NOTE: This is the third of ten reviews of contemporary weird novels. An overview of the project can be found below.
The Fisherman, published in 2017 by Word Horde (a small press specialized in speculative / supernatural fiction run by Ross Lockhart in Petaluma, CA), is John Langan’s second novel. His first, House of Windows (2009) and his numerous short stories (collected in Mr. Gaunt and Other Easy Encounters (2008), The Wide, Cavernous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (2013), and Sefira and Other Betrayals (2016)) are all in the genre, and he’s an active member of the online horror/speculative/weird tales community, with articles and interviews in e-zines such as Nightmare and Weird Fiction Review. His blog Mr. Gaunt provides links to his many projects, including an interview with Peter Straub and the anthology Creatures (2011), co-edited by Paul Tremblay, whose latest novel will be discussed in this series.
The Fisherman received a fair amount of press from mainstream reviewers, such as the New York Times and NPR, further indicating the popularity of weird fiction today. Writing in the Times, Terrence Rafferty calls it “superb,” citing its ability “ to sustain the focused effect of a short story or a poem over the course of a long horror narrative,” and making a favorable comparison to Robert Aickman, whose resurrection is one of the more salubrious results of the return to the weird. I can’t agree with Rafferty’s assessment, but his terms—the effort to “sustain the focused effect” associated with poetry—point in the right direction. The Fisherman provides a contemporary object-lesson in some of the foundational “poetics” of the genre. Langan gets many elements right—his themes, plotting, and narrative frames all contribute to his novel’s considerable weirdness; but his overly methodical prose detracts from this affect. Consequently, this novel provides insight into the relation between aesthetic techniques that contribute to the effect of supernatural horror that contemporary fiction might evoke. Before turning to Langan’s novel, I will quickly sketch a few observations regarding the “poetics” of weirdness in relation to the modern literature of ‘sensation.”
As I suggested in my first post of this series, I treat weirdness as both an affect in the psychological sense—a feeling that names a certain relation between the subject and its object, in which the latter is regarded as meaning more than is immediately discernible—and the name of a genre with a long history in the field of literature, broadly conceived. I say “broadly” because one of the most intriguing qualities of weird fiction—one of its weirdest features—is its appearance in texts commonly regarded as “high art,” or canonical literature as well as in genre, pulp, or sensational fiction. It is unlike most other genre fiction in this regard.
To briefly explain: in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Pierre Bourdieu describes the “literary field” as a set of social practices within the broader field of cultural reproduction. Within this field, distinctions are made by writers, critics, and the reading public between “the degree of consecration . . . between styles and lifestyles” associated with genres (122). His case studies are Flaubert and Baudelaire, whose aesthetics define the modern perception of capital “L” Literature in terms of its “autonomy,” a condition also realized in the writers’ relation to the market in material and social capital. At one pole we find bohemian or avant-garde poetry, published in little magazines for no money, but consecrated by the heroism of the aesthetic “purist,” starving for the sake of his art and contemptuous of even sympathetic critics. At the other extreme, we have the “Theatre de boulevard,” which Americans might think of as Broadway. Here it’s all about money. Bourgeois entertainment lives or dies by its ability to capitalize upon the fluctuating tastes of its fickle audience. Lodged between these poles are the “psychological,” “society,” and “naturalist” novels, as represented by Zola, Hugo, etc. The contemporary field in the United States looks nothing like this, of course. Bourdieu doesn’t attempt to account for the mode of mass production that emerges in the twenties, which scholars refer to as “the culture industry.” Yet the process by which social/aesthetic/political distinctions are made—the structure of taste—remains remarkably robust.
For the modern U.S. reading public, “sensational” writing was (and remains) a nebulous region within the broader field, roughly commensurate to “genre fiction,” the subcategories of which are often named by sensations: “horror, romance, mystery, thrillers,” etc. These genres, developed in dime magazines, the pulps, and paperbacks, are neither autonomous nor consecrated by bourgeoise critics and scholars. Within most of these genres, such as the western, the mystery story, or science fiction, writers of considerable merit may produce work worthy of the attention afforded to Literature, but in so doing they are working against generic constraints. Fantastic or weird fiction does not fit easily into this aesthetic taxonomy. As a genre, it emerges among Gothic romances, such as The Castle of Otranto (1764), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and the “Arabesques” (themselves derived from Ovid and 1001 Arabian Nights) written by Hoffmann in the early 1800s. From Daniel Defoe’s “A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal” (1706) to Edith Wharton’s “Afterward” (1910), canonical authors have always written weird tales.
