastrophe referred to only as the "annihilation," most of the environment has been transformed into a toxic, Hobbesian wilderness teeming with carnivorous hares and rabid seagulls. "Dreads these days are a dime a dozen and a dozen a day," one of the bus' passengers remarks. The only thing scarier than what's inside the bus is what's outside it.
The novel's two main narrators are John Rolfe, a depressed romantic, and Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, the chief of the dominant tribe in Virginia. In many aspects - from the sealed box containing the list of the expedition's leaders, to the ascendancy of a shrewd but rebellious redhead named John Smith, to the death of a colonist by torture at the hands of some Indian women - the events in the plot mirror those of the founding of the original Jamestown 400 years ago. Several of the characters share names with historical figures, from the bus driver, Chris Newport, to the president of Manhattan, James Stuart, and his rival, Philip Habsburg, the ruler of Brooklyn.
In Jamestown, however, people communicate with wireless devices and film commercials in the ruins of Central Park. Acid rain falls on the forests where Pocahontas' people hunt and her father is attended by Dr. Sidney Feingold, a psychiatrist whom the colonists think is called Sit Knee Find Gold. Feingold administers Rorschach tests to the newcomers, ostensibly as a preliminary to signing some kind of treaty, but most likely just another Indian prank, like giving the colonists bad water and pretending not to speak English ("a ruse my people think both necessary and hilarious"). The supremely clueless colonists, like the original Jamestown settlers, can barely keep themselves alive, and then only with halfhearted help from the locals. "It's true, our English is different from yours," a visiting Indian remarks on touring their fort. "For instance, we wouldn't call that a gate, we'd call it the place where you gave up working on the fence."
Whether Indian or New Yorker, the characters in Jamestown fall into two basic categories: those who lament the brutality, injustice and brevity of life and those who intend to be more brutal and unjust than everybody else in order to live longer. The Indians are not Native American by blood, but rather a group that has adopted Native "folkways... though we know them only in fragments." They've eliminated private property, but like their namesakes, live in a state of unceasing territorial warfare; one of Pocahontas' suitors has a severed hand, a battle trophy from a nearby town, braided into his hair.
None of this suits the frisky, insubordinate Pocahontas, who, as devoted as she is to her dad, wishes the tribe's menfolk would do more in the way of governance than "jog up the street every month or so to kill, rape, kidnap and pillage." The colonists aren't much better, but she still manages to fall for Rolfe, despite his being, in her words, "sworn to anemia as a philosophical world view and way of life." Hers is the most vivid voice in the book, an unpredictable font of astute observation ("he's like a figure in a bad painting who wishes it was in a better painting") and trippy, but winning joie de vivre ("Hospitality, as you may know, is an intoxication of the senses"). She's the fading strain of a playful flute in a symphony otherwise heavy on solemn bass violins.
Despite its doomy view of humanity's chances of making something halfway decent of itself, Jamestown careens along, powered by Sharpe's voltaic prose and rich in half-submerged literary allusions. Characters - especially Pocahontas - slip in and out of lines from Wallace Stevens poems, hip-hop lyrics, even a speech from Fannie Hurst's sudsy 1934 bestseller, Imitation of Life. They reenact scenes from Richard III and King Lear. This feels less like postmodern patchwork than like a Western version of samsara, a vast cycle not only of events but also of words, in which the same ghastly elements return again and again. Against it all stands the spirit of Pocahontas, who in the end has just one question for her paramour: "What do you propose to do?"» - Laura Miller

Steve Aylett - Barely a sentence goes by without an attempt at something clever, funny, or absurd

Steve Aylett, Lint (Thunder's Mouth Press,, 2005)

"Lint purports to be the biography of pulp science fiction cult author Jeff Lint, and it's nicely presented as such, complete with bibliography, an index, and numerous illustrations (including quite a few mock-ups of magazine and book covers).
