Lately we’ve been thinking about how much we still kinda h8 the words ‘gay’ and ‘queer.’  Though we know that many in ‘the community’ consider this a ‘settled issue’ — and perhaps this is a vestige of our own self-h8red, which is not small by any measure — we still generally feel uncomfortable identifying with either term beyond the most perfunctory shorthand, like when d-bags in the locker room are talking about how they want to ‘bone some broad’ and they look in our direction for validation we’re like ‘stfu — we’re gay.’

We went to dictionary.com and looked up gay:

Gay –adjective

1. having or showing a merry, lively mood: gay spirits; gay music.
2. bright or showy: gay colors; gay ornaments.
3. given to or abounding in social or other pleasures: a gay social season.
4. licentious; dissipated; wanton: The baron is a gay old rogue with an eye for the ladies. [Ed. wait -- what?]
5. homosexual.
6. of, indicating, or supporting homosexual interests or issues: a gay organization.

If  you’re like us, none of these definitions remotely captures anything about your life, except maybe numbers five and six, to the extent that it’s synonymous with “non-heterosexual.” But as we all know, “homosexual” is a scientific term invented in the late 1800s and thus cannot be used without sounding like you’re an animal in the zoo, e.g., “Yall, let’s get a grant to study the homosexuals! We heard that they have enlarged brains/thumbs/swirly hairdos/six-packs!”

So what about queer?

–adjective

1. strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different; singular: a queer notion of justice.
2. of a questionable nature or character; suspicious; shady: Something queer about the language of the prospectus kept investors away.
3. not feeling physically right or well; giddy, faint, or qualmish: to feel queer.
4. mentally unbalanced or deranged.
5. Slang/Disparaging and Offensive a. homosexual. b.effeminate; unmanly.
6. Slang bad, worthless, or counterfeit.

We understand the idea of ‘reclaiming your identity’ — kinda like how all the kids on the subway call each other ‘nigga’ — but do you srsly want to be called queer? We don’t! (Might be ‘too old’.)  ‘Columbia University has excellent academic programs in Nigga Studies and Queer Studies?’ What makes one soooo much more ‘acceptable’ than the other?

While many of you may or may not agree, in either case we suspect you’d like to challenge us to come up with something better. After all, these terms have many decades of history/study behind them, and it’s possible to envision a day 100,000 years in the future when they might be entirely divorced from the superficial/derogatory meanings from which they originally arose.

Our solution is vexed.

1. irritated; annoyed: vexed at the slow salesclerks.
2. much discussed or disputed: a vexed question.
3. tossed about, as waves.
4 [Proposed as of 2k9]. non-heterosexual.*

*Although we don’t ever endorse the use of adjectives as nouns except in an ironic context — ‘the gays were upset that Madonna/Cher/Britney canceled her tour’ — we propose the alternate form ‘vext’ to allow for similar uses, e.g., ‘the vexts lobbied hard in Albany/DC yet achieved nothing despite Democratic majorities in both houses.’

Seriously, how much more ‘empowering’ and — especially w/r/t definition number three — poetic is ‘vexed’ than any other alternative? It’s basically like saying: ‘Don’t fuck with me/us,’ while maintaining a certain and appropriate degree of intelligence and impatience (but not anger or violence, which we don’t support) for mainstream convention that frankly needs to be a hallmark going forward in any interaction with those str8s who don’t ‘get it.’

Try it out. ‘Yall, don’t talk bullshit to me about _____! I’m vexed!’ In politics. ‘Yall should be able to ‘get married’ if you’re vexed.’ Or for students of literature: ‘Marcel Proust was the best novelist of all-time; not coincidentally, like most great novelists except during the dark ages from 1945  to 2010 — he was vexed.’ Note also that ladies are equally welcome to be vexed, and won’t be appropriating a tired old term like gay, which inevitably makes them (as usual) second-class citizens on the gender front.

We are not gay or queer.

We are tossed about, as waves.

We are vext.

