Six Personal Investigations of the Act of Reading:

Caleb J. Ross' Stranger Will

By Pablo D' stair

One of my favourite responses to any question ever belongs to Prince Hamlet-Polonius inquires what he is reading and he says "Words, words, words." It strikes me as pure and beautiful, the way a book should be encountered and experienced-in my most abstract, philosophical ideal a book would exist as a white cover, title in black, author name in grey, then the pages with the words-nothing of exterior, a priori influence to the interaction.

I can count on one hand the pieces of literature (and add in even the non-literary works) I have had the pleasure of experiencing in such a vacuum, usually there are some half dozen influences I encounter well before the first word, usually even more peripheral influence during the read. Certainly such is the case with Caleb J. Ross' Stranger Will.

"Noir" is one of those wonderful genres in that it so ethereally avoids exact definition, it's broken into sub-genre, it's fervently believed to be composed of X by this party of Y by this of Z by some other. Indeed, it is a genre name I use to mean something very particular that seldom matches up with anyone else I encounter-it's a genre I sometimes write in, as well, so my own artistic tendencies (what I do, not even what I observe in others) creep in to inform my encounter with anything labeled (or labeling itself) with the word.

Stranger Will does this. And so from the outset, I "knew what it was I was reading"-or, better put, "knew what the book was telling me it was". Always a curiosity about genre, the idea of which party sets the tag to a piece-originator or audience-and whether it is something fluid or something interchangeable...

But this is not so much what was on my mind when I started the novel.

Genre

What was on my mind, as often is when I read noir, was Roman Polanksi's film Chinatown-because this film epitomizes how I define the genre, and moreso it (better or worse for whatever new material I am encountering) sets the pitch as to whether something is going to be "good noir" or "bad noir" and only after I make this determination do I, personally, get my head unstuck enough to consider my direct reaction to a piece, outside of its arguable connection to a label.

Ross' novel is, to my way of thinking, about the hermetically sealed atmosphere of an individual-there is a conscious sense about it of "being a novel", this cannot be denied, an artful stacking of conflict, representational parties, events which have a sense of inertia to them built more of progressing a series of prompt/responses than of suggesting a tangibility in a world "outside of the pages", but these elements don't overwhelm the humanity right out of the thing.

What do I mean by that?

There can come a point where the magnetism of the internal conflict of a central character can be abandoned or toned down for "the reveal" the exposition of the superficialities of the plot ("whodunit", as they say, taking center stage) a delicate tension can be lost which to me is always a shame.

Returning to Chinatown, a piece exemplary of what I consider a flaw in some branches of noir, a piece in which the unveiling of who-did-what-to-who-and-why-and-when demolishes the connection to the world, takes the intimacy of the shared experience and makes it remote, only observed, no longer "lived" (even only vicariously). Because of Chinatown, of the letdown I feel every time I get wrapped in its spell and its spell for me falls limp, I always dread when it seems we're going to learn of a "dark secret" or "a cover up" or any of the conventions, it gets my guard up.

And Ross plays in the tropes, as though cognizant of precedent as something essential. This was evident to me from early on, inseminated in the prose, the clip-and it reinforced my reading it through my own stance on genre.

Indealised world

To return to my idealised world of books existing somehow outside of precedent or pre-suggestion (from the reader's point-of-view), I found myself asking "What would Stranger Will have been, how would I have read it if my history could be set aside-and moreover, how would Ross have written it without his?"

This sat in my thoughts well through the center action of the novel, it must be admitted-indeed I think I read a more razor pointed suspense (or at least tension) in whether or not the novel-as-an-example-of-type was going to lose cohesion, drift from what I abstractly prefer from a noir, become unglued from the character, unroll into a litany of consequences and imports and moralistic dot-to-dot than read as vicarious exploration (or even earnest investigation) of theme and tenet.

A problem-hyper consciousness on my part, involved wholly in "what I'm thinking" rather than "engaging the page straight", something I often deride others for.

I wondered throughout Stranger Will if I actually could access a book-devoid-of-genre, if I came onto a novel about a man considering the philosophical, ethical considerations present in Ross' narrative (not an essay, mind you, a novel about the ideas) but without the recognizable landmarks, without the conscious adherence and veneration of them, would it lead to any different a headspace for me-put differently, did I need to make it noir to make it something else?

Because thinking about what I was thinking about reading Stranger Will, that is what it boils down to-I was positing adherence to the fundamental truth of genre-having-flaws, yet not positing any alternative (flawless) model to use as litmus test to get any idea of what I am even driving at with such considerations.