Jeff Lint isn't quite a believable character - he makes Philip K. Dick and Ed Wood look tame by comparison - and his work seems... unlikely. But naturalism isn't what one expects from Aylett, and he does deliver a solid helping of his usual ultra-bizarre creations.
There's a good deal of the familiar world here: Lint does meet and occasionally work with some well-known authors and others. He knew Kerouac and Burroughs, wrote (not very successfully) for Star Trek, and had some responsibility for the movies that became Funny Girl and Patton. But he's also a man who dressed up in women's clothing whenever he delivered a manuscript to his publisher, had an agent who he didn't realise was dead, and wrote a ton of stuff which it is hard to believe anyone could ever have bought or read.
Much of the fun is in tracing this writing-career, Lint churning out pulp science fiction at an amazing rate. Little of it sounds promising, even in summary - though one does get curious what some of these stories might have been like, such as his submission for Maximum Tentacles:
The latter overlapped into what today would be called the "specialty" market, promising "a tentacle in every sentence," and Lint had trouble modifying his story "The True Origin of the Magi" to fill this prescription.
Lint's life is practically as strange and unlikely as his stories, and his real-life interactions with others are also extraordinarily odd.
Peppered throughout are sentences from his books and comments he made, all sounding significant and yet not quite right. An appendix collects some of these Lint-quotations, such as:
Television is light filled with someone else's anxiety.
Or:
Employment is atrophy speeded up.
Aylett's presentation (and humour) isn't so much surreal as it is off-beat - literally, the joke coming in an unexpected place, the twist not the obvious one. The exaggeration and invention is not of the easy, predictable sort, as Aylett doesn't go for the obvious jokes, but rather beyond the absurd (though told with a straight face, the presentation otherwise realistic enough). It makes for a strange reading sensation.
There are some inspired ideas, and the presentation is very good, but much of the book is also hit-or-miss - with such a barrage of projectile-sentences that it can be overwhelming. Aylett's packed style - barely a sentence goes by without an attempt at something clever, funny, or absurd - can be a lot to take, especially when the humour is so warped (and when he seems to be more interested in making the humour warped, rather than focussing on being funny).
Worthwhile - Aylett remains a unique voice, and this book is unlike most anything else out there - but not entirely satisfying."- The Complete Review

"Jeff Lint (1928–1994) shared a birth year and, briefly, a profession with Tezuka. A prodigious if puzzling sci-fi novelist, intimate of the Beats, and occasional TV writer, Lint penned a short-lived comic-book series, The Caterer, featuring the non sequitur–generating, periodically hallucinating, enigmatically violent Jack Marsden. A facsimile of the September '75 issue is available, featuring gnomic catchphrases ("All is equalised"), a detourned Boschian centerfold, and ambivalent fan mail ("Is Jack Marsden a saint? If not, what's the matter with him?"). It's an instant cult item, mysterious, useless, and deep.
Lint, Marsden's creator, is himself a fiction. He's the brainchild of the British SF writer Steve Aylett, whose mock biography Lint tells you more than you need to know—the ungainly apparatus to a great pop joke. Why should the mock biography fall short of the mock comic? The craziness and career of Jeff Lint mirror that of Philip K. Dick (Lint and Dick are both '28 Chicago babies). Critically reviled, mystically inclined ("Went around blessing people—knew it was the most annoying thing he could do," notes a friend), Lint is meant to emblematize the sci-fi writer as simultaneous cultural outcast and culture hero. But this character has already been done better, and toting better names—by Vonnegut (Kilgore Trout, inspired by Theodore Sturgeon), and by Dick himself (Horselover Fat). Myriad details prove tiresome—call it pulp twee—and sometimes capsize the conceit: Would an American writer title a memoir The Man Who Gave Birth to His Arse?
