I haven’t had much time with it yet but, after the first twenty pages, I can safely say it is a pretty incredible read.  If the mishaps of Slutty Teenage Hobo Junkie Vampires aren’t enough of a lure, then I don’t know what is.  But really it’s her language, words that are subtle, revelatory and ensnaring and that I can’t look away from.

It’s the perfect book to read after you’ve been uprooted to an industrial crossroads of a big, battered city, and are living in a tumbledown garret room with a view of a lumberyard, a room with walls that look vaguely like they belong in a back-alley Bangkok hostel — all of which has happened to me and happily so might I add.

You should buy it from Two Dollar Radio. I also suspect that someone here at The Rumpus will be doing a full review of it in the near future.

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But then writers blurb their friends, right? It’s just the right thing to do, so maybe it doesn’t say that much about the book.  Yet I’m always looking to see what writers have praised what books and why. It’s borderline compulsive.

(Jonathan Lethem, I’ve decided, has probably blurbed the most books of any living writer.  And generally I think he is spot-on.)

But when a writer not only blurbs the book, but also writes a detailed and praise-worthy introduction to it and excerpts two of its chapters in his well-respected literary magazine, Black Clock, then it’s a safe bet that the writer really really really likes the book, so much so that the book he is praising, you can safely assume, is a true piece of art. That’s exactly what Steve Erickson did for the novel The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich, forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio.

Now, I’ve already ordered the book — in fact I bought the full Year 4 book subscription which seems like an easy win to me — based simply on the fact that Erickson is a terrific writer in a stupefying genre all his own and his words are not to be taken lightly. It’s also every writer’s dream to be published in the strange, boundary-pushing journal he edits, Black Clock.

Needless to say I’m looking forward to reading The Orange Eats Creeps — not only because of Erickson’s elegiac praise but also because the book is inspired by great rock bands of the Pacific Northwest, like the incredible Dead Moon, or  at least that’s what I read somewhere.

In the future though, instead of just mere blurbs, I’m going to find out what books my favorite authors have written the introductions to and then greedily hunt those books down.

Is this one more way I rationalize a textophiliac madness that makes it hard for me even to leave the house without a satchel sagging and grimacing with too many unread books?

Do I really need to bring the Dictionary of Obscure Etymology with me to the liquor store?

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It isn’t lyrical, it isn’t fun, it isn’t a spectacle, it doesn’t beg for your attention—Nog honestly considers the absurdity and sadness of everyday life.

It’s enough to put most people off: A self-described cult classic and symbol of the 1960s counterculture, full of echoes from Beckett, shamelessly horny, periodically misogynistic, and set in a strange man’s mind—Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Nog is no airport novel.

Republished this year by the admirable independents at Two Dollar Radio, Nog has many of the usual features of the dreaded Experimental Fiction. Nog contains multitudes, it jumps in time and space, is stylistically unusual, insists on mixing fantasy and reality, and is utterly unsentimental. It also got a good review from Thomas Pynchon.

But in what sense is all this experimental? Pynchon’s much-quoted announcement that with Nog “the Novel of Bullshit is dead” gives the misleading impression that Nog is somehow sui generis, as though Wurlitzer came out of nowhere, as though his book singlehandedly changed the way we write. Nog, of course, did no such thing; and despite reviewers’ claims that this is a “singular” book, there is no page of Nog in which one isn’t reminded of the voices of Samuel Beckett’s Watt and Murphy. Far from coming out of nowhere, Nog is very much of the tradition—even the genre—of post-war avant-garde aesthetics.

Pynchon is right, though: It is surely not a bullshit novel. The multi-voiced narrator, whose name may or may not be Nog, completely rejects middle-class society and its values; Wurlitzer’s exploration of his unsound mind is careful and extensive. Early on, Nog (as we may as well call him) is invited by his neighbors to a party. Their nickname for him is “Dr Angst.” It’s raining, and he is soaked through by the time he arrives, so the host leads him away to dry off. Left unsupervised, Nog strips down before a random dinner guest and throws all the household medication into the bathtub before hopping into bed for a snooze. Later, tormented by the usual dinner-party insincerities—“What do you do?” “Having fun?”—he walks back into the storm to help an old maniac arrange driftwood and junk against the rising ocean.

