The life lived in the external or internal world of a writer

When promotional material for Cult Writers: 50 Nonconformist Novelists You Need to Know fell into my inbox, I couldn't resist comparing its contents against my own mental list of quirky writers and literary obsessions.

Written by Ian Haydn Smith and illustrated by Kristelle Rodeia, this volume covers a decent cross-section of slightly off-mainstream literature available to the English reading public. Some of the writers are better known for their poetry or essays, but all had authored at least one novel. (For those interested, the publisher's page reveals the full list of writers.)

Note: The contents of my digital review copy differ slightly from the public list (swapping out five entries). I truly hope Eve Babitz and Joan Didion made the final cut over Joseph Heller and James Joyce.

I've read 32 of them, and obsessed over several of them throughout various phases of my life (though only one served as namesake for a pet cat).

Women writers are relatively well represented (23 of the 50). Regarding language, 18 of them do not write in English. All but 12 writers are dead.

Only one author had I never heard of (Juan Rulfo).

Each entry is topped by the writer's name and dates, with a pithy descriptive label, like "Chronicler of the Weird" (Murakami) or "The Literary Outlaw" (Genet) or "The Experimenter" (Lessing). Some of these are repetitive, not particularly insightful, arguably not even accurate, but I'd be hard-pressed to come up with better options — that's a tough exercise.

The entry covers a combination of biography, publication history, and public reception — it sticks to objective fact rather than attempt to offer insight. There is little attention to any particular work, but in most cases a style is attributed to the author — "Southern Gothic" (McCullers) and poetic Confessionalism (Plath) — and their work is described in broad thematic strokes. Every entry is complemented by an illustration of the author (that's Bulgakov below, and can you guess who it is on the cover?), and some of them feature quotations.

The book is indexed (mostly people, institutions, publications, and prizes) and includes a list of key works for each writer.

But how do you define the cult status of a writer anyway? Without setting hard and fast criteria, Smith focuses on the fervour of their readership and their transgression of genre boundaries.

However, for all its focus on their work, this book is ultimately about the creators. Which raises another question: is a cult writer defined by the work they produce or the life they have lived? As you will glean from the portraits included here, the answer is: both. More specifically, it depends on the life lived in the external or internal world of a writer.

(Umm, what? I think I disagree.)

I would dispute the status of some of the writers included (and here my own biases will be laid bare).

One stumbling block for me is that I don't think it's enough to have authored a cult book to be considered a cult writer. To me, you're only a cult writer if, having experienced your work, I'm compelled to search out and devour everything you've ever written.

By my thinking, JRR Tolkien does not fit the bill. The world he created is massive and influential; Middle Earth inspires worship, but Tolkien does not. Besides, he is too obvious and too present in our culture to be a discovery — cult status is reserved for the special, beyond mainstream.

Pauline Réage authored but one book, The Story of O. She is, I think, unfairly labeled here as "the sado-masochist author," diminishing the sexual paradox of liberation in slavery that it explores and the controversial brand of feminism it inspires. While I think her novel is an important one and it enjoys elite status, the author, anonymous for years, remains essentially unknown.

Ken Kesey. Really?

And Ayn Rand. Does anyone read her seriously after high school?

But I was pleased to see Chris Kraus in this company (whose work I only recently discovered, and yes, I am compelled to explore more).

And then there are the inevitable oversights.

Smith justifies some of his choices in the introduction: "Thomas Pynchon stands in for other experimental writers such William Gaddis, Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace." Even while they're all postmodernists, and often maximalists, they're quite different. I suspect Pynchon is less prevalent on college campuses today than the others. But maybe not. (Smith acknowledges, "Times are changing and so should this list.") Since the entries tend toward the biographical with only a minimal attempt to place these figures on the literary landscape and describe their significance and influence, the idea that one writer might stand for a group isn't strongly conveyed. (I would've chosen Bolaño to represent this group, because he resonates more strongly with this millennium's readers.)

Smith nods at a few other writers that didn't make the cut (I would have included Mark Z Danielewski over several of the others).

The one writer missing who, in my view, absolutely ought to be here: Clarice Lispector.

Despite my quibbles, I love lists, and I think Cult Writers makes for a great coffee table book. It has smallish dimensions but the illustrations are a lot of fun. It's not the kind of book you read cover to cover; you flip through and learn a random fact, reminisce over the copy of Cortázar your ex gave you, be inspired to finally read Train Dreams.

I'd happily bestow this book on the right college student, possibly annotated to better mould their mind.