Edgar Allan Poe, obviously enough, is the figure for the uneasy relation between these two poles of the field of fiction. He was and remains “edgy”: his poems, stories, and essays are the subject of both scholarly dissertations and the idle enjoyment of adolescents. He was a hero for avant-garde bohemians and a politically conservative editor of gentleman’s magazines. His approach to literature uncannily appears on both sides of what would become the modern terrain of assessment. In essays, reviews, and the stories themselves, Poe offers a minute appraisal of his own poetics. “I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect,” he wrote in “The Philosophy of Composition,” his explanation of the entirely rational method by which he produced his sensational poem, “The Raven.” (503; (in this post, quotations from Poe are from Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poetry and Tales, edited by James M. Hutchisson. Broadview: 2012). For Poe, a literary “effect” was like a dramatic “point”; thus his essay takes us ‘behind the scenes’ of poetic composition to reveal “the painful erasures and interpolations—[…] the tackle for scene-shifting—the step-ladders and demon-traps—the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.” (504) Readers of a romantic inclination have taken this essay to be tongue-in-cheek: its minute poetics of one of the most successful entries in the small genre of weird poetry (other entries include Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”) must be the work of inspiration. How could such intense sensation be produced by mechanical means? But Poe is not putting us on; he makes versions of the same argument in several reviews and exemplifies his logic in numerous stories.
His analysis of “effect” is oddly physical. It begins with the length of time an average reader may be expected to sit with a text. “The initial consideration was that of extent,” he argues, “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sitting be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed.” (504) In his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (several of which are weird), he extends the reader’s temporal experience from lyric poetry to short stories. He begins his favorable review by defending the short story as a “poetic” genre. Because “the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance,” he writes, “true poetry” can only exist “within the limit” of “what might be perused in an hour.” (525-6) This is because “All high excitements are necessarily transient”: the sensations we experience when reading do not last long. He likes Hawthorne’s tales because they take “a half-hour to one or two hours” to “peruse.” One need only read any of Poe’s most sensational stories—“Ligeia, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Oval Portrait,” “The Black Cat,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Cask of Amontillado”—to know how much he cherished brevity. These stories take twenty minutes to an hour to absorb, even when reading closely. When it comes to claiming the reader’s attention, originality is the most important factor, but it doesn’t require inspiration. Original impressions may be produced by combining previously successful effects. The “wise” writer “invents … incidents” that can be “combined” to produce the “preconceived effect.” The result should be an intense compression of effects, such that “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.” (526)
Following Poe, let’s assume that the effort to sustain a poetic intensity—the production of a new sensation (or variation on a dominate sensation) in every line—is a vital quality of what I am calling “sensational” fiction. Here we encounter an interesting conundrum. All fiction generates sensation; this may even be its most important quality: its “purposeless purpose,” to condense Kant. Throughout much of the twentieth-century, “genre” fiction also describes “low” or “popular” or “kitschy” fiction. In this loosely cultivated part of literature’s garden the violence of sensation is stripped of the moral and ethical requirements of naturalism, the delicate sensibilities of a realism developed in the “novel of manners,” and the radical critique of form offered by avant-garde novelists and bohemian poets. Because the pulp and paperback publishers gambled on volume over quantity, flooding the market with thousands of stories each month, “sensational” fiction is closely equated with a boring or brutal prosaicism. Little to no time is spent, by authors or publishers, cultivating style. If “all high excitements are necessarily transient,” and the goal is to produce a large number of these short-lived sensations, there was no time to search for “le mot juste,” which is why pulp fiction is the nadir of modern aestheticism as such. The premise of “The Philosophy of Composition,” and its underlying logic of cause and effect, “set the stage” as it were for pulp formula. Poe articulates a simple mechanics for producing marketable sensations. Yet at the same time, his insistence upon the lyrical compression that creates an intense correspondence between each word or utterance and the story’s final impression is one of the qualities that so delighted Baudelaire. In short, Poe’s notion of sensation contains the seeds that will flower in both pulp and avant-garde forms of modern fiction. There’s nothing original in this observation; my point is just that a poetics of weird sensation runs both within and against the grain of twentieth-century genre fiction. In the American context, Lovecraft, deservedly or not, inherits Poe’s position within the field; his pulp stories have been consecrated by academia and enjoy a sort of bohemian notoriety.
