Nick Sweeney - Daedalus: All Dublin Talking (2023)

 

Never having read Ulysses, I may be at something of a disadvantage here given that Daedalus extends the existence of its principal character; and yet it didn't feel as though I was at a disadvantage. Similarly, this is a work in progress - a breather taken for the sake of comparing notes and due consideration given to what other materials will be needed before the building can be completed - and yet to me, in my potential ignorance, it feels finished. Daedalus presents thirteen snapshots in the life of himself beyond the final page of Joyce's novel and dating from 1904 to 1925. Sweeney hasn't yet settled on what will occur to link these interludes, hence the temporary pause to take stock.

I didn't have much of an idea of what occurred to Stephen before the final page of Joyce's novel, but Sweeney isn't afraid of making what I suspect may be dramatic changes - dramatic changes being more consistent with real life than with fannish extensions. So our man turns his back on the poetry and we find him later crossing the Atlantic to churn out popular songs for Tin Pan Alley - or at least one of its cousins - then hanging out on Hollywood lots with Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. It probably could have turned a little pear-shaped given some of the supporting cast, but doesn't, retaining its focus on what it was doing anyway and otherwise ignoring the legends of celebrities who happen to be passing through; although this paragraph gave me a warm chuckle:

He gave in to sleep, dreamed of a bananaeating lion roaming the Emperor Diocletian's Palace in Split, and he and Stan and a fat man comically trying to shoo it out the door before the illtempered boss noticed and put his one fearsome beady eye on them all.

Somehow, although written in a style which pays homage to Ulysses, or so I gather, Daedalus is recognisably the work of Nick Sweeney in that it's the voice established in Laikonik Express and The Émigré Engineer, which seems like no mean feat, elaborating on migratory themes - where we end up and how we're changed by the journey, which appeals to me for obvious reasons. So Daedalus isn't either - ugh - fan fiction, or even Wide Sargasso Sea which, fine book though it is, sings from an entirely different hymn sheet to Brontë's Jane Eyre. Most surprising of all, at least to me, is that it doesn't read like a work in progress and does everything it apparently needs to do in just 150 pages. It feels complete and satisfying as it stands, and doesn't suffer from its episodic composition; and it's of a quality suggesting that any expansion, extension, or filling in of gaps the author chooses to make can only add. I'll be interested to see where it goes from here.

I really need to read Ulysses, don't I?

Ploughshares Fall 2021

Ladette Randolph (editor) Ploughshares Fall 2021 (2021)
Ploughshares is a quarterly literary collection of short fiction. Most contributions are approximately novella length, so this is going to be a long one. If you need to dash to the kitchen to grab a few cans of Kestrel and a packet of custard creams, I can wait.

Okay, in vague order…

I'm kicking off with Afsheen Farhadi whose The Mexican Detective takes its time, creeping up on the reader without giving away too much of where it's going despite the obvious focus on bereavement; and once everything has fallen into place, it leaves a lasting evocation of the unreality which tends to surround the death of a loved one, mapping a borderland in mythic terms - in this case by the seemingly implausible agency of a Mexican detective who admits he's mostly just a guy who attends a writing class. The aforementioned borderland incorporates Mexican streets terrorised by knife wielding infants, and I've always enjoyed reality described by that which is found beyond its outer limit.

Christie Hodgen's Bush v. Gore hits a lot of buttons for me, being set in Texas - albeit Dallas rather than San Antonio - with a regular gal, probably the author, abruptly stranded within one of those dysfunctionally over-moneyed families with which I'm now somewhat familiar thanks to the stepson. My bunch are of generally lesser toxicity than Phyllis and the gang, but not one of those people got where they are by playing nice; and the point at which our narrator finally pops, dumping an entire paragraph of home truths on her hosts - page 113, if anyone's wondering - is so satisfying that I had my wife read it too. The entire psychodrama is set against the backdrop of George W. Bush defeating Gore in Florida, or kinda sorta maybe defeating Gore in Florida. Why the election played out as it did seems adequately explained by the family dynamic of Jack, Phyllis and the rest, which in turn goes some way towards accounting for what happened more recently in November 2016.