Further, and somewhat embarrassingly, I seem to be suggesting that genre is actually elevated by "abandoning out of itself" rather than following through. A thought I do not really like.

Appreciation

How do I approach a novel I know I identify as genre-built without having reconciled my feelings of genre-and connected to this, is an appreciation for genre necessary to an appreciation of literary-built-from-said genre?

More troubling to me (pointedly so, as Stranger Will seemed to me-aggravated by continually having to leave my reading of it and return-to be embroiling itself in what I consider genre flaws but certainly not "writing flaws") is that I couldn't come up with an answer to the question "Is it necessary for me to disavow a pieces connection to genre in order to settle my thoughts on it-how far should I remove myself from suggested artistic intent and personal reader preference?"

Elements

I've at length discussed with colleagues and written elsewhere of how Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment is a novel heavily influential on me (beloved, in fact) but at the same time one I know I reduce down to particular elements-I may have blasphemously even said that every other sentence in it could be removed to no detriment. It is this self-chosen reduction I identify as "the novel" and this reduction I so adore.

And certainly it is endless rhetorical round about to ask myself "If the novel in fact had been written 'as this reduction' would it have impacted me?" or to suggest that perhaps the presence of what I may consider excess (the elements I can freely strip away) is necessary to my adherent love of the elements which imprinted.

But it's also something that as I focus more and more on what I do when I read becomes essential to make concrete, to bring down from the ether.

The interesting intersection between Crime and Punishment (as I view it) and Stranger Will (as I viewed it while reading) was that with the former, I reduced a more genre identifiable version from a dwarfing literary whole, while with the latter I excised what I respond to as a taut, literary investigation from out of an overwhelmingly blunt genre mechanism.

I've no idea what I make of that, but I know it's what happened.

Suspicion

Perhaps there is something in a work I encounter which leads to this paring down-whatever is in greater measure I instinctively remove, as my heart suspicion of all things artistic is that "the meat" of them is an unconscious germ which blossoms an infection of prose around it.

The germ in Stranger Will is the titular character-the suspense, the tension, the mire is his internalized reassignment of himself, it is there I find my fascination, my focus.

Ross designs a world of keenly rendered grotesque for a man who feels a goblin to navigate-so much so that I felt these grotesques (built of convention though uniquely rendered) were almost, as literature, purposeful fantasia, were machinations built so specifically to play into Will's internal deterioration yet refusal to totally discorporate, as though the novel (if I were to sum it up with some artful turn) was "a tangible man confronting a genre" a man, wholly human, encountering a rendering of a world that could never reconcile itself to him because its very nature is one built of contrivance and representative apparition.

A fine novel that would be.

But, as with my pulling apart Crime and Punishment, is it also appropriate of me to think "A fine novel it is?"

Absolute meta

Much literature (not only contemporary, but there is a large swing of it in the contemporary literature I discuss in this series) seems to be overtly aware of itself as literature, though in no way titling so far as to become absolute meta. And as I read (not to say it was to a point that distracted, not to a point of failing to appreciate the prose for its own nuance and direction) I really felt conscious of the novel as written, couldn't shut myself of the fact that (to me) it seemed evident how aware Ross was of the act of each word.

I am quick to add I see nothing wrong with this, do not for a moment think "a book should keep a reader unaware of the fact it's a book"-indeed largely I think this is nonsense. Much as with cinema, I think a crucial part to the immersion as a viewer is an awareness of the physicality of the camera, I think a novel (or any piece of writing) gains nothing by reverting to a place of pure escapism, positing a tale meant to distract from the act of reading. There may even be something to the loss of equilibrium when considering genre-identity, a kind of impossible to reconcile back-and-forth between artist and realised art that draws me as a reader into my all too precise concerns of reaction, lets the creation touch something actual in me even as it proves itself increasingly ethereal with every attempt to get in closer.

Absoluteness

Ross' novel, much more than anything, is a reminder to me of arts ability to disquiet the concreteness of my status of Observer by so underhandedly reminding me that the concrete absoluteness, the identity I need to inflict on something before I can voyeur is something perhaps an endless figment, nothing that can ever be made real enough to truly observe.

Pablo D'Stair is a writer of novels, shorts stories, and essays. Founder of Brown Paper Publishing (which is closing its doors in 2012) and co-founder of KUBOA (an independent press launching July 2011) he also conducts the book-length dialogue series Predicate. His four existential noir novellas (Kaspar Traulhaine, approximate; i poisoned you; twelve ELEVEN thirteen; man standing behind) will be re-issued through KUBOA as individual novella and in the collection they say the owl was a baker's daughter: four existential noirs.