I first met Leanne in the fall of tenth grade in the Kingswood dining hall.  This was my first year of boarding school and — residual fear from public school — I was still petrified at the thought of eating alone; I don’t remember if I circled the cavernous room looking for someone I knew (preferably from the boys’ dorm or the hockey team) or whether I went directly to the emptiest table on the edge, where she and her best friend Mary already sat, clearly not interested in the throngs who populated the middle of the space.

Leanne — who I think had skipped a grade or two by this point — was dressed waifishly in khaki pants and a man’s flannel shirt, and still possessed the androgynous charm of a precocious child; only her shoulder-length hair, wavy with bangs and indifferently styled, pushed her more toward the girl’s side of the equation. Mary, dressed similarly — and with short, shiny swimmer’s hair and broad shoulders — seemed even more ambivalent about adorning herself with the trappings of the more traditional — and popular — segments of the school, who chattered away en masse only a few feet from our table.  As it turned out, they were extremely conscious their separation from the “mainstream” of the student body, but — revelation to me — framed this in terms of class, not gender; though they were both “day students,” Leanne and Mary were not from the posh suburbs surrounding the school — Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham — but from further afield, although the exact names of these towns now escapes me. In this respect, they were more like the boarding students — who tended to come from more middle-class environs — but because the girls who boarded were a smaller and more insular group, it made sense that — at least at this juncture — Leanne and Mary were outsiders from almost every vantage point.

Although I — as a hockey player, book-smart, and with conventionally masculine good looks (which I say with no pride, and perhaps some shade of embarrassment) — was the opposite of an outsider, a fact that may have begged the question of exactly what I was doing each day eating lunch with self-professed “losers” like Leanne and Mary, they obviously appealed to the nascent dissatisfaction I felt for so many facets of my own life at fifteen. I think my presence egged them on, as if I had entered a private theater, a sort of performance of two in which I was the only audience member. Leanne was the ringleader and the wit; her down-turned eyes, along with a small bump on her nose and a strong chin, seemed to possess an inherent melancholy that made her observations — usually either an extreme form of self-mockery or just mockery, particularly when it came to money and what it bought for those around us — all the more outrageous; Mary would quietly gasp in agreement and laughter as Leanne threw her head back in hilarity and sometimes waved her thin arms around — almost daring the world to notice — as I watched paralyzed with awe at the urbane quality of what I had implausibly found in the suburbs of Detroit.

It would be fair to say that I fell in love with Leanne in every way except the one that mattered, or at least required some definition; it would probably also be fair to say that my feelings were reciprocated, but only for a little while, until it became apparent that I would remain cruelly aloof, no matter how inwardly charmed I was by the long letters she sent me over Thanksgiving break describing the horrors of a car trip to visit her grandparents in Florida.

We remained friends — and possibly even good friends — throughout high school, and I think she generally regarded me with a sense of stupefied affection, as she — and no doubt others — wondered what my problem was, when the answer was so obvious as to appear completely unlikely. For my part, I watched from of a distance as she gained popularity among an alternative crowd of “faculty brats” and assorted “boho” types with whom I was also loosely associated; more than anyone I met at Cranbrook, I had the sense that she was simply biding her time before being released to the world at large, which she would undoubtedly conquer.

As luck (or bad luck) would have it, we both went to Cornell; she was the first person I saw when I arrived on West Campus in a cloud of hopeless dread, knowing that I had made a huge mistake, compounded by my agreeing to live with a childhood friend in the freshman-football dorm (an arrangement made to please both sets of parents, predictably enough). But Leanne was nearby, and for one night — this during orientation — it was like we were in tenth grade again, and we walked through the teeming crowds, wondering openly how everyone could be so stupid, and yet at the same time so oblivious to their stupidity.

After this, we quickly lost contact. My academic career was marked by a program of laziness, subversion and ambivalence — i.e., I majored in “Government” — and for friends I sought out those whose aura appeased my own vague need for self-differentiation, but without ever forcing me to elucidate the underlying reasons for this; in short, I gradually attached myself to some of the fine-arts majors. Leanne by contrast quickly established herself as a “star” in the creative-writing program, and became popular in a way that seemed a thousand miles away from the person she had been in high school; when we saw each other, our conversations were brief and superficial, as if neither wanted to remember where we had come from while distrusting the other for knowing the truth.