Yxta Maya Murray's When the Prophet Gazed upon the Face of the Lord is incredible, and one of the tightest, most powerful pieces of writing I've read all year. It orbits - I suppose you could say - the true story of a partial nuclear reactor meltdown in Simi Valley, California back in 1959, additionally taking in the tangential horror of Nazi rocket scientists and other elements found so far beyond the edge of daily existence as to impinge on the spiritual, in this case the religion of corn, stone knives, and the Centzontotochtin of old Mexico. The reality of the tale and its telling is such that it's difficult to imagine it consciously composed and directed as a fictionalised narrative, such is its power.

Talking of which, Mona Susan Power is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a Harvard graduate who was awarded the PEN/Hemingway prize for her novel, The Grass Dancer. Here she contributes Goodreads Warrior which tells how of a young Native American man from a town near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation gets into Harvard to be taught by a teacher whose last collection of short stories won the PEN/Faulkner prize, whatever that is. Whilst I very much like the theme of what it takes a Native to get ahead in such institutions, I had trouble getting past this one being writing about what it's like to be a writer - a genre I dislike because it feels self-involved and dishonest on some level. It probably doesn't help that our guy's own literary efforts, which appear nested within the narrative, aren't anything special and are conspicuously consistent with Power's own narrative voice, which is freewheeling and would, I suspect, better suit something a little less recursive.

A Procession of Beasts and Men is Will Schluter's first short story - according to the byline - and if it's a mostly decent effort and not lacking in poetry, most of it seems to comprise descriptions of the domestic texture through which his character moves without any obvious sense of direction. Accordingly, there are some long fucking sentences here.

Not unlike those waves of electric pole and line that rose and broke in a steady stream all the way from West Texas through New Mexico and into a rest stop just south of the headwaters of the Rio Grande where she ditched the Volvo for a Pinto left idling at a gas pump and urged that baby up up up and into the Rockies as that one cassette played over and over on fuzzy speakers because the car's broken antenna wouldn't pick up a radio signal that didn't give way to static after about three and a half seconds but the electric line never stopped no matter how high she went and that one song kept on playing Josie's on vacation far away as the woman not yet named Josie approached the crest of the Great Divide and the waves of post and line seemed to transfer into her own body starting in her abdomen and continuing on down through her pelvis over and over again until she felt the emptying that soaked her leggings and the whole carseat under them and she knew her water had finally broke up there among the snow-capped peaks.

I appreciate the reason for the absence of a pause anywhere in the above, but this sort of thing doesn't always work, and here it slows everything down which is, I suspect, the opposite of the desired effect. Additionally, Schluter strives to create mood by means of sentences broken into inactive segments. Such as this. Where a comma would work a whole lot better than a full stop. Never mind.

Having known Nick Sweeney since the nineties, I'm probably biased regarding his contribution, although you wouldn't actually be reading these words if I'd thought it was crap so make of that what you will. The Émigré Engineer is really a novella and the longest story in the collection, which is as it should be given the scale of the tale, trailing its main guy from his bloody coming of age during the Russian Revolution, to Paris, then small town America between the wars. It's about an engineer, one who forges with his hands, making his way by sheer bloody minded force of will in a difficult and occasionally fucking ridiculous world, as told with a satisfyingly nourishing cadence and a sense of the physical which reminds me of a folk tale or even Gogol, albeit without quite the same level of surrealism. I mainly know Nick as a friend of my friend Eddy and as - much to my excitement - a man who once auditioned for Adam & the Ants. I've no real idea from whence his interest in eastern Europe is derived, but he channels it like a native, I suppose you would say. My recent reading has brought me to the surprising conclusion that, despite the last few hundred years, the heart of our world has generally been that expanse of land between the Baltic, Adriatic and Caspian seas for the longest stretch of human history, with the rest of us fiddling about around the edges; and as an immigrant myself, and friends with at least one former Russian Jew, I recognise a lot of The Émigré Engineer, although thankfully not so much the more harrowing episodes. Nick Sweeney taps into something fairly fundamental here, yet without the need for anyone honking away on a trumpet.

