it’s been a few months since i read matthew sharpe’s most recent novel, you were wrong, and i didn’t write about it after i read it because i was still thinking about it. i’m still thinking about it. i’ve probably thought about it more than any book i’ve read since bolano first blew my mind way back in 2008. but those are two very different thought processes. 2666 came with piles of hype and made them pretty much irrelevant, whereas you were wrong is tied in with hype in a way that makes the text and the phenomenon inextricable for me.
and of course we’re talking about entirely different scales of hype. like i said, 2666 had piles of it. you were wrong had almost none. and it almost seems like this was part of matthew sharpe’s design.
sharpe had a relative hit in 2003 or so with a book called the sleeping father. it was published by soft skull but was somehow chosen for the today show book club. i didn’t read it because the description didn’t sound all that interesting to me, and i hadn’t joined the today show book club.
anyway, sharpe could have followed that up with something that might have generated more hype, but instead he published jamestown, which i did pick up, maybe for the cover. i don’t want to get into an analysis, or even a description, of it here, but it was biggish and weird and uneven and brilliant — one of my favorite books of the decade, though not the kind of thing that could ever get you on the cover of time magazine or even the stranger. still, it had a kind of gravitas to it, in its size and subject matter (a post-apocalyptic retelling of american colonization that had obvious parallels with current events).
this is one of the reasons why you were wrong is such a mind-blower — sharpe gets some retail and critical success, jumps to a larger (though still independent) press (bloomsbury), and then publishes a strange, slim novel (about a high school math teacher on long island who, according to his mother’s dying wish, has to live with his obnoxious stepfather in order to inherit his boyhood home) that straddles a line between surrealism and naturalism, allegory and slapstick nonsense.
for the record, i liked it. i like it, but i think it’s a mess. but the mess is clearly part of the point, and this is where the tie-in with the phenomenon gets too tangled to unweave.
see, i read all of the reviews of it i could find, and most of them seemed mixed, and even the positive ones seemed a little mixed up. i was at jury duty when i finally started reading it, and at first it had me mixed up too.
sharpe is a really sophisticated prose stylist, but every now and then, the prose would break form, go limp, clunky, or purple in ways that just didn’t make sense to me. i started to get suspicious during a trippy party scene where the line “someone had blundered” repeated for no reason i could see. a few pages later i came to this:
… Jouncing along above the soft and pitted beachfront road, Karl gazed up at the treetops and the clouds. A cloudy day. Whom did he love best, his mom, his dad, his sis, his bro? He had no mom, no dad, no sis, no bro. His friends? He hadn’t heard the word. His home? He’d never been home. Money? He hated it as he hated God. What, then, did he love? He loved the clouds … the passing clouds … up there … up there …
now i don’t have the space here to contextualize the passage for you or give you a plot summary, and anyway that would be beside the point, because the point is that there is no more than ambient or extratextual context to the passage. in context we already know that Karl is on a beachfront road, and the first page of the novel tells us that he has no family other than a mean stepdad.
okay, the thing is that, after the first sentence, this passage is a pretty faithful paraphrasing of an entire baudelaire prose poem.
when i realized that, i remembered that “someone had blundered” was a line from tennyson’s “charge of the light brigade,” which we all read in high school, or at least heard geoffrey quote on the fresh prince of bel air. and it turns out there are others. “He had drunk of potent wines last night, and perhaps had found himself for an hour among the valiant of voluptuousness,” comes from cp cavafy. i’ve never read cp cavafy, but by the time i came across the line i was on to sharpe and went and looked it up.
like i said, i’m still thinking about what sharpe meant to do here, and i have my theories, but again that’s not the point. the point is that a phrase like “the valiant of voluptuousness” does not really match the prose in the rest of the book and is not something that a contemporary author would write, and so you take it as a kind of wink.
or you don’t. maybe you don’t even notice it.
original gangsta
none of the reviews i read seemed to notice it was happening. some even attributed the borrowed lines to sharpe himself as examples of his accomplishments as a stylist. this kind of intertextuality is a complicated issue, and maybe not appropriate for the kind of crap reviews you usually find in most papers and websites, so i’m not even questioning the reviewers themselves.
i think who i’m questioning here is myself. what i’ve found in you were wrong is one of the things that got me liking books — the chance to keep up a conversation with people you can’t actually converse with and to add to their accomplishments. i personally think that aspect of reading and writing is not only fun (it is, for me), but also helps develop ways of thinking that can help you get through life.
but if zero other living people are participating in that conversation, it risks being airless or masturbatory.
matthew sharpe is still alive, and i look forward to reading what he does next. maybe i’ll even check out his first three books.
very well then.
Christian, thanks for noticing not only that I’m alive, but that I like to quote and paraphrase. I think of it as collaging in elements of varying colors and consistencies (as one dog says to another in a Cheech and Chong bit, “I like how you put the corn in there for texture”), sometimes to create abrupt discontinuities, which you picked up on, and other times to make less noticeable gradations. The quotations do tend to be thematically if not tonally adjacent to what’s going on in the book, as for example “someone had blundered” / You Were Wrong. And by the bye, I came to “someone had blundered” via Virginia Woolf, who drops it, mysterious and unattributed, into To the Lighthouse. So quoting is also a way of, as you say, being in conversation with authors by whom I have been consoled and enlivened.
And, I’m afraid, I can’t not quote. I — we, I believe — are hard-wired to do so, or, as R. W. Emerson begins his essay “Quotation and Originality”: “Whoever looks at the insect world, at flies, aphides, gnats, and innumerable parasites, and even at the infant mammals, must have remarked the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes the main business of their life.”
As for the trajectory of my novels and publishers, I hope you don’t mind my saying that it feels a bit more intuitive and random to me than the way I see you depicting it.
Thanks for your thoughtful words about my book.
Matthew Sharpe