Scortch Atlas by Blake Butler

Butler speaks, and Perraultian vipers slither out, squirmudgeoning onto ink-blotted grey pastiche paper and tranvesting into diamonds: toads and diamonds, toads and diamonds: how I love Perrault.inanisms.

Blake has language, but no meaning. Words oscillate with a vested light and charge the plane of paper until they combust. Apocalyptic prophet, Butler reams his world with doom embedded imagery lacking spatio-temporal placement but suffused with emotion: alienation, destruction, fragmentation. I get this guy. He’s consumed by feeling, powered by sensation, but blind to any Vision (in the grand sense. Hallucinations there are many). Plot lines succumb under pressure, any kind of outlines really, and language comes into its own: glass pelting down, floods, gravel: staccato of finite chunks, fizzling off into Spent. Of mind, emotion, endurance.

The Loser

The novel  is an obsessive (I think), or at least an autistic droning of repetitions and paranoid preoccupations with a tight set of recurring themes, most of them apparently autobiographical. The central tenet is an acknowledgement from the narrator that he would never be as ‘good’ a pianist as Gould, and subsequent renouncement of the piano, and, subsequent inability to crystallise anything productive in his life as a result of ‘analysis paralyses’. The narrator, a nameless character, devotes the span of fifty odd years of his life, consumed, governed, informed by this one meme. He never publishes any of the work he keeps writing about Glenn Gould. The alternative would be a controlled descent into madness, which is exactly what happens to the narrator, arrested in a 2D plane of existence which never changes.

The Knock Out Artist

I loved 'Feast of Snakes', so I went here...But I'm not sure its where I wanted to be. Yes, on the one hand a brilliant premise: if ever there was an anti-hero who triumphs on the basis of annihilation of self, this is it. Can you imagine, sucess garnered from destruction of the self: the more you 'die', the more famous you get, the more you get out of it. How to stop this cycle of self fulfilling violence?

How about the 'girlfirend': is it OK to scrounge off a 'sugar mommy' and then get all upset because she wants to get something outof it as well, albeit it is your soul? Come on: we all have to pay the piper some day. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Is there redemption in the end? If piling up your collectibles on an ox cart and legging it counts for a grand finale, then I guess yes. But wait: where will THAT long winding road take you? with no money, no prospects, no job? OK, we've seen it before: Kerouac's 'On the road', Bukowski's 'Factotum': but is the knock out artist made of the same mould? And if he was, wouldn't he have just been ...meandering from the get go, like the miscreants in the former two novels?

And so, I can't imagine a 'happy' ending here. Shame