Joan Wickersham's Mortal Enemy was an odd one for me, not least for being listed as non-fiction in the index - presumably through being directly autobiographical - which implies the potential for a technical discussion of scaffolding. It's an account, and a fairly harrowing one, of a one-time friend evolving into a violently bipolar stalker. The problem, which is possibly my problem rather than anything to do with the author, is the initial setting of writers, writing courses, and literary discussion amongst students at Yale, the sort of thing which hits me as vaguely adjacent to Wickersham's own assessment of a novel written by her mortal enemy.

The prose sounded like Bobby, Bobby eager to tell the world about itself, but what he knew about the world he'd learned from reading other books by men eager to tell the world about itself. He wrote in clichés. Every sentence congratulated itself for being that sentence.

This is why Charles Bukowski recommended time spent at the race track. To be fair, Wickersham writes without either cliché or sentences congratulating themselves, and the account begins to feel distinctly more vital once we move on from prestigious colleges and trips to Paris. It's honestly a respectable piece and one I'm glad to have read because I'm sure many of us have known Bobby at some point or other, although that whole deal of an insight into the lives of writers usually brings me out in hives which, as I say, is possibly just me.

Leslie Kirk Campbell's The Man with Eight Legs and Julian Zabalbeascoa's What We Tried to Bury Grows Here were both entirely decent without inspiring me to write about either, which is why I haven't.

I don't actively seek out new writers as any sort of official policy because I already have too many books stacked up on the to be read pile, some of which admittedly may be garbage, but these anthologies are always a pleasure when I make the time and I highly recommend this one, not least on the strength of the contributions from Afsheen Farhadi, Yxta Maya Murray, Nick Sweeney and Christie Hodgen.

Dubliners

James Joyce Dubliners (1907)
I'd been umming and ahing about tackling Ulysses before my brain fully reverts to adolescent slush in the wake of my having resumed reading comic books with teenage fervour. Nick Sweeney, or possibly someone else, suggested I first give Dubliners a shot, and so I have.

I thought A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was mostly wonderful, inhabiting territory with which I was loosely familiar. Dubliners I've found a little more impenetrable in so far as I couldn't really tell whether there was anything to penetrate, so to speak. I picked up a few hints from the internet, but mostly themes which I'd already noticed, or at least suspected might be in there somewhere, none of which significantly increased my reading pleasure. Dubliners is a collection of short stories describing significant moments of understanding in the lives of Dublin people around the turn of the century, but feels a little like a novel given the consistent themes running through these fifteen vignettes; and the progression from youth to age, book-ended by death in both the first and final stories is surely deliberate. The turn of the century apparently saw a rise of Irish Nationalism, notably in Dublin, which Joyce views with scepticism, regarding it as a stifling influence. Much of the book is concerned with inertia and the weight of tradition or expectation, with the contrast of modernity and social progress faintly tangible as occurring around the edges of the narrative.

I could tell what the collection was doing, and I enjoyed most of the stories, but the sense of detachment was a little overwhelming in places, with the author leaving us to pass judgement in situations which seemed to rely upon a much greater investment in the culture of Dublin than I've ever enjoyed. This isn't to say that I needed - ugh - identifiable characters, so much as that it was all a bit too relentlessly brown for my tastes. It felt like reading a Walter Sickert interior of roughly the same vintage.

Probably a bit too soon for Ulysses then.

Lazarus Churchyard

Warren Ellis & D'Israeli Lazarus Churchyard (2001)
As you may recall, Lazarus Churchyard was approximately the main feature in Blast!, a monthly anthology comic which lasted for seven issues back in 1991 at the height of the hoohaa of the comic having grown up - meaning Batman was suddenly allowed to say rude words and kill the occasional paedophile. Blast! had replaced Speakeasy, a mag about comics rather than specifically featuring them, which pissed me off because I liked Speakeasy, and Blast! wasn't actually that good. Lazarus Churchyard sounded like something which couldn't quite decide whether it wanted to be in either 2000AD or Deadline, and even the name seemed to be trying far too hard to be weird, like one of those lazy steampunk juxtapositions - Jedediah P. Mainframe or whatever; plus it's Warren Ellis. Apparently his work is amazing, except for the stuff I've tried to read, which is weird.