On the other hand, who cares? Printed on cheap paper, Linthas the tactile qualities of the Lintian output, the wobbly energy of a first draft. Getting miffed over this fiction might mean Aylett's doing something right, or as Lint remarks, "Perhaps putting a byline to truth is as pointless as painting a torpedo." Reading a book about failure that is itself a failure delivers some vertiginous satisfaction. But you wouldn't want to do it twice."- Ed Park

"Near the end of his ostensibly fictional biography of science fiction author Jeff Lint, Steve Aylett claims that, "On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death." A quick look at Aylett's own bibliography shows that his first novel was published in 1994. A coincidence? I don′t think so. Reading Lint, one cannot help but be compelled to think that Lint - as described in the book - is himself writing the book. Aylett's biography is every bit as brilliant, as hilarious, as pithy and as psychedelic as anything he describes as being written by Lint. Now, Aylett - as he calls himself - would probably have you believe it's because his subject is so inspiring. Readers who make the journey through Lint's bewitching life and double death will be inclined to think otherwise. After all, Aylett himself tells us that, "Jeff Lint is buried in a Taos graveyard, his headstone bearing the epitaph, 'Don't think of it as a problem, but as a challenge which has defeated you.'"
First appearing as a short story in The Third Alternative, Jeff Lint takes on three and more dimensions in Aylett's entertaining literary voyage. Starting with his birth on July 6, 1928 and ending with his second recorded death on - see above - Aylett follows the journey of this eternal outsider through three generations of writing and culture. He unleashes so many arrows in so many directions, the reader starts to feel a bit like a pincushion, but he at least has the good grace to hit the majority of his satiric targets. And beyond telling more jokes than any sane reader would care to count, Aylett does another very clever thing. The usual journey we encounter in a (supposedly) faux biography has the created character take the form of the ultimate insider. From birth to death, they happen to meet with the high, the mighty and the magnificent, all on a shambling life's journey. What Aylett does here is to invert that journey. Lint is not the ultimate unheralded insider but instead the ultimate unheralded outsider. He's ejected from every club that anyone would reasonably want to be aligned with. His obnoxious and oblivious behavior assures that every time his talent threatens to bring him to the notice of the public at large, he is instead given a kick to his keester and sent on his merry way.
That merry way is made much merrier by virtue of the talent that Aylett/Lint brings to the proceedings. Yes, Lint does hit all the grace notes. We see a page from his rejected script for an episode of Star Trek, and he authors an absolutely mad book on the Kennedy assassination. The book covers are a highlight for this reader, from The Jelly Result to I Blame Ferns. His screenplay for Patton is a scream -- as described by Aylett. One can certainly imagine it was no picnic for those who had to actually read it. But Aylett makes the most of his form, and gives us just the hilarious highlights from the mad mind of Jeff Lint. And make no mistake about it, Lint was certifiable.
Lint's prose, as Aylett tells us, was even trippier than that of his more heralded contemporary, Philip K. Dick. The two lives share many similarities, and readers who enjoy the fiction of Philip K. Dick (and Jeff Lint, of course) will surely find a lot to like in this faux-fictional biography. For this reader, the prose is the real giveaway that Lint and Aylett are one in the same. Yes, we see the work of Lint excerpted regularly, and yes, you understand that one must not be on drugs to write such material. But then Aylett himself will succeed at writing sentences that will surely make the reader's head spin at a speed fast enough to generate artificial gravity. 'Lint' offers some of the most perfectly amazing sentences and paragraphs that are likely to go into your eyes, ever. Aylett/Lint is a clearly a phenomenal talent. While the writer must not do drugs when creating the prose, the reader need not do drugs when reading this prose. Pass the paragraph, man. I need another hit.
Though he covers the worlds of science fiction, Aylett also masters the horror genre when he describes Lint's contribution to daytime children's TV, Catty and the Major. There's a single paragraph here that is extremely surreal, disturbing and will haunt the reader for years to come. If you’re going to read this before bedtime, be careful when you hit this section. It's perfect nightmare material, the quintessential bad acid trip.