Whom would you include in a list of cult writers everybody needs to know?

So plausibly finite

She kisses his knuckles. One to eight. And then again, one to ten, because she forgot the thumbs. Bobby stops her there. When did these gestures become so plausibly finite? How many more kisses do they have left? How many more new moons? Paul Bowles knew the danger that comes from counting. "Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really." The Sheltering Sky. John Lehmann Limited, 1949.

This series, at a planned 27 volumes, is not so plausibly finite.

The Familiar, Volume 2: Into the Forest, by Mark Z. Danielewski, is another trip and a half. It picks up where A Rainy Day in May left off (May 10, 2014) and runs a little more than a month.

We learn that while the cat looks like a kitten, it may be as old as fifteen years, it may be ancient. It's also microchipped — it's identified as a deceased dog.

This volume is less chaotic structurally than its predecessor, but seemingly chaotic things happen. It is addictive. It is magnificent.

Xanther is developing some kind of symbiotic relationship with the creature — they need to be together. Yet, I feel, Xanther needs to return it to its source (or its destination) — where it truly belongs. Weird things happen at the animal shelter.

Astair is having some kind of crisis of sexual awareness. Also, her thesis has been rejected. She's to write about cats — rather, the cat. She doesn't even like cats.

Anwar goes bowling. And something weird happens.

Özgür, I like him, tormented detective type. Something called Synsnap. Three dead bodies in Long Beach. I want Özgür to have a real story.

And Luther's in some nasty shit, they (who?) want him dead. Something weird happens. But he's an asshole. Why do I feel sympathetic toward him?

Is feeling a casualty of accuracy?

Then there are the stories I don't much care about: Jingjing's missing cat, cabdriver Shnorkh, and I don't know what Isandorno's thread is about except the Mayor dropped the baby into the deep fryer.

I don't know what it's about.

I think it's about the Orb. Are they on the run, or is it some kind of cult? Does the Orb actually go off when Cas is hiding with it in the bathtub? I don't think so, but it's kind of like something's gone off. But then it does go off. It's some kind of computer, designed by the Sorceror. Anwar knows the Sorceror.

NPR: 'The Familiar Vol. 2' Is Better, Stronger ... Weirder

Danielewski is deliberately using this stone-simple through-line of a girl, a cat, a family, as a clothesline from which he can hang ten thousand freak-outs.

I was sad but also relieved to learn that this show has been cancelled. I have Volume 3 queued up, and at least now I have a hope in hell of getting to the end.

What I love most is the feeling of realizing that I hadn't known how badly I needed this. The sense that everything is connected.

Misrepresenting the world

But Özgür never hangs up on Elaine because Elaine never lies like that. If she lies at all. Özgür's never caught her. Sometimes he wonders if what keeps him interested isn't the sex but the dumb suspicion that how Elaine misrepresents the world is far beyond his abilities to detect, which considering his profession both galls and entices him, especially since the implication then is that the only one misrepresenting the world is Özgür himself.

Elaine had even written on the very possibility once:

Where identity's at stake, the unconscious keeps attempting to create a blind until it succeeds in fortifying one beyond the abilities of the intellect to parse. We cannot mentally accommodate the vastness of the variables we daily inhabit. So we invent a self we believe can.

"Though none can. Not even you, Oz." Her margin note.

Which more crucially posits: it is not belief that necessitates the self, but rather the other way around. It is the creation of the self that necessitates belief.

But when Özgür asked what she meant by belief, Elaine had just smiled and before going down on him, whispered: "Let me show you."

— from The Familiar, Volume 2: Into the Forest, by Mark Z Danielewski.

On not buying books

Yesterday for lunch I went to the bookstore. Food for thought, food for the soul. Usually I just like to browse, just being in a bookstore brings me comfort (and I'm lucky to have recently found a non-big-box-chain store near my office — I blame the shifting streets of Old Montreal, like mischievous Hogwarts staircases, for keeping it hidden from me for so long), but yesterday, uncharacteristically, I splurged on impulse.

I have tried to keep in check the acquisition of books, but when displaying my spoils back at the office (just three books), a coworker, having witnessed me purchase books on two occasions and at other times open packages of books, called me on this delusion of mine.

