Any decent literary critic can thump on, and sound, ordinary monster fictions. Ghosts haunt houses recently occupied by new couples who haven’t worked out the most basic problems of intimacy. Werewolves, on the other hand, are caused (like zits) by puberty. Wherever somebody is overly—that is, erotically—attracted to knowledge, vampires come sprouting up like mushrooms. Frankenstein—truly horrific, a morality tale with no moral—was the byproduct of several ideologies tripping over each other in a single writer’s brain. Nobody has ever failed to understand Frankenstein in part, and nobody will ever understand it as a whole. We should remember that it was assembled from the disinterred remains of a dozen philosophers, then subjected to extreme intellectual currents. (A recent survey of English teachers, asked about Mary Shelley’s novel, identified its primary focus as “the American Dream.”)
When I get called in to solve a monster problem, something’s gone haywire. A house—which, I should note, would’ve been a nice living space for ghosts—instead grows some kind of phantom limb extending into hyperspace, inspiring Mark Z. Danielewski to write House of Leaves. (“Call in Kugelmass,” they say. “He’ll know what to do.”) In Snow Crash, a computer virus that doubles as a contagious lobotomy emerges (somehow) from the dim, forgotten lands of Mesopotamian linguistics. Call in Kugelmass! In 1Q84, written by Haruki Murakami, tiny gremlins go around incubating alternate realities in pearly space cocoons. The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall, is about a guy who’s hunted by a “conceptual shark” made completely out of memes. Call in Kugelmass, they said, as usual. So here I am, but I’ve got nothing much to offer except some accurate bad news.
You see, monsters can be solved. They hate being analyzed. The second I show up, and start describing the Freudian concept of erotic transference, most vampires run willingly into the brilliant path of dawn. I’ve sat down with a whole family of werewolves, and said to them, point-blank, “It’s not what you do on the full moon that worries me. It’s how you’re living the entire rest of your lives.” My critics point out that I once signed a petition asking for our government to give zombies a small number of wisely-chosen rights.
But if your problem’s sexual, and it’s also incredibly boring, then I can’t help you. That’s what kills me about these spooky, eight-dimensional, physically bulky works of postmodern literature. There’s a monster at the end of [every] such book, and that monster is… people who are tired of making love, or two nice kids who can’t bring themselves to shack up, or some awkward British geezer who thinks his girlfriend is extremely “fit” but has a lousy “personality.” Add, to this, the sheer number of cases (in these same texts) where not having sex—at some awkward moment, pivotal only for the author—is somehow equivalent to Sir Gawain recovering the Holy Grail, or Joan of Arc saving France, and what you’ve created is a stupidity-induced migraine I probably won’t shake for a week.
In House of Leaves, for instance, the basic problem is not the house, which is never scary at any point, any more than reading Immanuel Kant on spatial “extensibility” would be frightening to a person with normal blood pressure. The basic problem is that the people living in the House of Leaves, Karen and Will Navidson, are unhappily married. Will disappears into his work, and since his work is a filming a really long, monotonous tunnel, he disappears into it. His near-death story, brought to national prominence by his insanely boring home videos, turns into a cult obsession that drives other people crazy, apparently because none of them are even remotely capable of shrugging, and stating, after five minutes’ research, “What a dreary marriage.”
Instead, they all go crazy trying to understand the house, what the house was expanding for, what the house was trying to say by getting larger, and so forth. They might just as well try reading the prose of Andy Warhol without a knowledge of amphetamines. Given all the fictional academics that Danielewski entangles in the hunt for Planet Earth’s least interesting wormhole, slash marital stalemate, the book should have really been called House of Leaves of Absence.
But wait! I forgot to tell you about the kids who don’t have sex! So there’s this other guy, named Johnny, who narrates certain portions of the book, at a lousy angle, in a pretentious font. He’s got it bad for this stripper named Thumper, who’s named after a rabbit featured in the Disney film Bambi. Thumper and Johnny get it on even less than Will and Karen Navidson. Instead, Johnny descends into psychosis, and “the line between reality and fantasy” begins to blur. (Which is all that particular line ever does, am I right?) One explanation for this is that the house is somehow driving Johnny mad. Another explanation, which I find oddly compelling, is that Thumper’s a stripper, she’s named after a cartoon rabbit, and she’s working in the kind of place that makes a profit by blurring fantasy and reality. Nervous breakdown: fully explained. Mutant hyperreal house: not required.
At this point, I could go after Snow Crash, which is marred by unnecessary, unconvincing, icky episodes of statutory rape. I could complain about 1Q84, where a fairly blatant rape—both statutory and nonconsensual—gets embalmed in a thick layer of gee-whiz mysticism by an indifferent Murakami. But my sights are currently set on The Raw Shark Texts, if only because Steven Hall is guilty of creating the dumbest clump of monsters since The Matrix Reloaded hit theaters nationwide. His “conceptual” sharks and remoras are, like Danielewski’s House With Extra Storage Space, stunningly unfrightening. Even worse, they don’t “slither into existence” because language is so infinitely striated, so saturated with bits. They’re the cleverly disguised shadows of Eric Sanderson’s ex-girlfriend, Clio, who was a real piece of work. Clio, as the novel makes clear, is an unmitigated pain: “Clio laughs… and says I sound like a sex pest in denial… She had a disapproving look.”