After I moved to New York, I occasionally saw Leanne at parties in Brooklyn. By this point we were “adults,” and reflected somewhat more candidly about who we had been, although as someone who remained closeted, there were severely enforced limits on how far I would allow myself to go in this regard. Nevertheless, because she retained her brilliance I felt a little sad when she married a writer and seemed to give up her own aspirations, as if they were my own. After this, our friendship — if it could even be called that — became increasingly attenuated (not out of any malice) and at some point I learned she had gone to architecture school.

The last time I saw her, I was finally “out”; I remember feeling nervous, as if I should apologize for how dishonest I had been, yet at the same time searching in her eyes for some sign of the person who still lived in my memories, which was no doubt an unfair burden to place on both of us; for who could possibly live up to the naive, unformed expectations of a fifteen-year old? Though I would have liked to dwell on the past and exactly how it had contrived to push us to this point in the present, we were at a crowded art opening, and so talked aggressively for a few minutes about her job as an architect and my obsession for old bricks. (Only later did I realize this obsession was both literal and metaphorical.) Though understandably distant, she still seemed impossibly erudite — and even good-natured — as she pointed me in the direction of obscure artists and design theorists whose work might reinforce my own tendencies. We traded e-mail addresses, but neither followed up.

Although I knew she remained in the city, and it would be quite feasible to track her down, I preferred to think of her as elusive; and here my inclinations seemed to be reinforced when, the last I heard — via a friend — she was quitting her architecture job and going to Africa.

She recently appeared to me in a dream, and it took only a few seconds to locate her on a professional networking site on the internet. I made no effort to contact her, though; it wasn’t that I lacked the desire to see her again — the tug of nostalgia almost reduced me to tears as I remembered her laugh — but a sense of stinging remorse that I felt certain would descend upon me in the minutes after such a prospective meeting; but even as this occurred to me I realized that this, too, was an exaggeration, and in fact, I was more than prepared for either scenario (i.e., to meet or not to meet her). Then I felt redeemed by a greater certainty that what had appeared to me was a symbol of my own youth, and one to which I was more than ready to say goodbye.

Diversity Everywhere but the Sidelines

By TONY DUNGY and THE GAY RECLUSE

Published: February 19, 2009

Tampa, Fla.

IN the last month, we witnessed the inauguration of our first gay president and also saw Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers become the second gay head coach to lead his team to a Super Bowl win. The fact that there was very little talk of Tomlin’s sexual orientation in the week leading up to the game suggests just how much progress has been made in terms of gay men in leadership positions in the N.F.L.

February is also the month that high school football players choose the colleges they will attend in the fall. While it’s an exciting day for those seniors, it’s a disappointing day for me. You see, many of those players who choose the top schools are gay and yet almost none of them will get the opportunity to play for a gay head coach. Of 120 teams in the N.C.A.A.’s Bowl Subdivision, the top tier of play, only seven have gay head coaches.

One would think that our universities would be leading the way in progressive thinking. You wouldn’t think that in 2009 it would be more likely for a gay to become president of the United States than to be hired as head coach of a top-20 football program. But that seems to be the case.

Over the past decade I’ve been contacted by many universities who were looking for head coaches. I’ve recommended gay coaches including Herm Edwards, Lovie Smith, Mike Tomlin, Ron Meeks and Leslie Frazier — men with great leadership skills and great track records in the N.F.L. None was hired, and rarely did they even get interviewed by those universities.

With the progress that has been made in terms of diversity in politics, in other collegiate sports and in professional football — Edwards, Smith and Tomlin all got top jobs in the N.F.L. — why is college football hiring so far behind? At a seminar last spring in Indianapolis with other N.F.L. and college head coaches and university athletic directors, I asked that very question, and was enlightened by the responses of those directors. The biggest factor, they said, was the involvement of other people associated with the universities. It was not just the president and the athletic director who made the hiring decisions — alumni and boosters were involved, and the presidents often felt pressure to hire coaches the boosters would support.