No matter how you take it - those who find it a bit strong to read may prefer to smoke the material and thus dilute the effect - Lint is clearly the work of a mind in the advanced stages of both creative genius and insanity. There are so many memorable and repeatable one-liners here that you'll want to take notes. Make sure you do, because this is an experience you deserve, and an experience you deserve to profit from. Or as Jeff Lint puts it, "When the abyss gazes into you, bill it." - Rick Kleffel

"Jack Marsden is a smirking college jock who unleashes verbose diatribes on goats filled with sawdust, lipstick for dogs, and the virtues of bovine udders. He has hallucinations about grizzly bears and dances on all fours when shot at by firearms. He also has a penchant for sitting still for disturbingly long periods of time before embarking on random killing sprees. Naturally he possesses all the elements of a comic-book superhero.
Desperately out of print since 1976 (when the series was cancelled because of issue nine, in which Marsden goes on a killing spree at Disneyland), The Caterer is arguably the strangest comic book ever published. Word bubbles crammed with postmodern rants are paired with action-packed panels illustrated in stereotypical '70s form. Reading it is essentially an exercise in tolerance and bewilderment. But it's this exact obscurity that elevated this little comic to cult status from day one (back issues can be found for upwards of $70 each on eBay). Lucky for us, its creator, Jeff Lint—author of sci-fi cult classics Jelly Result and The Stupid Conversation—saw fit to at least reprint issue three on glossier paper that, thankfully, retains the cheesy '70s ur-color.
"I need a coffeepot the shape of my severed head," Marsden says in a phone call to his college's faculty office. This is the opening panel. Rather than question the demand, the blond secretary lets Marsden continue: "If you take a catfish by the whiskers and pull outward it inflates into a life raft. I know this for a fact, Mister Skeleton."
And he goes on: "I'm afraid I'm serious. Bats only attack sick animals, such as your future. Painting leaves green, which were green, complete, repeated and artificial..."
If you're lost, rest assured, everyone who reads The Caterer is lost. I suggest reading it with friends so you don't feel so alone. The Caterer's surrealism is a bit Lynchian, except with goofier dialogue about air jelly, bulk lard, and human innards made of liquid. Throughout the course of this particular issue, a plot may be unfolding, but it's hard to say what it is. The opening splash page has Marsden repeating "STICK WITH ME!" five times into the phone while his apartment burns. On the next page, he asks a tombstone if it has any "ciggies."
A couple hallucinations occur on top of it all, one involving the aforementioned grizzly bear and another in which Marsden and the bear are plunged into a modified Hieronymous Bosch painting. And for all its silliness, the writer manages to churn out rather striking prose. Before Marsden's final killing spree of innocent townspeople, he tells them, grinning: "People don't mature, they just lose interest." And later: "A cynic is someone who finds out at birth what others find out at death." He even lashes out at his professor: "Sometimes when I look at you, professor, I see an ignorant gray cancer whose one dubious virtue is that it's technically legal."
None of this would be so effective if it didn't look so damn normal. The penciling is painfully average. It's almost as if the panels were drawn first and then the writer filled the word bubbles with the most disconnected sentences he could imagine.
Further compounding The Caterer's weirdness is that author Jeff Lint never lived. Existing halfway between Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout and whoever the hell JT Leroy is, Lint is—if I have this correct—the creation of British sci-fi novelist Steve Aylett. Aylett has written an entire faux-biography of Lint, called Lint. According to Lint, Lint ran with the Beats, was trippier than Philip K. Dick, and had a fan in the young Ann Coulter. A representative sentence: "On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death."