I’ll spare you the Hitler jokes that follow this charming little aside; in a strangely appropriate turn, however, Eric opts for a strategy of appeasement:
…“[I’ll] buy you lots of drinks so you don’t get the next ferry off the island and abandon me for being the amoral worm that I am?”
“And?”
“What?” I said.
“And?”
“And what?”
“You’re not funny.”
Clio’s not wrong at any point here, but that doesn’t make her a joy to be around. And then there’s her bizarre “Elegy for a Half-Remembered Hospital”:
“There’s, like, a cheerful united outlook, you know, in the staff. They’ll do anything for you. You can have a TV by your bed, videos whatever. Everyone’s so upbeat. Eric, it’s fucking awful.”
“Hon, you’ll never have to go back. I promise.”
“You can’t promise that.”
Now here’s where the novel stops being even potentially weird and is just annoyingly dishonest. When you read that passage, about the hospital, just now, you said to yourself: Oh, she’s mentally ill. That’s the only reason someone would make a big deal about in-bed TV; it’s also the only reason any boyfriend would ever say, ever, “You’ll never have to go back.”
Here’s one other little exchange for your consideration. It’s from the same scene:
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
“Clio, you’re not crazy at all. I’m crazy, remember. You’re—well, special maybe, but not crazy.”
Which is how you speak to someone who has, at the very least, Bipolar Disorder. (Clio also obliges us with a very Tender is the Night-like bout of sudden, crazy-lady frigidity.) But Sanderson is correct. Clio has… cancer! It’s temporarily in remission. The important update, regardless, is this: she’s perfectly sane, and she always has been. Moreover, Hall knows Clio seemed kind of bitchy in Big Dialogue Scene 1, so in Big Dialogue Scene 2, she pops up instead on the visible sainthood spectrum, somewhere between Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa.
Hall writes, “Clio’s deep honest kindness—you could call it a mothering streak even—is something most of our friends probably wouldn’t even guess at.” Eric, I bet they wouldn’t! Because, based on her character as written, a claim like that makes no goddamn sense at all! I mean, she comes off as a certain kind of maternal, I suppose—but not in the lovely way that Sanderson, her resentful idiotic boyfriend, means the word. She’s the young, topless version of Tony Soprano’s old lady.
All of this frantic re-upholstering of Clio, and the worrying about Clio’s cancer—and Hall generally making her disappearance seem like Princess Diana is about a get new drinking buddy in Heaven—is side-by-side with the un-spooky appearance of this metaphysical thing, with phenomenological teeth, and blah blah blah, that’s trying to eat poor Eric Sanderson up by his synapses. Which is so sad, because if he could only regain his mind, he’d realize that he does love Clio, and if she does still have her Facebook profile going, then they ought to arrange meeting up—for some catch-up cocktails, if nothing else.
But he can’t do anything to recapture Clio, who isn’t worth it, because of that nonexistent poststructuralist moiré fin-job that’s hunting him. You know the one. Easy shark to find. Its goddamn moiré dorsal fin is probably sticking out of Sanderson’s unread copy of Heidegger like a quirky vintage bookmark.
Perhaps you’re thinking that I’m going to mention Freud and condemn all of these works on the grounds that they’re written by a bunch of unredeemed sexual maniacs. The thought certainly crossed my mind. But I think what’s happening here isn’t as tidy, or as easy to dissect, as a bunch of overgrown children playing clever word games to camouflage their forays into poking at real, mutual, adult sexuality with some tremulous borrowed stick. Honestly, they treat sex exactly like they treat language games: as if both are something you can stir into your art, for flavor and effect, like you do pecans or chocolate chips. Their metaphysics are unconvincing. Their sexcapades are like peepshows that make you ask, “Am I, in fact, gonna insert even one more lousy coin?” Their “monsters”—their monsters wouldn’t turn a grad student pale. It’s so spectacularly immature, from start to finish, that it leaves one stranded—but stranded, I’ll admit, on a rather blessed isle.
Just consider what the failure of every whizbang postmodern novel like this means. It means that some kinds of fear have to grow, steep, ferment, in a process that takes slow, almost imperceptible time. It means you have to grow through, and then beyond, your first love affair. Otherwise you can’t dramatize it with radiance or awe. It means words aren’t sitting there, like heaps of Smaug-curated gold, waiting to be scooped up and flung around by the latest talented nitwit. The crisis of meaning, the strangeness in a name, the soundless note of unutterable grief: they’re, all of them, long awaited and hard-won when you try them on for art. To hell with theory-laden parlor tricks. A decent novel is like some hoped-for seedling, winging greenly upwards from its furrowed nest of earth. What’s unfolding in that instant is the patient fruit of years.
Unless you’re Mary Shelley. She wrote Frankenstein at the age of 18. She cheated on the hourglass that gives a sifted weight to words. That creature of hers doesn’t merely live and breathe like we do. Leave that to lesser talents; they’re content to conjure monsters. Shelley makes us the creatures of her genius, ragged from a bootless chase. Shelley takes us in, at a glance, and then disappears—our faces red and solemn from the true, refining fire that her stallions bear away.