Robert Glück: About Ed. New York: NYRB, 2023.
Maybe it’s appropriate to start a letter on a work from the New Narrative trend with a confession: I never really got into this whole corner of modern American literature. We’re talking mainly about Glück, Dodie Bellamy, Camille Roy, and other personalities (including the transgressive experimentalists Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper) in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s; writers who were digesting French critical theory and avant-garde poetry, fusing reportorial, autobiographical, and lyrical types of writing into books with protean forms.
And at the risk of copping out, I’m not even sure why. Maybe it’s the confessionalism, or maybe the apocalyptic postmodernist mood.
But reading About Ed was an impactful reading experience at the aesthetic level—Glück has a way with the final phrases in his lines, which feel delicately structured, whether they’re long or short: “I had made myself late, following the minute hand in a loose reverie while my breath fanned mint into my head. I was shaved and dressed, longing for some memory or plan.”
It’s enough to make your host reconsider the whole NN thing. This book by Robert Glück, who ran seminal workshops for the New Narrative practitioners up to the mid 80s, has a form that’s raw in appearance but refined in its essence.
About Ed is about Ed Aulerich-Sugai, a painter, and the first-person narrator of the novel, Bob. Bob and Ed live together for a while in San Francisco in the early 70s, and they stay close after they break up, until Ed’s death from HIV in 1994. The book is populated with other community members: the old neighbor Mac, his widow-to-be Nonie, the neighbor Michelle, Lily the dog, and many other lovers: Denny, Pete, Jim, Marty, and Zack “the bisexual pussy-boy.”
Glück’s prose style has a wonderful sense of delicacy. Out of nowhere in the drift of thoughts comes a line like "A cat walks across the roof, making a sound of rain beginning."
A Berkeley radio station interviewed Charles Mansion, 93,000 midsize farms were going broke, and Gorbachev became president of the Soviet Union. Interferon stopped the AIDS virus in test tubes, and doctors who implanted a baboon's heart in Baby Fae overstated her chance for survival.
As opposed to these historical facts and recordings, by the end of the book we are wading through Ed’s dreams and fantasies:
Before that drapes from the unreachable cerate an indistinct room around a pond. Friends dart, bodies blur. A newt swims toward the bank, becoming a prehistoric fish. Reptiles combine to make a plesiosaur with spatula fins and a long neck, snapping at the blurs. It swims at me, jaws gaping, small teeth inches from my face. Daniel drags me away. Curtains divide a vast room. A slight terror. Japanese file in and hide behind a drape. More Asians behind another drape. We're prisoners. A military guard marches by, pistols in hand. People speak out, then militant groups, but there's no escape, no windows or roof.
(Is this the “real” essential difference between fiction and nonfiction? That is, if nonfiction starts in the abstract and gradually fills itself out into the concrete, fiction is the inverse, from the concrete into the abstract, from news headlines to dream transcriptions.)
While Ed physically declines, Bob still watches horror movies with him, though with more self-consciousness about the death and decay on display in Mario Bava films.
What does he make of the skeletons with rags of flesh? I am the only one who can ask him this question, so I do. He rolls his head on the pillow and reminds me in a mild voice that he will be cremated, and that decay is not the same as death. He says, "My death is an emptiness that I can't fill." I am relieved, but why?
All the while, as these accumulated fragments fill in Bob’s past relationships, with Ed as a contradictory macabre center, at another level his writing is reflecting on the his composition process. What does it mean to create this “hybrid” book in memoriam, what is happening in its making?
I flee from the screen as I do from my notes. About Ed grinds to a halt. If I knew why this novel is falling apart, I would know something more about myself. And yet I'm glad incapacity is accumulating. I'm beset by opposing feelings of failure — I am not equal to the task of writing this book (laziness, ignorance) and I long to be stripped of knowledge and motivation, to be an empty room, or as Ed might put it, an empty sky. I want to conserve experience and I want to throw it out. Making experience useful by turning it into a book is repugnant, but what else can I offer? I need this book to be impossible to write, I need to become a different person to write it.
Write before this passage, he speaks of the book as a “ritual to prepare for death, and an obsession to put between death and myself. I want a tomb to keep up appearances in the face of death. Will I occupy the tomb I have been building for Ed?”
These lines suggest that writing the pieces that bind into About Ed — and Glück actually wrote these chapters across the decades — is to imaginatively enter Ed’s mind, to go “Inside” like the heading of the final section of Ed’s dreams: a long poetic sequence with a certain indenting technique.
In any case, Glück’s book, and his other writings, have such a high quality of thought to them, higher than that of the theorists that inspired the New Narrative tendency, I think!
Read Glück’s account of “New Narrative” in glorious html format here. (With references to Lukács and Althusser as influences.)
See a review piece of this book by Alina Stefanescu (a bit heavy on postmodernism) at Cleveland Review of Books.