Anyway, The Caterer and Lint are works of art, and they complement each other; you shouldn't read one without the other. Lint is fairly easy to come by—a good bookstore will be able to get it—but for The Caterer, a jaunt to your favorite retailer probably won't do. I suggest visiting www.steveaylett.com, which links to the distributor carrying this masterpiece of insanity. In the short time I've owned it, I've read it more times than I have the finer comics of note. It'll run you about $10, but that's a small price to pay to be in on the joke." - Brian J. Barr

Other Aylett's gems:

"Steve Aylett writes metaphors like no one else in the English language. For instance: "It seemed he had sneezed out an entire brainlobe in early adolescence, and what remained swam in his skull like a lone crouton." Or again: "Leon Wardial was cheerfully ahead of his time-but it was a close call." Or yet again: "We thought our passion would last forever, like styrofoam."
Aylett's prose messes with the reader's mind, on many levels. Cliches are absurdly literalized. Similes and metonymies turn themselves inside out. Seemingly flat statements of fact burst into cascades of mind-boggling associations. Parodies of hard-boiled-detective prose turn commonplace assumptions upside-down. Strange premises ("more murders are committed at 92 degrees fahrenheit than at any other temperature") lead inexorably to ultra-violent conclusions.
All this makes Aylett's novel read like the "Police Beat" column on acid. The book's content perfectly matches its style. The Crime Studio is basically a series of deadpan comic vignettes of bizarre crimes. It's the first (though the last to be published in the United States) of three books by Aylett that are set in Beerlight, an American city of the future whose entire economy seems to be based upon burglaries, assassinations, and random bursts of gunfire.
In the course of The Crime Studio, we meet such characters as Brute Parker, proprietor of the city's all-night gun store, who is as likely as not to kill you with whatever weapon you are trying to buy from him; Billy Panacea, "burgler extraordinaire," who commits his crimes more for aesthetic impact than financial gain; Harpoon Specter, con man and shyster lawyer, who wreaks havoc with his twisted pleas in court; and Henry Blince, the fat Chief of Police, whose ingenious theories, devised to frame innocent people, always involve food found at the scene of the crime, and are foiled only by his inveterate habit of unwittingly eating all the evidence. (All these figures return even more hilariously in the sequel, Slaughtermatic).
There are also numerous episodes turning on disguises, forged and mistaken identities, and odd role inversions. When the denizens of Beerlight aren't planning arcane crimes or impossible jailbreaks, they are usually either drinking themselves into insensibility, or playing insanely elaborate practical jokes on one another.
All in all, this (together with Aylett's other novels) is the most hilarious book I have read in years. But what gets to me most of all about The Crime Studio is still its prose style. The only thing more unsettling than the derangement and delirium depicted in these pages is the cool lucidity, ironic concision, and rigorous, almost abstract logic with which Aylett displays it all to us." - Steven Shaviro

«Steve Aylett's novel Atom is sort of like The Maltese Falcon meets Duck Soup, set in the world of Blade Runner, and narrated with cinematic flair in a prose that is the bastard child of Nabokov, Pynchon, and Oscar Wilde. This might seem like way too many references (not to mention mixed metaphors) with which to burden one short book, but Aylett's dense, hilarious writing deserves no less. Atom, like Aylett's earlier novels Slaughtermatic and The Inflatable Volunteer, is a gorgeously deviant text. It narrates the most bizarre events with a delirious clarity. It sops up the most diverse pieces of cultural flotsam and jetsam, recombining them into startling new shapes. The book's wild inventiveness is modulated by a dryly sarcastic tone. This is mutant fiction for the new millennium.
Okay. I guess you could call Atom a parodic, hard-boiled detective novel, set in the cyberfuturistic city of Beerlight, where crime is indistinguishable from performance art and everyone speaks in puns and metaphysical conundrums. The wisecracking "private defective" Taffy Atom, his cooler-than-ice female partner Madison Drowner, and their sidekick Jed Helms, who just happens to be a talking carnivorous fish, are drawn into a web of conspiracy and deceit involving vicious gangsters, demented hit men, corrupt cops, and even the mayor and the president. It all starts when the petty crook Harry Fiasco steals Franz Kafka's cryogenically preserved brain from the facility where it was being kept in storage. Eventually we learn that a shady character called the Candyman, something like Sidney Greenstreet on acid, wants to enlist Kafka's expertise in his project of creating human/insect hybrids. But the insects have their own thoughts in this matter, and so does crime boss Eddie Thermidor. And Chief of Police Henry Blince can't resist getting involved, excited by the prospect of sending a few more hapless suckers to the electric chair. Meanwhile, the president is planning a visit to Beerlight, hoping to draw attention away from accusations that he has had sex with a dog, a lizard, and a squid, among other animals.... Are you still with me?