Anyway, Nick Sweeney seemed to rate this thing and suggested I give it another go, and then a week later I happened across this collection in Half Price Books, which seemed too timely a coincidence to ignore.

To be fair to Warren Ellis, Lazarus Churchyard is pretty much him finding his feet as a writer, learning on the job, so to speak. It's more or less a list of shocking or startling juxtapositions like one of those Sigue Sigue Sputnik songs which is just a tally of futuristic sounding things - dead man butterfly effect sex toy foetal heroin and so on; and Lazarus Churchyard - Keith Richards reimagined as that Sisters of Mercy album which no-one bought, the one with Tony James on bass - moves from one startling thing to another, then to another, and that's the story. I'm a little cynical regarding this narrative technique because I was once involved in an unfortunately similar enterprise, so I can tell when a comic book writer is trying to distract from the possibility of his having no fucking clue what he's doing. The ability to gift one's characters with sardonic or ostentatiously edgy observations is not the same thing as being able to tell a story.

However, none of this takes into account the art of D'Israeli, which is rich, angular, and absolutely breathtaking, and so much so as to take up most of the slack; and some of what we have here is surely sufficient to warrant his canonisation in one of those greatest of all time lists. Therefore, unless I'm just making excuses, the problem with Lazarus Churchyard may actually be to do with expectations, specifically my expectations. It seems to present itself as something profound and revealing when actually it's just a Ramones album which ticks the boxes you would expect it to tick, and ticks them very well. It's nothing deep - it's simply a list of things which seem cool or interesting, and I guess maybe that's enough.

Laikonik Express

Nick Sweeney Laikonik Express (2011)
Not entirely sure what to make of this debut, and my views faltered during reading, ranging from bored to amused to entirely engaged. The narrative follows writer Nolan Kennedy to Poland where he tries to coax Don Darius, his friend and also a writer, into completing an unpublished and apparently amazing novel he's been sitting on for far too long. I'd say Laikonik Express is Kerouac's On the Road except for the fact that it's set on a Polish train, and never having read On the Road there's a danger I might actually be talking out of my arse.

Much of what transpires is low on incident, largely conversational and anecdotal, inspiring the thought that this may  represent characters as much in search of a story as their author; and whilst much of the Polish detail is fascinating, I was never quite convinced that Kennedy or Darius were ever entirely engaged with their surroundings, but for all I know this may well have been the point. Clearly it is a novel which to some extent concerns itself with the process of writing a novel, possibly an examination of the relationship between the terrain and that which ends up on the printed page. When, towards the end of the book, the lads meet Krystyna and learn that she is dying of cancer it seems the harsh reality of the situation obliges them to at last engage on a level beyond that of scenes viewed from the window of a railway carriage.

Possibly.

I suspect there may be a great deal that I missed in Laikonik Express, and certainly it seems pregnant with the possibilities of what it might be saying, if it really is saying any one specific thing. If the point is the journey rather than the destination, I may have appreciated more focus on the journey itself, with a little less on the anecdotes of our travellers which tended to unbalance the narrative a little in my view. Yet in the final quarter it all seemingly adds up by means suggestive of a purpose to the rambling of previous chapters.

At this point I should perhaps stress that I did enjoy Laikonik Express even if I wasn't always sure of where it was going or why. Those online reviews I've checked out mostly heap glowing praise on the quality of Nick Sweeney's narrative, and rightly so. The man is clearly incapable of a dull sentence, with even the most prosaic of observations sparkling with an effortless wit that puts most of Nick Sweeney's contemporaries to shame.

Possibly an unusual debut - says the man who rarely picks up anything that doesn't have a picture of a robot on the cover - but one that may prove more rewarding with time, and one that hints very strongly at better to come.