‘Great Art Exists in the Margins’ – A Naked Singularity

My latest book review for Review 31 is a long look at Sergio de la Pava’s fascinating A Naked Singularity.

http://review31.co.uk/article/view/191/great-art-exists-in-the-margins

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No review of Sergio de la Pava’s debut novel would be complete without a comment on the fact that this now-prize-winning novel was originally self-published. Armed with an unwieldy manuscript of more than one thousand pages, the author (a public defender in his mid-thirties) was turned down by more than eighty publishers. In spite of these rejections, de la Pava decided to publish the book himself using the print-on-demand company Xlibris. Thanks in part to the assiduous solicitation of his wife, bloggers and online outlets eventually reviewed the novel, with two notable sites describing it as ‘one of the best and most original of the decade’ and ‘the most imaginative and exciting and funky and galactically ambitious first novel to come down the pike in I don’t know how long’. In due course, the University of Chicago Press republished the tome in 2012 and it won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize in 2013.

This, as has correctly been pointed out before, is an indictment of the conventional publishing model – proof that great art exists in the margins of where one is accustomed to looking for it. It is also (as logic would have it) the root of the some of the novel’s greatest virtues and all of its biggest flaws. For in the first instance, one seldom sees a debut novel this ambitious: a mammoth 864 pages that combine courtroom transcripts; letters; lists; a recipe for empanadas; discussions of art, philosophy, religion, television and crime; in addition to an account of the boxing career of Wilfred Benítez.

This occasionally baggy book would certainly have benefited from a good editor. Not to mention a copy editor, as the lightly punctuated text has legion missing commas and hyphens, as well as a good few typographical errors and missing Spanish accents. As the author himself has pointed out, ‘there has been nothing changed from what I was showing to agents’; so what we have – for better or for worse – is the unadulterated authorial vision. Conspicuous faults or not that vision is still the most exciting new voice to turn up in the past year.

A Naked Singularity is told in the first-person by Casi, a 24-year-old New York City public defender of Colombian descent. A preternaturally gifted lawyer, the young man has never lost a case but is becoming increasingly frustrated by the Kafkaesque court proceedings and the depressing effect that the Pyrrhic War on Drugs is having on his clients. Spurred on by Dane, a silver-tongued colleague of his, he is gradually seduced by the idea of participating in a heist, with the help of insider knowledge that he and the perfection-driven Dane have. At the same time he is also trying to stay the execution of a death-row inmate with learning difficulties in Alabama, interact with his Colombian immigrant family in New Jersey and have lengthy discussions with his downstairs neighbours and assorted workmates about a vast array of topics.

Donald Barthelme once said that there is ‘only truth in fragments’ and this is true of A Naked Singularity’s structure, which attempts to capture the essence of contemporary reality. What at first seems like a disparate mass of barely related material and scenes manages to coalesce into a taut storyline and, ultimately, that white whale – a literary page-turner. Curiously enough for a novel based around someone in the legal profession, there is no central case to provide a framework for the drama. Many defendants come and go, as the workload of the public defender is emphasized. In this respect, the story is a subversion of the legal thrillers which Dane dismisses as, ‘uniformly and horribly bad’.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is the inclusion of Wilfred Benítez’ story. The sports-journalism tone and third-person narration immediately differentiates these sections from the main narrative and they appear initially unconnected to the life of Casi. However, as one learns more about the boxing prodigy Benítez – a world champion at 17 and a two-weight world champion at 20 – one comes to realise that the narrator identifies with the fate of the Puerto Rican fighter. For those unaware of Benítez’s personal history, the passages about him are genuinely dramatic, with the descriptions of his classic encounters with Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Durán and Tommy Hearns beautifully evoked. Whether the boxing has any relevance to the fiction it commingles with or not, one imagines the author would have found some way of including the sections anyway, having said that Boxing is his ‘fucking religion’. Given the potency of the accounts, one is inclined to agree with the narrator’s assertion that boxing is ‘less a sport and more like concentrated life’.

The narrator does happen to share a great deal of biographical information with de la Pava himself, not to mention other interests. The themes of physics, philosophy, classical music and mathematics pepper the pages. Whether these are in service of the narrative or are a demonstration of the intelligence of the author/narrator depends on both the reference and one’s vantage point. The naked singularity to which the title refers – a point of infinite density that our universe is slowly collapsing into – is, for example, a brilliant metaphor for our fate and the book’s plot. Moreover, it is proof that, as Casi’s neighbour Angus opines, ‘only physics can adequately explain what’s occurring’. The list of Casi’s six favourite philosophers, on the other hand, purportedly provoked by a friend’s choice of David Hume, feels tacked on.