Poe’s notion of compression also helps to explain why so many weird tales are short stories. The greater the length, the more difficult it is to sustain any given sensation, weirdness included. Thus, when Rafferty argues that The Fisherman sustains poetic intensity over its 266 pages, he implies an enormous accomplishment: one that Poe attempted only once, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. This observation is supported by a key point made by Langan and repeated by several of The Fisherman’s reviewers: that he worked on the novel for twelve years. It suggests the painstaking process of autonomous aestheticism, a devotion to the novel for its own sake. The comparison to Aickman, a singularly powerful stylist within the field of “strange” stories, further re-enforces this view. We are asked to approach the novel as a sort of “pure” aesthetic project, despite its generic origins. The attempted “expansion” of Poe’s formula for sensational stories into a novel also implies a movement across the terrain of literary sensibility—from the pulps toward the “mainstream” of psychological realism. In my view, this expansion fails in a very particular manner, one which reveals an inherent tension between weirdness as a sensation and the weird tale as a genre.
Poe famously chooses “melancholy” as “the most legitimate of all the poetical tones,” and therefore the chief effect to be sought when generating the sensations deployed in “The Raven” (506). His notion of melancholy combines “beauty” with “sadness.” (This as distinct from the “homeliness” and “passion” that he combines to produce tales of horror (such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” or the “The Pit and the Pendulum,” in which squalid, grotesque environments establish the setting for terror). With an infuriating literalism—“it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes” (506)—he determines that “the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally it is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.” (508) Langan follows this advice to the letter. His narrator Abe is grieving the death of his wife Marie, “and us married not two years,” drinking heavily, and about to lose his job, when he takes up fishing to hold onto life (3). When a coworker in his office named Dan suffers a similar loss—his wife and young twins are killed in an auto accident that is partially his fault—these “men without women” (the title of the novel’s first section) begin fishing together, spending what used to be “family time” in the woods: “For the rest of that summer, on into early fall, as we roamed the Catskills, fishing streams I’d fished on my own, trying some spots that were new to me, I learned a little about Dan’s wife, and about his family, too.” (25) As Dan grapples with his loss, he confesses to an uncanny feeling: “I have the strangest thoughts lately. I swear I do. When I look at things—when I look at people—I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mache masks we made for one of our school plays when I was a kid. What play was that? It seems like it must have been Alice in Wonderland, but I can’t remember. I wish I could remember that play. I wish I could. All a mask, Abe, and the million-dollar question is, What’s underneath the mask?” (28-9) Weirdness is promised in the tone and guise of melancholia, and because we are told on page one that the present narrative is motivated by the loss of “a good friend, most of my sanity, and damn near my life,” the sensation is doubled. As the allusion to Alice makes clear, the strangeness of grief will take us to both sides of reality’s looking glass.