Since September,

• The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle — because a review made me want it, it's Lovecraftian
• Le Chat, Georges Simenon — to practice my French
• The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon — because I've been planning to read it for years, so finally now
• The Door, Magda Szabó — because I wanted Iza's Ballad (because the name) but it wasn't available, and NYRB Classics books are beautiful
• Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau — because it's exercises in style, so I can argue that it's related to my work
• The Familiar, Volume 2, Mark Z Danielewski — because volume 1 was exhilarating, and it's fascinating as an object
• The Hand, Georges Simenon — because I'd never heard of it, and since it's not available in Canada it's that much more precious
• The Invisible Library, Genevieve Cogman — because it was on all sorts of books-to-watch-for lists and it cost less than 2 dollars, and it might be about a library
• The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville — because Miéville is one of the few authors about whom I feel I must own his entire oeuvre
• The Loney, Andrew Michael Hurley — because I had it on a list somewhere, I don't know why
• Monday Starts on Saturday, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky — because now available in English, plus it's an excellent title
• So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, Patrick Modiano — because I'd never heard of it, and I felt a connection to Modiano this summer, and it was shelved in the thriller section
• The Vegetarian, Han Kang — because I've been wanting to see what the fuss is about, but it wasn't available at my library, and I know I can hand it off to someone afterward

And before September, the last time I purchased a book was August, and before that was June. If you don't count the travel guide I picked up in July, along with some other vacation-reading material.

That's not counting the books I've purchased as gifts for other people, which typically occasion an oh-I'll-just-pick-up-a-little-something-for-myself-then-too moment, which helped contribute to the above.

Some of the above books were rationalized in a my-birthday-is-coming-soon way, and then an it-was-just-my-birthday-so-of-course-I-should-treat-myself way.

I'm proud to be using the library more regularly this year (quite suddenly they have a decent selection of ebooks), and when I'm hankering for something new I'm likely to browse NetGalley review copy offerings. At least some of the books listed above are ebooks (for which I'll rarely allow myself to spend more $5). I have not listed here the free ebooks I've acquired.

But believe me when I say it's not a spending problem so much as a space problem. I've become adept at slipping books in and overlooking them mentally; physically, it's a bit more challenging. Surely I'm a victim of book creep — the steady but so-slow-as-to-be-almost-imperceptible advance of books from designated shelves and corners onto most surfaces of my living space.

Me not buying books? Not very good at it.

The Narcon

As the old Narcons put it: "There is not space in the universe to tell the universe to the universe. Therein lies the peculiar beauty and sadness of stories: to tell it all without all at all."

The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May, by Mark Z. Danielewski. Yeah. I don't know how to talk about this book. I don't even know what this book is about.

I can tell you:

• This book is beautiful as an object.
• The experience of reading this book is somewhat otherworldly.
• I fucking love this book.
• I wish there were more books like this in the world.

Book as object
This book is heavy. It's printed on art-catalogue-quality glossy paper, 880 pages of it. The binding is such (with pink thread) that if you open the book to any page, it will lay open.

There are full-colour plates between chapters, with epigraphs quoting the likes of Emily Dickinson, Lady Gaga, and Norm Schryer, or featuring lines from movies like Moonrise Kingdom, Blade Runner, and Chinatown.

The top corners are dipped in colour, each chapter colour-coded according to the character perspective (of which there are 9). The beginning and end of each chapter also include a timestamp, place, and date to help orient the reader.

Each chapter picks up at the second the previous one left off — the story covers 08:03:05 to 23:32:09 on May 10, 2014. It spans Los Angeles, Singapore, and towns in Texas and Mexico.

Each character perspective also has its own font (these are detailed in the credits). The text includes Russian, Chinese, and Arabic script, and lines in a few other languages.

There is a design element along the centre seam, which varies from character to character. These are fractal-like, and many forum pages are devoted to theorizing about them: they likely indicate static or frequency, functioning as a narrative ECG.

There is a lot of white space. Some pages have just a single word. On some pages, the text seems to fall away. One chapter has extremely wide margins; the text is focused in a tight block. In another chapter, the text wraps around a circular whitespace; if these pages were flippable, the orb might appear to move across the page.

On other pages, text scatters and runs sideways. This happens consistently with one character, indicating a cognitive break, or sensory overload, or the onset of one of her seizures.

So none of these design elements is arbitrary. Form reflects content.

Pages 563-578 are whiter than white, blank of many of the elements mentioned above. They are distinct from the creamy pages of the rest of the story. These are the pages of a Narrative Construct, or Narcon for short.

Book as story

This is the first volume of a planned 27-volume series. I've heard this book described as the story of a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten. That's mostly accurate. Even though for the first several hundred pages, she's on her way to pick up a dog.