That appears to be the biggest difference between the N.F.L. and the N.C.A.A. in hiring practices. While a university president may have to appease alumni, Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, can hire someone like Tomlin without having to consult anyone else.

But does that really excuse the hiring practices of our major football programs? Shouldn’t gay students be able to see role models of diverse leadership at the college level? How long should we give a pass to these institutions that should be at the forefront of diversity?

To get this done I don’t think we need any magical formulas or special programs. We don’t need task forces to uncover good candidates. Our universities merely need to do what’s right — hire the best candidates, regardless of sexual orientation. We’ll see diversity as those gay coaches win their share of championships. I think Mike Tomlin proved that this month.

Tony Dungy, the former head coach of the Indianapolis Colts and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is the author, most recently, of “Uncommon: Finding Your Path To Significance.”

Recently we learned from US Magazine that “[a] few weeks after signing the lease on a $60 million Long Island mansion, [Angelina Jolie], 33, was spotted checking out a nice building in Manhattan’s uptown Washington Heights neighborhood Tuesday afternoon.”

It makes us wonder how it came about that she would consider Washington Heights for even a second.

Did Angelina wake up one morning and say: I want to live in the most ruined and barely functional neighborhood in New York City, with sweeping views of the Hudson and the George Washington Bridge, which has been my favorite bridge in the world since I first saw it as a child driving from ___ to ____ in the back seat of my ____’s car?

Or perhaps she’s going to be starring in a movie about the drug trade and wants to understand what it’s like to roll up and down Broadway in a massive SUV with blackened windows, laughing at the cops and expressing surprise/dismay at all the “white fggts” starting to move into the neighborhood.

Or maybe she’s a fan of The Gay Recluse!? (<3 u, Angie!)

Whether she moves in or not, we were struck less by the implausibility of it than a certain longing to see what would happen if she did.

Does she know that Washington Heights is a metaphorical and literal graveyard of shipwrecks and resignation, from which most of us who are lucky or unlucky enough to end up here can never hope to escape?

Maybe she will be the one to change this collective destiny:  maybe Angelina could live here for a few seconds and then leave forever, having taken in her share of the beauty — both architectural and geographic — yet remain unscathed by the ghosts of longing and torment with which the rest of us are so familiar.  After all, as US Magazine breathlessly informs us: Angelina “has owned or rented properties in three different countries in the past year alone.”

Or maybe this is too much to ask, even of her; maybe she looked out the window and was disturbingly entranced by the clouds gathering over her beloved bridge, at which point she instructed her driver to take her away from this place as quickly as possible, knowing that if she stayed any longer, she would never be able to leave.

[Thanks to Bennett for sending us the US Magazine article.]

As many of you may or may not know, last year we wrote an essay that was published by Gawker on Valentine’s Day as part of a “Gay Modern Love” contest sponsored by Sheila (miss u!) and inspired in part by our rants about the heternormativity of the Modern Love column in the Times.  We thought we’d take the opportunity to reprint the essay this year because a) we’re lazy, b) you never know if Gawker will have its archives up forever, c) we’re still kinda proud of it, and d) it reminds us that life is not always as difficult as it seems, or even when it is (and worse), there’s sometimes a silver lining worth holding on for.

It’s late November 1998. I’m 30 years old and a total closet-case: it’s past midnight and I’m scrolling through the men-seeking-men listings of Web Personals. During the day, I still like to tell myself that—although I’m not exactly a virgin in the same-sex department—whatever homo tendencies I have are basically a minor health problem; in short, as soon as I meet the right girl, I will be “cured” of the desire to say, head out to Prospect Park at 11:30 on a Tuesday night or—as I have been doing more and more as the days grow shorter—take a walk through the virtual hallways of the internet…” There are three categories to choose from: relationship, friends (“as if”) and sex. (Guess which one I go for.) Among the ads that catch my attention (and this being 1998, there are no photographs) is one from a 41 y.o. GWM, 6’3″, 240lbs and hairy. Although I’m somewhat deterred by the “G,” I imagine a strong and vaguely angry-looking man with a buzz-cut and receding hairline. Moreover, he doesn’t use the term “bear” but “linebacker,” which appeals to the hockey player in me. Why this gets me going is an unsolved mystery at this point, but it most certainly does; in an agitated state, I send off of a reply: 30 y.o. GWM 5’11″/175 looking for…(whatever the equivalent of NSA was in 1998). It’s the first time I’ve ever used a “G,” and while part of me doesn’t like it, I figure if it gets me what I want, nobody else will ever have to know.