Two additional frames for weirdness are developed early on: the trope of the fisherman’s “tall tale” (the “one that got away” is given grotesque meaning) and intertextual correspondences to Moby Dick. The novel begins with a quotation from Melville and the sentence “Don’t call me Abraham: call me Abe.” Our Ismael “know[s] a story or two. That’s what fishermen are, right? Storytellers.” (1) The accumulation of these conceits early on follows Poe’s formula for developing an intensity in which “no word written” may not be given significance in relation to “the one pre-established design.” Langan establishes a rich terrain on which to evoke weirdness: we might distrust the narrator’s senses, subject as they are to melancholic fantasies, distrust the story related by Dan, also warped by grief, and further regard the whole story as the work of a playful fabulist. This is all very promising, but despite the narrator’s insistence that “a story doesn’t have to be fitted like some kind of prefabricated house—no, it’s got to go its own way” (2), there is also something labored in the prose, much as though the narrative were a prefab house being put together by someone not at all confident in their carpentry. Langan’s gambit appears to be the extension of details, provided by an untutored but thoughtful narrator, so that the events of a weird tale are spread across chapters rather than paragraphs. But the narrator’s meandering opinions do not compress resonant conceits. For example:
It wasn’t until late February of that next year that I finally had [Dan] over for dinner. Despites its abbreviated length, February’s always struck me as an especially bleak month, at least in these parts. I know it’s not the darkest month, and I know it’s not the coldest or the snowiest month, but February is gray in a way I can’t explain. In February, all the big, happy holidays are gone, and it’s weeks and weeks—months, even—until Easter and spring. I suppose that’s why whoever decides these things stuck Valentine’s Day smack dab I the middle of the month, to help lighten its load. To be honest, though, even when I had a reason to celebrate the fourteenth, I still thought of the second month as a bleak time. I think this was part of the reason I invited Dan to join me in a meal, and why, when I opened the door that Saturday night and saw him standing there, ushaven and obviously unshowered, wearing an old track suit reeking of mothballs and mildew, I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been, especially considering that, when I’d seen him on Friday, he’d been his usual tidy self. (26)
Regarding the psychological/natural atmosphere established in the first six sentences of this passage, let’s remember how Poe evokes the same feeling in “The Raven”: “Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; / And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.” Obviously, prose doesn’t need to be this compressed, but weird fiction, focused upon the singular sensation its genre promises, weakens rapidly when extraneous signifiers are introduced. Poe knows that we know what December’s like, whereas Langan seems to think his readers are not familiar with February’s bleakness. The extension of sympathy produced by such utterances generates a static of unnecessary information. It’s “extraneous” because the narrator is being all too rational, affirming a shared experience, rather than undermining it. The narrative voice, despite being positioned as a melancholic teller of tales, possesses no obsession. To put it another way, the loss is missing. The neurotic compulsions promised by the plot do not find expression in the narrative voice. For example, in a story told by a fisherman there is remarkably little mention of lures and reels, bait and casting and all the other fishing stuff I know little about but expect when reading such a tale. By my very rough estimate, there are fewer direct references to fishing in these 260 pages than in Hemingway’s, “The Big Two-Hearted River,” a subtly uncanny fishing tale that comes in at about 12 pages. We are told that fishing is a lifeline, but it’s not treated as such. These (absent) references would potentially contribute to the narrator’s weirdness in a way that explanations of Valentine’s Day do not. (By contrast, Valentine’s Day plays a vital role in the weirdness evoked by Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock: see my post below.)
Fortunately, The Fisherman weaves a much denser web of weird conceits than those so far established. Here again we might observe various mechanism for producing weird effects, in themselves “formulaic,” which Langan deploys. The next conceit the novel initiates involves fabulation and framing: tales within tales. Abe and Dan hear about a special fishing spot in upstate New York named “Dutchman’s Creek.” On their way to check it out, they stop at “Herman’s Diner on Route 28, just west of Wiltwyck.” In the diner, under a weird painting (“This painting was so old, so begrimed with the smoke of a thousand omelets and hamburgers, that only by diligent and careful study could you begin to develop an idea of its subject. The canvas was such a mess of masses of shades and shadows that I half-suspected it was some kind of giant Rorschach Test. “(41)), Herman tells Abe and Dan a story which occupies the next 147 pages: more than half the entire novel. As we enter this frame, the narrator explains that after surviving the events of the novel, “I wanted to copy down everything I could recall of what Howard had said, get all of it exactly right.” He writes for four days straight, getting all the details correct: “I understood that the story had passed to me, that somehow, Howard had tucked it inside me.” Not only that, but he discovers, in the act of writing, “details . . . Howard hadn’t included. . . And yet, at the same time, every last detail I wrote down seemed familiar. I had the maddening sense that, even though Howard hadn’t related anything like the complete story to us, I had carried it with me out of the diner.” (46)
This framing device has the potential to initiate a secondary system of weird referents. We can doubt the story that Herman tells, and we can doubt the narrator’s retelling. As touched upon in previous posts, the secondary or tertiary narrative frame is an age-old convention in weird fiction, with roots in 1001 Arabian Nights and The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, for example. As Poe recognizes in the introduction to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the “fictional” frame may in certain instances be used to impart realism at the same time. Properly handled, the truth can be stranger than fiction, at least within fiction.