Nog’s great dream is to control the content of his mind; and his tragedy is that “Memories crouch inside me, ready to spring.” Like Beckett’s Watt, he has a habit of listing objects in the world, in order to simplify and control it. But these simple, often childish descriptions are poor barriers against the persistent interruptions of other times, other places, other desires, and other voices. The interruptions are the usual interruptions of everyday life—but Nog wants nothing of everyday life. He wants to sit in a room and slowly construct his world: “If only nothing would grow, nothing change, nothing take hold and join where things take hold and join.”

Rudolph Wurlitzer

Because of this, Nog is a novel full of “I” sentences, simple statements of intent and feeling. But in the end, there is no “I” to Nog. He has no control. He can’t even manage Beckett’s great existential decision: “I am not thinking about going on and not going on,” he says. Nog’s voices and thoughts wander away from their source, refusing to come together and make sense. There’s nothing certain to Nog, nothing solid, no definite structures, no identity.

Wurlitzer’s aim, one can safely assume, is to undermine the great myths of rational, self-sufficient, economic Man, and to expose the suffering such myths produce. But what about rational, self-sufficient Woman? The novel begins with Nog enjoying the “thin ankles” of a girl walking on the beach, “her large breasts under her faded blue tee-shirt, the quick way she bent down, her firm legs…” Oh boy. As with Pynchon, Wurlitzer has a habit of using female characters to make theoretical points about male desire and the limits of male rationality. So, we have Meredith, the principle female character, who is always fucking, or naked, or getting naked on film. “I like it when someone just takes me,” another female character confesses. There’s no female character who isn’t described as attractive, whose ankles don’t inspire the narrator’s lust, who doesn’t end up fucking, or sucking, or talking about fucking and sucking.

These fantasies, like the fantasies of Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop, with their obvious debts to popular psychoanalysis, seem to me more out-of-date than misogynistic (note also the continual references to caves and slits and cupboards). For all its apparent counter-cultural chops, the core of Nog isn’t the endless fucking, the pill-popping, the communal living, or road-tripping. All this problematic plotting seems incidental to the simple and terrible drama of a man trying to live in his own mind.

Like Gravity’s Rainbow, Wurlitzer’s novel might be read for its place within the mythology of the American counter-culture, for its generic avant-gardisms; but that’s not why Nog is worth reading. It isn’t lyrical, it isn’t fun, it isn’t a spectacle, it doesn’t beg for your attention. Instead, it honestly considers the absurdity and sadness of everyday life: “There’s an emptiness, but then there’s always an emptiness.” Nog is a subtle and nomadic book, a great counterforce to the loud, sentimental, novels of bullshit that take up so much space in today’s literary landscape.

Still, like many of the great novels of its era—novels which explicitly confront or challenge hegemonic power and the limits of experience—Nog is spectacularly unable to imagine the lives of women outside of the porno-norms enforced by the heterosexual male voyeur.

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by Joshua Mohr

Lately people have been asking me why I decided to publish my novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, with a small press. Instinctively, my gut wants to lie, stammer some kind of self-justification: “Well, uh, I felt that a boutique house (note that I didn’t say “small press”) would give me more attention (i.e. answer my emails) and nurture the book in a way true to my artistic vision (i.e. not perform fellatio on the marketing department)

in a manner a larger house might not be willing to do (e.g. my book dies on the vine while they hype their latest cookbook or tell-all memoir by a fallen debutante who smoked crystal meth and wrecked her Bentley but lived to tell the tale…).”

When people ask me about my “decision,” I want to say something that makes me sound too enlightened to peddle my subversive and cerebral material to the fatcats who run the major publishing houses. But I’m not that enlightened person at all. I am the very guy who tried desperately to peddle his subversive (Really?) and cerebral (Didn’t you go to a state college?) material to the fatcats. They shunned me, not vice versa.

I finished my first novel and got a swanky agent in New York. She did her very best to sell the book (I have no idea if she did her very best, though I assume so), but the fatcats told her, “This book is too grim. It’s not viable in the market place.” They weren’t looking for cerebral and subversive—they were looking for the Next Bestselling Voice!, someone like Jonathan Safran Foer. (I’m sure he’s a nice guy.)

This is by no means a criticism of authors who have published with major houses. I’m not insinuating that they’ve sacrificed their integrity. Far from it—some of my favorite books have had the stamp of the fatcat. This is an indictment of the major publishing houses’ attempts to superimpose templates of success onto literary fiction, judging the marketability of next year’s titles on the successes and failures of last year’s.

As my novel made its way around Manhattan, more than one editor said she liked the book, but had to “pitch it to the marketing people.” These pitches never seemed to go my way. Eighteen houses shot the book down. The swanky Manhattan agent basically fired me: “Why don’t you write a second book and we’ll try again?” she said.