Xanther has her own thread, and her mother and stepfather each have one too, so it's easy to feel that the story centres on her. As for the other character threads, I have no idea what they have to do with anything.

And I'm fine with that.

Around the world, it's raining.

There was this moment in writing when I realized that every character was in the rain. If Kubrick was the patron saint of House of Leaves, Akira Kurasawa was sort of the patron saint of The Familiar.

The Narcon chapter helps explain things. It describes some of the formulas used to create narrative and develop character, and defines its parameters. It is self-aware but only so far as it's been programmed to be. Well, this chapter may or may not explain things.

Book as experience
This is a puzzle of a book. I love puzzles.

The discovery of all those elements noted above is a pure joy. It makes this a very visual and tactile read.

The Familiar is also full of nested parentheticals, so reading is a bit like diagramming sentences, but on a more psychosemantic level than a mere grammatical one.

Danielewski has spoken about how The Familiar is conceptualized like a ("quality," modern) TV series, like The Wire or Mad Men, in how it develops character over long-form narrative. The way it shifts character focus, the way individual character stories intersect; how small events play into a season-long story arc.

This volume includes season previews (which don't (yet) appear to be linked to the novel proper), and pages of credits at the end.

It's highly conducive to binge reading. Just one more chapter.

The formatting helps pull the reader along. It feels a little like a graphic novel in this way, like where text spans frames and physically leads you where you're supposed to go.

If the text of this novel were conventionally laid out, it would be a standard 300-page novel. I believe I read it at a slightly faster rate than my usual, because the design factors were so compelling. The only hindrance was the weight, making it a bitch to commute with, which led me to plan my reading time a little more carefully.

The future of publishing
As soon as I finished reading volume 1, I rushed out to buy volume 2. I have a couple other things to read first, but I needed to ensure that I have it, for whenever I'm ready. I need to do a little catch-up, but I expect I'll be lined up to get volume 4 the day it's released.

It would be easy to dismiss this book as gimmicky if it weren't so goddamn beautiful and narratively compelling. It must be very expensive to produce; someone must have a lot of faith in this project.

I've showed off this book to a lot of people. This book is coveted. It has been fondled.

What if publishers made books beautiful? Good book design can be more than just a pretty cover. It's the paper, it's judicious use of colour, it's white space (white space is so underrated).

So 27 volumes of 800 pages may be a bit ambitious. Books don't have to be oversized to capture attention. But there are shorter stories. There are short stories, for example. Many texts could lend themselves not just to illustration but to design-sensitive interpretation. Or serialization. Graphic novels do this to a degree, but as mainstream as they are, they're not for everybody.

I happen to love ebooks, and in general I believe that the content of a book is more important than its form(at). But there is a market for beautiful books. People appreciate fine detail.

Make people want to turn pages.

One thing I admire about The Familiar is that it never becomes a graphic novel, can never be a television show. It does not resort to incorporating artefacts or referring to complementary online material; there are no fussy envelopes or reproduced postcards; there is no CD included. This is not amultimedia production, but it is fully immersive.

It's stretching our idea of a novel, but remains contained, remains very definitely a book.

One rainy day

It's a rainy day in Montreal and I'm glad to be reading this. This book is L.A., and here's a bit of noir amid the chaos.

Özgür should get out of the rain. He doesn't even have an umbrella. Balascoe sure as hell isn't sharing his. Men a lot younger than him, soaked through like this, can get horrible things in their lungs and die on a respirator days later. But Oz loves rain. Almost as much as he loves this city.

Oz has lived and worked her streets for over twenty-seven years. And one thing stays true: he never gets sick of the way she rises up at dawn, the way she grows smokier come dusk, and the way during a big storm like this she falls down and her mascara runs.

"Do not apply gendered language to urban zones," Elaine warns whenever Oz acts like some sailor talking about his ship, letting slip a feminine reference to this place where they both live. He can't say she's wrong. After all, what kind of woman contains this scene?

Because if this was mascara it was red. A seep of blood still washed over the sidewalk. The Korean woman still agape at a sky streaking indifferently down upon her.

— from The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

It's hard to say what it's about just yet. I believe the novel covers one rainy day, and I've been given to understand that it's about a girl who finds a kitten. But on page 267 at 12:33 that day, the family is planning on bringing home a dog.