Langan immediately multiples the narrative frames. In Abe’s transcription, Howard begins by explaining that his story comes from Reverend Mapple, “minister at the Lutheran Church in Woodstock and what you’d call a local history buff.” (49) The minister’s story is a retelling (supplemented by his own researches) of an account of life on the banks of “Deutschman’s Creek” (as it was known in the 1910s) told him by Lottie Schmidt, a German immigrant whose father worked on the construction of an enormous reservoir built in the Catskills. These conceits—the amateur researcher whose observations resonate with the testimony of an unreliable narrator—are also common mechanisms for producing weird effects: variations on this formula were particularly favored by weird modernists, such as M. R. James, Machen, and Lovecraft. Frazier’s The Golden Bough is the obvious inspiration for this “antiquarian” weird tale, in which an increasingly obsessed / horrified narrator pieces together a glimpse of the impossible thing from folklore, second/third party testimony, and direct observations of archaic rituals.
Unfortunately, The Fisherman doesn’t use these devices in a manner that generates weird effects. The problem of “extraneous” information generated by the rational / sympathetic narrator in part one is reproduced on a larger scale in the novel’s second part—precisely because of the numerous supplements that are allowed. Lottie’s tale is supplemented by Rev. Mapple, whose story is supplemented by Howard, whose story is supplemented by the narrator’s own mysteriously “familiar” yet additional details. I suspect that Langan’s intent was to create the degree of detail associated with naturalism or psychological realism, thus allowing readers to become absorbed in the immediate exigencies of the weird events that Lottie witnesses, but this turns out to be a poor choice. Each narrator’s sympathetic supplement is used to generate transparency, rather than the inherent artifices of a palimpsest. For example, Howard’s story begins:
Anyway, as far as the record shows, the Indians left [the town that would become Dutchman’s Creek] alone. And for a long time, until the eighteen-forties, not much of interest happened there. The other towns in the Esopus valley grew up around it. The hemlock tanneries were established and became a thriving concern—that was the big business here, the tanneries. Then, one summer’s day, this man comes riding out of the west, along the turnpike. He isn’t much to look at. Even for the time, he’s a little fellow, with black, stringy hair—kind of greasy—and a black, stringy beard that hangs down from his chin like a cheap disguise. […] This man comes riding on a one-horse cart, and there isn’t much remarkable about either horse—a brown nag that wearing the same thick coat of dust as the man’s clothes—or the cart. Oh, except for the cart’s wheels: apparently, their rims are twice as thick as they need to be, and covered in pictures. Actually, this is a little unclear. Some folks who see the man making his slow way along the turnpike say that the wheels are wrapped around with symbols like hieroglyphs, you know? While others declare that the wheels are decorated with pictures that look like writing but aren’t… (54)
Such passages—the story within the story is composed of many—fail to feel weird because, again, they lack an account of loss—in this case, the loss of information ordinarily generated by the researcher’s fetish for accuracy. All the narrative frames painstakingly established a few pages before are abandoned. To which narrator are we to ascribe evaluations such as “not much of interest happened,” “kind of greasy” “making his slow way along the turnpike,” “rims twice as think as they need be,” and so forth? Who exactly are the “folks” who declare the symbols hieroglyphic in the face of “others” who say they only look like hieroglyphs, but are actually illustrations? Where did this debate take place, anyway? Was there a meeting in the town square? Does it evolve from competing versions of a local legend? Or have these details been added by Mapple, Howard, or Abe? As with the narrative voice, the lack of lack produces an abundance of stability that dispels the weirdness evoked at the level of plot. The stranger comes to town, odd things are seen at a certain old house; in later years the abandoned house, which must be razed before the reservoir can be built, becomes a kind of impossible place—ultimately [spoiler alert!] a portal through which a magic fisherman seeks to land an unholy cosmic leviathan. But I found it difficult to care because nearly all the realist details Langan’s narrator(s) reconstruct(s) fail to contribute to the sensation he promises. There are a few moments of weirdness, but finding them felt much like my few attempts at fishing: a lot of waiting around between bites.