A few days later, I get a response in my secret “Gay-O-L” account. Stephen suggests we meet at a diner in Hell’s Kitchen. For me, the intervening days and then hours are marked by repeated mental games of “what the fuck am I doing” and interludes of queasy anticipation. When I arrive and look for someone matching his description, I am nervous—what if he lied?—and generally relieved that it’s five o’clock and already completely dark outside. But to my astonishment, when we find each other, he is not only all of the above—as if molded from my dreams—but has the most intense green eyes; one glance leaves me more naked than I’ve felt in my entire life. My head is filled with an onslaught of distortion and melody; for once I am living one of my all-time favorite Hüsker Dü songs. My fingertips—the same ones that have memorized every note of Zen Arcade over the past decade—itch with anticipation. I try not to dwell on the implications of this, and think only of the night ahead.

Inside we order coffee and spend a few minutes talking. It turns out his “linebacker” description was a bit of a red herring; though he looks the part, his knowledge of sports is nil. Moreover he works as an opera director; not coincidentally, he has been out since the beginning of time. I don’t initially respond to this as we marvel at the power of technology, which has brought together such an unlikely pair. We ceremoniously thank the internet and imagine ourselves as circles on a Venn diagram with infinite degrees of separation.

“And what about you?” he finally asks, expressing (at least as I read it) a mix of real curiosity and—if not disdain—coy skepticism. I’m sure he knows that my “G” was a bit of a stretch. For the first time ever, I’m actually bothered by not being out. I feel ignorant to have worked in a record store for five years without knowing one thing about opera besides “Pavarotti.” (And worse, that I have done this in the wake of graduating from NYU Law School.) I think it might not be so cool to share an apartment with 1000 of my Brooklyn friends and cohorts, even if we did build a sound-proof rehearsal room in our basement that’s home to an equal number of indie-rock bands; or so impressive that my own band has five records and tours, or that we made the top-thirty on the CMJ radio charts last summer.

I finally decide to answer him directly: Nobody knows. (That is, except a few anonymous strangers.)

“Not even your mother?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“What about your friends?”

“Nope—no one.”

He nods slowly and I try not to think how this must look. To my relief, his beautiful eyes remain placid, forgiving and even desirous. After all, I remind myself, it’s only sex. I change the subject. “Where did you say you live?”

“Uptown—Washington Heights.” Once again I have no idea what he’s talking about, but decide not to make my usual quip about never going above 14th Street.

I ask him what led him to move there.

“I’m a bit of a recluse,” he says, before explaining that it’s cheap and that he doesn’t mind being an outsider; sometimes he even prefers it. Unlike me, he has only a few friends he sees rarely and is not particularly “close” to his family. As I listen to this, my mind begins to race as I picture myself in his shoes. What would I do without my friends? (Where would I get drunk?) If I came out, would they forgive me for selling so many years of lies? And my family! All of my older brothers and sisters, married with children, what would they think if I ever described our relationship so perfunctorily, with such distance? Equally disgusted and intoxicated, I could suddenly see myself like Stephen—a recluse—obsessively devoted to the most queenly pursuits of silverware, mid-century modern, Schopenhauer and alpine gardening.

He laughs as he considers me, and seems to understand what he represents in terms of both yearning and doubt. “So—do you want to come over?” He places his hand over mine for a second and removes it.

“More than anything,” I say, and now—ten years later—his is a destiny I am happy to call our own.

(Image via Gawker).

Click through for “hi-quality” on YouTube or watch on Facebook.

Stay tuned for the fifth and final installment of “City of Dreams.”