I was back in square one, except now square one had the stink of failure. And I had no idea what to do.

Good times (not good times)…

I got a new agent, and she sent the book to Two Dollar Radio, an independent publishing house that saw promise and merit in the story I was trying to tell. They are the subversive and cerebral ones, the brave souls who publish literary fiction and only literary fiction. There are no cookbooks or debutante tell-alls on their list. It’s literature for the love of language and story, rather than commercial viability.

My experience finding a publisher was horrible and gut-wrenching. (Whiskey helped.) It was also incredibly confusing because I didn’t know whose opinion to trust. I began referring to it as my “faithful grope in the dark.” I knew I needed a publisher. I knew an agent acted as a liaison between writer and publisher. What I didn’t know was what editors were looking for. Only later did it occur to me that maybe agents and editors are faithfully groping themselves.

I talked with an agent and an editor to hear whether my suspicion was right: Is the whole shebang run on hunches, “informed” inferences, projections based on ambiguous past experiences?

“How do you know what will sell?” I asked one prominent agent.

“You find a book you believe in, make an educated guess, and hope for the best.”

I tried to sound calm, professional, but I think my voice cracked: “Hope for the best?”

“There are too many variables to predict with any kind of accuracy,” she said. “There are editors, acquisition boards, marketing and sales teams, the art department, then the buyers. And that isn’t even factoring in trends or positive reviews or competition. Anyone who thinks they have an answer is lying.”

I then spoke with a former editor at several major publishing houses and asked how she knew what would sell.

“It’s a crapshoot,” she said. Her tone wasn’t smug or ambivalent; the calm way she conveyed this sentiment made it feel honest.

Turns out, chance is a brutal part of the publishing trade. Good books sometimes vanish without a trace, and obvious, dumbed-down books with clever marketing tricks often become successful. It’s a savage reality of the business, one writers need to be aware of.

What I heard from these publishing insiders confirms my suspicion that writers and agents and editors are all faithfully groping in the dark. There’s no such thing as a template of success. It’s impossible. There are too many stodgy people in publishing who look to replicate past successes rather than find new and unexpected ones, to capitalize on trends rather than create them. There’s an almost singular reliance on authors who have already sold well, shoving their new work down consumers’ throats regardless of its quality. What’s left for first-time or mid-list writers with better books but no reputation?

Again, I asked the swanky agent and editor.

“There’s a diaspora of emerging writers to the smaller houses,” the agent said. “The money just isn’t there for unknowns in the current market. There are exceptions, of course. But overall…”

My ulcer tapped-dance as I phoned the editor.

She said independent houses might be better for first-time or mid-list authors, because in a smaller catalog their book will get more attention. Indie houses may have better guerilla marketing strategies for 21^st century technologies. Maybe most importantly, the sales projections at smaller houses are more modest, and a book won’t be considered a failure if it sells 6,000 copies.

“Will this be good for literature?” the editor asked. “It’s too soon to tell.”

Joshua Mohr - the Faithful Groper

Fair enough. It probably is too soon. But for me, this information is all I need to solidify a couple things, make a couple decisions. One, since they’ve corroborated that the publishing business is run on chance, I need only concern myself with one thing: the quality of my writing. That isn’t chance at all. I can’t control marketing trends or debutantes, but I can control the amount of energy I put into my revision process. I can take my time and make sure to write the best book I can.

Two, I’ve decided to publish my second novel, From a Fragile Galaxy, with Two Dollar Radio as well, next year. Assuming the “crapshoot” model is true, I see no reason to leave. I don’t want to be a free agent out to make as much money as I can, I want to publish my books somewhere that editors, not marketing people, make the decisions. 2DR has proven itself interested in my aesthetic. They’ve built me a website and booked a reading tour. They’re receptive to my ideas. They—not to sound sentimental—care. Books aren’t just commodities to them. Books are art.

At least I know that when my editors think a section of my writing needs tinkering, it isn’t because the marketers deem it “too grim.” I know that the problem is with me, the words I’ve chosen, the scenes I’ve constructed—and that’s a freedom every writer should enjoy, the freedom of knowing that their editor is more concerned with publishing the best possible novel than selling the most books. If you happen to sell a lot of books, that’s wonderful. We all want an audience. But for me the audience is only worth having if they’re reading the book I intended to write.

**

Joshua Mohr’s first novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, comes out next week.

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