A moment near the climax of the story Howard tells in the diner crystalizes this problem of positive narration. Within Howard’s story, the entrance into the magician’s house is focalized on Lottie’s future husband, Jacob. We are told that “it will be from Jacob Schmidt that Lottie will learn the events of that afternoon and evening; although it will take her the better part of two decades to hear all of it. Neither her father nor her mother nor Italo will say anything about what happens … up at the Dort house.” (120) The obscurity of the information, passed from Jacob to Lottie to Mapple to Howard to Abe to us, is emphasized, but not enacted in the narrative. Instead we get:
Jacob is prepared for the interior of the house to be dark. He isn’t prepared for it to be full of trees, evergreens, from the feel of their branches. . . . A dim light whose source Jacob cannot locate renders the trees visible. The evergreens extend far back into the house. . . . Overhead the trees are so high ad so dense he can’t see the roof. Nor is the floor visible, though it feels more like dirt, rather than wood or stone, underfoot. Jacob supposes it makes sense. If you wanted to fill your house with a forest, you would need soil to plant it in.
My God, he thinks, I’m reasoning like a crazy person. (141)
The thing is, he’s not. He’s being quite reasonable, especially in his self-awareness. The lack of unreason is magnified by the prose style; this scene includes several sentences that I removed because they convey nothing necessary to the effect. The old mansion turns out to be a façade: the door leads not to a man-made interior, but to an otherworldly landscape—an ocean where the leviathan is being hauled ashore over centuries. Within the generic formula, it’s a wonderful idea. It combines weird tropes (the eeriness of an abandoned dwelling, the portal to a dream world) in an original way. And, unlike Lovecraft Country, discussed in the previous post, we are presented with a thickly-textured world. But, oddly enough, this itself is the problem. We are given far too much information in far too rational a light. We know exactly what Jacob thinks and feels, and the account is rendered in a logical, coherent manner. Each sentence bears the weight of too much non-sensational signification. Where else would one expect to feel a floor, save “underfoot”? This precision drags the cosmic horror we are meant to encounter too much into the light.
The third act begins when Abe and Dan leave the diner. Abe feels “disjointed” by Howard’s story, which has apparently taken only a few hours to tell, despite the many hours it took to read. Dan seems nonplussed. When Abe asks for his reaction, he says “I think if that shaggy-dog story had been any hairier, . . . it would have been a carpet.” (199) Does he really think so? Or does he discount Howard’s story in order to persuade Abe to visit the fishing spot, despite this lengthy warning? They go, of course—initiating an ascent into the mountains which is also a decent into the fantastic. They encounter strange fish (again rendered in reasonable, non-horrified prose: “The fish’s face, as I’ve said, was rounded, its eyes a pair of large, forward facing sockets. No doubt, its resemblance to a human skull had factored into my initial shock at its appearance.” (210)) and the ghost of their dead wives and children. The leviathan is encountered for a second time. However, because we’ve already encountered it in Lottie’s story–despite the numerous conceits meant to give us indirect evidence–the narrator’s encounter with the creature is superfluous. He wakes up the hospital and wonders how much of it was a dream.
This critique is not meant to be mean-spirited. My goal has been to isolate a quality of the prose that separates weirdness as sensation from weirdness as generic formula. The novel presents a good case study for the effects of style because the tropes it deploys are so promising. The melancholic narrator, fisherman’s fable, romantic setting, story within the story, and impossible thing are conceived of with originality and knit into a serviceable plot. Yet the reference to Aickman remains misguided. Readers familiar with his stories—”Ringing the Changes,” “The Hospice,” “Residents Only,” “Hand in Glove,” “No Time is Passing”—will recognize the problem. While Aickman evokes the strangeness of mundane life, surrounding his characters with circumstances that are about 90% ordinary, his diction and syntax renders the mundane in a consistently odd light. In an Aickman story the natural world is rendered with a poetic intensity that makes every word count, so much so that we frequently encounter utterances that are themselves nearly indecipherable because they resonate on so many levels we don’t know how to attribute them.
The issues raised here around psychological realism, the novel’s position in the literary field, and the production of weird effects also inform the next post in this series, on Paul LaFarge’s The Night Ocean.
matthiasregan.org 