In many ways it brings to mind Infinite Jest. The many characters playing out in separate chapters in different registers. I'm feeling parallels between Xanther and Hal, Astair and Avril. Xanther's considering whether a particular book can trigger a seizure, or reverse its effects. It feels like an addictive entertainment. If Wallace is footnotes, then Danielewski is all nested parentheticals.

It's a commitment, to carry this behemoth with me on my commute, but I have fallen deep into this book.

Looking for China

Sometime he directed me to one or another of his online projects. That was how I realised that Aykan was a virtuoso of programming. Once, on one of our infrequent rendezvous, I called him a hacker. He burst out laughing, then got very angry with me.

"Fucking hacker?" He laughed again. "Fucking hacker?" Listen bro, you're not talking to some sebum-faced little sixteen-year-old geekboy with wank-stained pants who calls himself Dev-L." He swore furiously. "I'm not a fucking hacker, man, I'm a fucking artist, I'm a hardworking wage slave, I'm a concerned motherfucking citizen, whatever you want, but I'm not a fucking hacker."

— from "An End to Hunger," in Looking for Jake, by China Miéville.

While a friend of mine is sharing her enthusiasm for China Miéville as she discovers Bas-Lag for the first time, I've been experiencing Miéville withdrawal. His next novel is a few months off yet, so I finally turned to Looking for Jake, a collection of short stories that I'd been saving up for just such an occasion.

Ah, it's great to read phrases like, "a bad atmosphere as tenacious as stink," and, "manipulating scobs of gris-gris," again.

A few of the stories are standouts. Namely, "Foundation," "Reports of Certain Events in London," and "Details."

They are cool and original and unsettling. I moved through them relatively slowly, partly in order to draw out the Miéville experience, but primarily to prevent overdosing on the vibe.

The story about the Ikea ball room, for example — I kept returning to it in my mind for days afterward, every time we passed Ikea (twice), every time I received or threw out an Ikea flyer (twice), every time we discussed a potential Ikea purchase, every time the kid mentioned hot dogs, whenever a colleague mentioned having recently been. This to say: the story stayed present, and I will never, ever leave a child of mine to the care of the Ikea ball room, and I want to warn all parents against it. (It turns out, that of all the people I informally polled, none have put a child in the ball room — it was too busy. It makes me wonder who actually enjoys this privilege?)

All this being the effect of a story I didn't even particularly like — the writing style felt off, it dragged a bit. Yet. It creeped me out!

You can't read too much of that kind of thing at once.

When Miéville is being straightforward with the storytelling, when it's about "regular" people in London (as opposed to "creatures" in imaginary worlds), when he's doing dialogue, he reminds me of Doris Lessing. The Londonness, the political sensibility. Banality preserved in even extraordinary circumstances.

A few other stories remind me of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. It's hard not to think of Danielewski when structures are imbued with qualities ordinarily reserved for animate things. "Reports of Certain Events in London," for example, uses scraps of documents to tell its story about streets that move. The alleyways, they fucking move! Also, there's a Johnny Truant–like edginess in a couple other stories (see quotation at the top of this post).

I was reminded of one other voice in particular, though it took me a while to identify. Anne Hébert. Every now and again, romanticism rears its ugly head, brought into sharp relief by the urban setting, and it made me think of Hébert's psychologically starved characters in lush surroundings, her vampires.

What you cannot know is how it hurt.

For we who are not, or were not, our bodies: we, for whom flesh is, or was, only one possible clothing. We might fly or invert ourselves through the spines of grass, we might push ourselves into other ways of being, we might be to water as water is to air, we might do anything, until you looked at yourselves. It is a pain you cannot imagine — very literally, in the most precise way, you cannot know how it is to feel yourself shoved with a mighty and brutal cosmic hand into bloody muscle. The agony of our constrained thoughts, shoehorned into those skulls you carry, stringy tendons tethering our limbs. The excruciation. Shackled in your meat vulgarity.

On the whole, these stories weren't completely satisfying. They're too long, or too short, not tight enough. The characters feel incomplete, the ideas haven't been fully thought out. For whatever reason, these short stories don't quite work for me. (Note also that one story is in graphic form, and the ebook interface in this case was not easy. Had I known, I might've opted for paper.)

I like Miéville best when he's discursive and epic, and that's only just hinted at here. He does manage to establish mood quickly and strongly. I almost wish each of them had been sustained for the length of novel.

If you worry that Miéville might be a little weird for your pedestrian tastes, this collection will give you an idea of what he's capable of. Only know that he's much, much better in long form.

Excerpt: "Looking for Jake."