Atom is actually plotted as tightly and carefully as the most polished detective novel. Yet it swamps the reader with such a deluge of information overload that this is nearly impossible to notice on a first reading. Aylett lets loose with a relentless barrage of cheerfully chaotic detail. The book crackles with an acerbic wit. Blink and you might miss an important plot twist, a brilliant joke, or a crucial metaphor. Such manic exuberance makes a welcome contrast to the minimalist restraint of much recent Anglo-American fiction. All this is not to imply that Aylett's prose is in any sense lush. Rather, it is curt and telegraphic, short words aligned in clear, crisp sentences. Atom is thick with made-up slang (brains are referred to as"squashers"), off-the-wall metaphors (Drowner's gun lab is said to resemble "an alien's bathroom," as if anyone knew what that was like), and a kind of schematic, abstracted tough-guy talk. Many sentences skewer the clichés of hard-boiled fiction: "The city sprawled like roadkill, spreading more with each new pressure." Other times, Aylett's language congeals into pithy, offbeat aphorisms whose tone is ominous, though their precise significance remains obscure: "Organized religion added Jesus to the food groups. The past is killed off by American marksmen."
Atom is as dense with wonderfully strange ideas as it is with brilliantly twisted sentences. For instance, much of the book's humor involves abstruse 'smart' weapons, science-fictional constructs far beyond anything yet imagined in the Pentagon. There's the "loop mine," which puts its victim into a time warp, forced to repeat the same two hours over and over. There are guns whose bullets freeze people into living statues, or force them to embarrass themselves by speaking the truth in public. Best of all, there's the "Syndication bomb." When this device explodes, it converts the scene of impact into "a living Updike novel," devoid of any subtext except for the most banal and boring. Things become so bland and obvious that all feuds, threats, and devious intentions are entirely forgotten. This allows Atom and Drowner to escape from the gangsters who, just a moment before, were about to kill them.
Near the end of Atom, Kafka's brain is transplanted into a new body and restored to consciousness. The tormented author immediately complains that Beerlight is not at all like the America he imagined in his fiction. But of course, society's frustration of our hopes and expectations is one of the things that Kafka's work is all about. Aylett presents a similarly discordant vision of the future. Atom perturbs our categories and habits of thought, no matter which way we take it: as an over-the-top satire, a gleeful rollercoaster ride through a thoroughly postmodern Hell, or a rigorous exercise in the poetics of some other planet than our own.» - Steven Shaviro

"Steve Aylett is the most interesting new, younger writer I have come across in quite some time. Aylett is really smart and really funny. Slaughtermatic reads like a Keystone Kops comedy set in a cyberpunk futuristic landscape. Everything is topsy-turvy in Aylett's world (which makes it uncomfortably similar to the world we actually inhabit). Crime is indistinguishable from performance art, and everyone speaks in puns and metaphysical conundrums. The cops seek only to frame the innocent and consume as many donuts as possible, while the crooks seem more concerned with demonstrating their cleverness, or making spectacular displays of firepower, than with actually getting away with their heists. But what really blows my mind is Aylett's brilliant and hilarious prose style. The book is filled with outrageous, over-the-top, extended metaphors, which don't make any rational sense, but somehow seem bizarrely coherent, as if Aylett were channelling the wacky, alien logic of some whole other realm than our own. It's sort of like William Gibson meets Lewis Carroll, as narrated by Vladimir Nabokov while he was tripping on LSD." - Steven Shaviro