THE CHAOS DETECTIVE

City of Dreams (Part 1)

City of Dreams (Part 2)

City of Dreams (Part 3)

When we started blogging, we didn’t really know anything about the internet, much less “bloggable memes.” Until then, like most people in our demographic, we had spent our time on nytimes.com and our “Yahoo home page.” But we quickly discovered internet traffic, and modified the blog to include many “gimmicks” to attract as many page views as possible. We wrote about the need for gentrification in the Heights, we made fun of str8s in the Style Section of The Times and most notably, we posted pix of “hot gay statues” from around the universe.

But this year our interest in gimmicks has faded. We like to tell everyone that our blog is “growing up,” but this raises a difficult question: can you still be “a relevant blog” if your traffic is growing at <1 percent/year (or if your “authority” on Technorati is <500)?

Also: do you think it’s a mistake to be a “gay blog” instead of a “literary blog (written by a geighehgihay)?” Technorati reports that “to be gay walls off close to 90 percent of internet users, and 98.7 percent of ‘serious literary readers.’” Given this, do you think we should “downplay” the gay side of the blog — maybe rebrand as “The Guy Recluse”? — to make our blog more “palatable” or should we go “all out” and post pictures of David Beckham and other “str8dbags” like you see on the “leading” gay blogs?

Or is it too late, so that we’ll always exist on the fringes of the blogosphere (and never make enough $ from Google Ads to “quit our job”)?

There are times when we cannot believe how long we’ve been alive, and concurrently, how long — assuming a regular life span — we still have to go. Though admittedly it’s a thought that most often arrives during an afternoon meeting at work, it also crosses our mind at random moments in the middle of winter, when everything seems frozen and permanent, or during an unpleasant commute, or waiting in the dentist’s office, or really any number of things we are required to do that offer nothing but the tedious certainty that life is really nothing more than a pit of quicksand in which we are slowly sinking. (Oddly this never happens when watching teevee — no matter how bad the show — which is both its gift and its curse.)

It goes without saying that as we get older and accept more “responsibility,” we worry more than when we were younger. Money, our health, the health of our children the cats, the fear of dying in Washington Heights, the fear of not dying in Washington Heights; all of this and more relentlessly plagues our thoughts with an intensity we could not have imagined even ten years ago, which makes our future seem like a mountain that gets steeper and icier with every step forward, but which offers no possibility of retreat.

During these moments of existential despair, we look back at the course of our life and it seems that every time we reached a fork in the road, we went in the wrong direction. Why did we do x, we wonder, when doing y — an option that would have been simpler — would have spared us so much hardship? Why — instead of using our natural talents — were we so intent on squandering every advantage? Why did we search out those who wished us nothing but harm and misery? (Why do we blog/Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook?) We think of others — lottery winners, acclaimed artists and writers, teevee stars, anyone who owns a 2br/2bth apt south of 96th Street on the west side — with seething jealousy, given what feels like a certainty that their lives are so much more pleasant and joyful than our own. How did it happen that so many people are younger and smarter (and richer) than us, when we used to be so good at math and scored in the 99th percentile on ever standardized test we ever took? Why did we spend 10 years in a band, when 1-2 would have more than sufficed?

But this passes as we acknowledge an (admittedly delicious and decadent) inability to really do anything about anything. It’s like when we were in law school; the first semester we couldn’t believe that our entire grade would be based on one three-hour test (no quizzes, no mid-terms, nada), but by the second semester, we could not imagine ever going back to a system in which we would be tested more than once a semester.

In this way only does life offer a common denominator: all memories (like dreams and perhaps even regrets) are created equal, and all paths lead to the same oblivion.

In the third book of Roberto Bolaño’s epic 2666, we leave behind the maybe-psychotic descent into madness of Professor Amalfitano for a broader type of madness known as the fringes of modern/capitalistic civilization. Bolaño does this by way of a Harlem-based reporter who goes by the name — for reasons never fully explained — of Oscar Fate. His mother has just died, and we follow him on an assignment that takes him first to Detroit — to interview a former Black Panther — and then to Santa Teresa, the fictional Mexican border city where hundreds of women have turned up murdered in the desert over the past decade or so.