The style and tone of the work is redolent of many of the American postmodernists of yesteryear: its combining of high and low culture evokes Pynchon strongly and its mixing of the academic and the demotic hints at the style of David Foster Wallace. There is also a streak of metafiction that is felt most clearly at the beginning of the book (e.g. ‘Digression begins’) that recalls Lost in the Funhouse-era John Barth. And, as has been pointed out by other reviewers, the dialogic element to the novel, with its swathes of unattributed speech, brings to mind both William Gaddis and Cormac McCarthy. Add to all of these extraordinary touchstones the author’s knowledge of the minutiae of the legal profession and descriptions of first-generation immigrant life at the author’s family home, and you have a book that adds a new inflection to contemporary literature’s well-worn bag of tricks.

The ethical sense that one gets from de la Pava and his characters’ righteous anger at the War on Drugs – described first by a judge as having ‘eviscerated our inner cities’ and later by Dane as ‘that hypocritical, mass-produced mindfuck currently lining everyone’s pockets’ but public defenders – is unremittingly strong. That has lead to further comparisons between the author and Dostoevsky (referred to as simply ‘Fyodor’ in the text), which the author is keen to play up. The author’s willingness to align himself with nineteenth-century novelists on the strength of their philosophical and moral content, and his reluctance to recognise his debt to the modern writers mentioned above, does the latter a grave disservice.

It is clear from the interviews given by the initially reclusive author that he is aware of his stylistic forebears – but it is also clear that he feels a Bloomian anxiety of influence. While he admits to having read all of David Foster Wallace’s non-fictional writings, he claims to be ‘not that well read’ in modern fiction. Despite his manifold denials of having read Thomas Pynchon (very similar to Wallace’s own regarding the same author) the greasy hand of Pynchon has certainly left its fingerprints on the novel. Thus, the word ‘entropy’ and Boyle’s second law of thermodynamics crop up more than once; there are a number of silly or allusive names (Casi is Spanish for almost, a judge is called Cymbeline, etc.); and there are several implausible acronyms (‘The Society of Reptile Protectors Entitled to New Technology’ and ‘T.I.T.S.’ among them). There are also myriad references to physics and mathematics.

The shadow of David Foster Wallace also looms particularly large. This is not just in the author’s fascination with philosophy or in the language (‘and so like’, ‘“…”’), but in the predilection for extended conversations between two or more characters, where various ideas – be they weighty or pop cultural – are thrashed out. Digressive discussions such as these, which do nothing to further the plot, take up a large amount of A Naked Singularity’s length. However, where Wallace was a master of the nuances of voice, de la Pava is not in the same league. Often the discussions – thrilling, enlightening and funny as they invariably are – could be soliloquies, and there is no differentiation between the Babel of his voices. Seemingly everyone, barring the criminals (some of whose speech is all lower case) is eloquent. The problem of stilted or expository dialogue does rear its head on occasion, too; at one point a character even says, ‘you’ll know everything I’m about to say, but here goes anyway’.

Just as in all of David Foster Wallace’s work, television plays a vital role in de la Pava’s mid-decade New York City – so much so that the word is always capitalised in the text. The medium described by one character as ‘modernity’s ultimate achievement’ and by another as ‘the greatest communication tool of all time’ is responsible for both generating the news and shaping people’s reality. ‘Being on Television is fast becoming the natural state’, remarks a neighbour. ‘In the future all life will be televised.’ In part because of the absence of the Internet, the author has little new or especially perceptive to say about this aspect of contemporary American life, and the writing of Wallace, especially his essay on the effects of television on modern fiction, “E Unibus Pluram”, is a clear reference point for his arguments.

De la Pava’s idea of ADTV, a moneymaking television channel consisting solely of adverts that appears in A Naked Singularity, also appears to be gleaned from the plot of a Wallace story, ‘The Suffering Channel’, which describes an ‘All Ads All The Time channel’. It is worth pointing out at this point that the ideas of Wallace on the subject of television were themselves largely based on a number of scholars, such as Mark Crispin Miller and Todd Gitlin; thus my aim is not to point fingers, merely to show the debt owed.

Don DeLillo is, of course, another stylistic reference point for an ambitious, postmodern New York novel like this one. So what DeLillo said about his difficulties in publishing his 1971 debut, Americana, immediately brings to mind de la Pava’s spate of rejections. Americana, DeLillo contended, would not have been published today and only made it to print thanks to two young editors seeing ‘something that seemed worth pursuing’. The older man’s observation that novels ‘are much more refined in terms of language… [and] tend to be too well behaved… in response to the narrower market’ is exactly why A Naked Singularity should be a cause for celebration. Being a self-confessed ‘driven nut’, the author himself is surely aware that the novel is not perfect – but how many first novels are? What remains to be seen is whether the author’s third novel (a second originally self-published novel was released by UCP in September) – which will be published from within the world of mainstream publishing – will be as fiercely idiosyncratic as his first. The moralistic fury and intellectual seriousness of someone who believes that the ‘novel is the greatest truth-delivery instrument ever created by man’ is surely here to stay.

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