The Impossibly

Rating:
Summary: A good example that if anyone wants to publish a book...
Review: Anyone can publish a book. Using all the tricks and techniques of what can be termed "experimental" the author sets out to write, and achieves, in agonizingly pretentious "prose" a wonderfully Impossibly Smug novel.

Rating:
Summary: Truth in advertising
Review: At least the title forewarns you.

No accounting for taste, of course, but the history of unusual narratives is long and detailed -- the difference between THE IMPOSSIBLY and, say, TRISTRAM SHANDY is one of style, not strangeness. Both are books for language lovers, readers who simply enjoy the act, and art, of reading.

And it is funny as hell.

Recommended along the same linguistiphilic lines: THE PHYSIOGNOMY; GRASS; Cordwainer Smith's THE REDISCOVERY OF MAN; and the ne plus ultra of such things, Thomas McGuane's straightforward but incomprehensible PANAMA -- a book which occasioned my all-time favorite editorial blurb, courtesy of the usually dependable New Yorker magazine: "Whatever risk McGuane may have sensed in attempting PANAMA, the feat proves successful." Or, to put it another way: "We haven't a clue."

Rating:
Summary: Wit and heart
Review: Hunt's narrator is a confused overweight dude who works for a criminal organization. He's always being given mysterious tasks by mysterious, violent people in mirrored sunglasses (the mirrors are a tip-off that these folks might at times be products of the narrator's mind -- perhaps, even, at some points, his mind after he's dead). Hunt's prose is smooth, witty, deadpan, but it's ruptured frequently by sudden flashbacks that are left purposefully unsignposted, so the texture of the writing remains even and glassy whle the timeframe it's describing wanders around wildly. I occasionally had to look back a few pages to remind myself where and how a particular tangent had begun, and I like having to do this when I read: it means I'm having to pay attention. Hunt may be using this device to describe the way we experience the world: our experience seems continuous, but it's made up of jarring swerves into memory and dream and, ultimately, death.

There's a love story amidst all this that I found quite moving. (In fact, I found the narrator's predicament moving throughout, despite its goofiness). The narrator's girlfriend is always wanting to acquire objects for which she does not know names. He provides the names, when he can: the objects she wants are usually oddly familiar things, like staplers. He finds all this charming, which makes sense, because he's trying to make sense out of the way his own perceptual reality is constructed. The girlfriend acquires what she learns names for, which is, again, a metaphor for the way we experience the world: we have access to that which we can name. In that way, in a familiar poststucturalist sense, our worlds are constructed out of language, and what we can "acquire" is limited by what we can talk about. Such a worldview does incite a kind of paranoia, though: what are we not seeing, what are we not getting at, if we can't describe it well enough to get hold of it and put it on a little shelf in our minds? And who controls what we see and know if we can get at reality only through language? In Hunt's novel, what the narrator sees and knows seems to be controlled by the criminal organization he works for, but there's a sense that escape is available and should be attempted even at great cost (Hunt's narrator, who does attempt to escape from the social controls he usually operates inside, is seriously punished for his temporary exit).

Hunt has found a new way to represent a strange aspect of human experience: that we don't know and can't know how much of what we perceive is reality, conspiracy, our invention, etc. -- it's an old phenomenological problem, even a Romantic problem (Shelley's " human mind...[that] passively renders and receives," and Wordsworth's concern with the world as "what we half create, and what perceive.") Hunt's book brings up all sorts of philosophical issues I haven't touched on and probably lots I know nothing about; it's also zany fun. I haven't read a new American novel I've liked as much in ages.

Rating:
Summary: demanding yet entertaining
Review: I picked up The Impossibly after a review in Time Out New York called it a combination of Robbe-Grillet and Beckett, two of my favorite authors. I can see where the comparison came from, but I don't think it's very accurate. If anything, the novel reads like Kafka as if written by Donald Barthelme - obscure and frustrating, yet written in a breezy ironic style. The review from Publishers Weekly complains that "the absence of plot make[s] this a difficult, frustrating read," but the same criticism could also be lobbed at any of the other authors above, and it misses the point - The Impossibly is not supposed to be a Bildungsroman, its difficulties are intentional. And it's worth the effort - the book is intelligent, funny, and beautifully written.

Rating:
Summary: A good example that if anyone wants to publish a book...
Review: The Impossibly is a stunning debut novel by Laird Hunt that is dark, contradictory, and utterly compelling. When The Impossibly's anonymous narrator bungles an assignment for his shadowy employers, everyone and everything in his life turns around to double cross him or stand by him. The narrator must navigate an unnamed European city, unraveling the mystery and enlisting the reader as a detective in order to identify the assassins that seek to exterminate him. Dry, deadpan prose characterizes this fascinating, original mystery.