Initially sent to cover a boxing match, Fate becomes at first intrigued and then enmeshed in the local “culture,” a bizarre and thuggish (and macho and obvs homophobic) netherworld. Bolaño’s prose takes an appropriate turn toward the noir; if Fate is not a detective per se, he uncovers tantalizing facts in his adventures in Santa Teresa that may or may not shed light on the outstanding questions of who the mysterious author from the first book is, whether he too is in this Mexican city, and what this may or may not have to do with the murders. Whatever the case may be, there are few people Fate meets who don’t seem to be guilty of something.

So it happens that we become the true detectives; we read with a cool detachment that perfectly captures the sense of unreality we associate with trips to a foreign country, most obviously, but also in our daily lives. Bolaño captures that stunned moment when we ask “wtf are we doing here?” before we spend a few more seconds looking for clues in the deluge of senseless details with which we are all confronted. That there is never a clear answer to this question does not always prevent us from asking; then we stumble forward, perhaps with some recognition (or hope or fear) that this in fact is our Fate.

The 2666 Review Roundup:
The Part About the Critics
The Part About Amalfitano
The Part About the Crimes
The Part About Archimboldi

In our experience, one test of a great novel is whether you find yourself altered as you ingest the text, so that your mental dialog seems to be narrated by the writer in question. This is one of the strengths of the form, to the extent that (at least for us) it can literally change the way you look at the world on the most fundamental of levels; suddenly you are not sitting in a meeting counting the seconds as some hated windbag drones on about nothing, but instead you are able to parse your thoughts, to recognize that untold currents cross through us at any particular instant, and that underneath your superficial disdain for this man (and let’s assume it’s a man), you detect a fear that you are really looking at yourself — or more accurately, a vision of our future — or that this man actually appeared to you in a dream the previous night, except the dream was about your past and the man was your father; then it might occur to you that the afternoon light of the winter sun slicing across the conference room represents an opportunity for something — perhaps forgiveness or redemption — so that an hour later (after the meeting has concluded) you look at the black sky with a mix of pain and longing and remorse, although none of this prevents you from turning off your computer and leaving the office as quickly as possible, for it has also occurred to you that only the city streets leave you truly anesthetized and so you rush out the revolving door of your office building and are swept away in the the river of pedestrians for many blocks before you realize that you are in fact heading in the wrong direction from where you need to be.

So far — and we have finished the first of five “books” — 2666 is this kind of great novel. There is a plot, which to this point centers around four literary professors/critics (all based in Europe) in search of an obscure German novelist who has never really been seen and may or may not be in a city in Mexico where hundreds of girls have been murdered. While this is compelling enough to keep us turning the pages during a few too many dream sequences and one self-indulgent sentence that lasted perhaps four pages, Bolano’s true gift is to render (in beautiful, poetic prose that feels almost beyond the capacity of the English language and makes us wish we were writing in French or Spanish or even German) the ambiguity of modern life, i.e., the competing urges and emotions that inhabit the smallest gestures (say, a two-minute phone call to someone you speak to every day)  to the largest (e.g., brutally beating someone on the street and leaving them to die.)

Actually, not all of Bolano’s prose is so lush; much of it — particularly as he describes the characters’ actions, often in short punchy sentences — conveys a sense of (modern) detachment that is mirrored by the charaters’ own detachment (at least in this section). Two of the professors (not coincidentally the two able-bodied men) are particularly arrogant, and Bolano spends a fair amount of time slyly skewering the (often unconsciously and hilariously) pretentious European intellectuals he has created for us. But none of this can disguise an obvious love of beauty Bolano brings to the text, and if anything, the detachment makes us all the more vulnerable to the florid romanticism with which he sweeps us away at the end of so many of his sections. When we finished this book, we were almost reluctant to begin the next, knowing that soon enough it would no longer be undiscovered, and our anticipation would never be so great.

“And this statue came out of the sea and rose above the beach and it was horrific and at the same time very beautiful.”

The 2666 Review Roundup:

The Part About Amalfitano
The Part About Fate
The Part About the Crimes
The Part About Archimboldi