in my last post i mentioned having read two novels recently that featured similar plot elements and other things and wrote about one of them, which was jesse ball’s samedi the deafness, and mentioned i would write about the other, gary indiana’s the shanghai gesture, next time. now it’s next time and i will write about the shanghai gesture, but first full disclosure:
the shanghai gesture was published by two dollar radio and i submitted work to them a while back. i needed to mention this because my response to the novel was generally positive. of course, i submitted work to the publisher because they publish work that i respond to positively. this is the kind of weird loop that only small press fiction writers can get themselves into (because no one would question if a writer from one of the conglomerates were to review a book by another writer from the same conglomerate, even in one of the big venues — because the work is so important that it simply must be discussed by the best — and because no one cares what poets do). so now that my conscience is clear –
i ain't got my baby and i'm feeling wrong
my brother came into this coffee shop where i hang out. i was reading the shanghai gesture. when i put it down to talk to him, he picked it up, turned it over, read the blurb on the back that said it “… reads as though Cormac McCarthy had rewritten Austin Powers,” and told me that it sounded fucking terrible. i told him to read a random passage from the book; he read for a minute and said the book sounded great.
i mention that not to shame the blurber (though it is pretty tone deaf) but to point out how difficult this book is to contextualize. in my last post i mentioned that indiana used old-timey language. cormac mccarthy also uses (or is known to use) old-timey language. indiana and mccarthy use two very different old-timey languages.
when most of us talk about cormac mccarthy’s style, we mean his style in blood meridian (in the books leading up to blood meridian, the debt to faulkner is near insurmountable, as good as the ones i’ve read can be; the books after tend to be stylistically dilute versions of blood meridian, though at least one of them is good) (thus sayeth me). blood meridian fuses the rhetoric of the king james bible with the tradition of the southern gothic (there’s plenty of overlap there, and also with faulkner) with the literature of the west and a good helping of melville.
i don’t see much trace of any of this in the shanghai gesture. here is the second sentence of the book:
Reports of Petrie in languorous flight through the velvet-shrouded parlors of his monstrous Victorian folly, of static levitation, even tales of Petrie clinging spiderlike to the plaster grape-and-putti moldings that lined the ornate ceilings of those musty rooms, suffocated by curio cabinets and incunabula, were rife not only in the hushed confabulations of Those That Know, but a topic of idle gossip among the raucous sailors, coney-catchers, fishwives, and floozies who trolled Gin Lane and its tributary alleys at Land’s End.
mccarthy would have used the word “and” at least twice as many times in a sentence of that length. but both the language and structure of the sentence suggest a different era and different influences, anyway. first, it’s long and fairly formal. it piles on adjectives in a way that most sentences these days don’t, and the diction is high, even if the subject matter is not so. it’s full of britishisms (“coney-catchers” etc) and archaic word choices (“incunabula” where book might have worked) and the references that help establish setting (“gin lane” and “land’s end”) point to the old world.
the gin lane example doesn’t just establish setting. i think it’s also suggesting a time period (though the use of the word “victorian” in the first clause shows that indiana is just referencing the period, not setting the book then), an aesthetic orientation for the text, because gin lane is a fairly well-known print by the satirist william hogarth. hogarth, a visual artist, was contemporary or roughly contemporary with writers like henry fielding, tobias smollett, laurence sterne, and alexander pope. i guess what i’m saying is, i came to the conclusion pretty quickly that gary indiana was updating 18th century satire for the 21st century.
and the fact is, he does a great job of it. i should actually end that sentence with “as long as you weren’t hoping for suspense.”
remember how i said that this book, like ball’s, hinged on a plot to destroy the world? well, it only hinges on that plot as far as indiana needs it as a skeleton for his riffing. when he doesn’t need it any more, he just makes it disappear altogether (and almost literally).
this didn’t bother me at all. in fact, i appreciated it. the riffing is the point, and in combining an old mode of satire with new(ish) things to satirize — fu manchu mysteries, globalization, the “war on terror,” technophilia — indiana has made something worthy of the writers mentioned above (as well as jonathan swift, whose meticulous, disgusted depictions of unpleasant bodily functions may even be one-upped here).
still, it’s maybe unfair to writers who would attempt something like what indiana has attempted that we tend to call every extended piece of made-up prose a novel, because that is the only definition by which the shanghai gesture is a novel, and, while after reading the first few pages of this book, i didn’t expect or want it to fulfill any of the writer’s workshop notions of the novel — ie, i didn’t want more of the mother (do they still use that one in workshops?) — i would have liked to see the scenario indiana set up play itself out.
instead, we seem, at the end, just as the world is about to be destroyed, to end up in a scene from a classic noir called the shanghai gesture, which i haven’t seen, so i can’t give a great evaluation of the success of the move. i could imagine the strawman workshop i invented above using the word metafiction here (WHICH DOESN”T APPLY AT ALL), but that’s not my worry. my worry is that someone who has written a truly vicious, arguably misanthropic (in a way we need) book might expect to sway me with a slightly corny mysticism as a way of putting a bow on it. i understand the idea that the plot to blow up the world is a red herring (with obvious political referents), but would it have been more effective to let the plot dismantle itself?
i used to ask that same question of my students after teaching nabokov’s bend sinister.
so whaddya say two dollar radio? you want to do a book together?