Wednesday 28 March 2018

Broken River

I read a lot of really excellent books in 2017 but one of the small handful which thoroughly got to me was Broken River by J. Robert Lennon.

Straight up, this is a fantastic novel and I recommend it to anybody, while noting that it does contain some representations of very grim violence. But for me, personally, it undid me in a way that very few books manage to do: reading it was like reading one book while yourself simultaneously existing in two different realities that are superficially the same but different enough that when they overlap in the reading, you can't help but feel endlessly shaken and jarred by the whole experience. It possibly wouldn't be like that for you although as I say I think it's a great novel. I'm not going to describe the book in such a way that might help anyone decide whether they'd like to read it. Stuart Kelly's review in the Guardian gives a good description of the plot and a close enough description of the effect of the narrative. As Kelly says, this is work in an instantly recognisable american gothic tradition. I would add that Lennon is the best writer I am aware of for capturing the uncanniness and dread that specifically belongs to the networked age. The flavour of this novel is very much The Night of the Hunter if Robert Mitchum had been a neural network stalking and gaslighting Shelley Winters on twitter.

I used to put a lot of store by a literary theorist by the name of Wolfgang Iser. I read heaps of his work without understanding all of it, but I kept going back for more because of the trailing afterglow of the extraordinary fecund flowering that took place in my thinking when I read his book The Act of Reading. From him I really grasped that reading is an entirely transactional and reciprocal procedure. Books and readers construct or unfold each other as they go. Iser demystified this idea for me. You put together the book as you read it, and the book structures your thoughts, and around it goes again. I hadn't finished the first chapter of Broken River before I could see how it was dividing me as a reader.

The first reader was more or less who I usually am when I read a novel. Is there a Zodiac of readers? There should be. Reading lends itself to developing bundles of behaviours that can be described like star signs, with just the same mixture of hokum and suggestiveness.  My reader sign would have these traits: trusting and compliant to a fault, eager to cooperate, slow to assert myself, ready to go along with any suggestions, and once the book and I begin to find our rhythm, I won't want to stop and when it's finished, if it's been good, I won't want to come out of that bubble. This is me as Iserian reader, there when the book calls, helpfully filling in the blanks and the gaps. So Broken River satisfied me in that mode. But at the same time the book produced in me a reader who felt like an intruder in the book, crashing uninvited into those expertly worked spaces, filling them with garbage and discordant noise. Among other things, the book is a thriller, but I can't think of another thriller which so thoroughly renders the discovery of narrative resolution as an intrusion: a projection of urgent fantasy, knowing and illegitimate. If this dynamic sounds perverse, or perverted, well, maybe it is. 

To an extent the novel read this way for me because of my history of consumption of J. Robert Lennon's work, which not at all coincidentally is bound up with, and symptomatic of, the evolution of the networked public sphere. I've bought and read nearly all his novels and story collections, beginning with Happyland - definitely the best place to start - and Broken River is the only one I still have a retrievable copy of. I had a paperback of Castle but I gave it away, which I now regret. All the others I bought and read via platforms, devices and online accounts that have failed, become obsolete, or otherwise gotten lost. They were born digital for me and they got ghosted the same way. I sought out Happyland after coming across a description of it that made it sound almost Pynchonesque, and the fact that I knew nothing at all about the author was a part of that mystique. I suspected the J. stood for John, and I wondered about what the parents could possibly have been thinking, but there was no actual biographical context at all. So I read more of his work - all I could find. And somewhere in there I found out that J. Robert Lennon is enough of a real person to possess an author bio: age, cv, place of residence etc. And about four years ago I began to subscribe to Lunch Box, the podcast he does with Ed Skoog, and by the time I got to the next-to-last novel (Familiar) there had been a complete revolution and I had listened to maybe sixty hours of Ed and John talking about reading, writing, music, teaching, America, work, food, their lives. New episodes of Lunch Box remain highlights of my week or month; I follow Ed, John and some of their guests on social media, and I feel like I know them both at least as well as I know some of my actual friends, and I write this sentence in full awareness of how extremely peculiar it sounds. This is Ed learning a song I love. I think you should watch the clip: it's how you'll see exactly what I'm talking about, this warped, weird, commodified, disconcerting, anxious-making one-way intimacy. I read Familiar, and then Broken River, entirely through this lens. That's why I say Broken River probably won't work the same way on you as it did on me, but as I've tried to indicate, the specific mode that this author operates in (and appears to have invented) is all about anatomising that condition, by whatever means. If you do read it, or you have read it, I'd love to know what you make of it. 

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