Manic creations
Louis Amis
Lost Empress: A Protest
by Sergio De La Pava
MacLehose Press, £20, pp. 640
American mass-incarceration is the most
overt object of the ‘protest’ of this novel’s
subtitle. The author, Sergio De La Pava,
works as a public defender in New York
City, and calls on an intimate secondhand
knowledge of the many different sorrows
to be found in the ripples of a single crim-
inal case. But Lost Empress is also about
other kinds of losses and limitations to
human freedom. One minor character, a
Colombian immigrant striving on behalf of
his children, endures labour that ‘felt like a
prison sentence’ or an ‘abyss’, opened up by
‘the desaturation of meaning’. He is killed
in an accident early on; for his son, the
grief is ‘a form of imprisonment’. The
911 switchboard operator and paramedic
who respond, and the doctor who tries to
save the man, in turn discover the limits of
empathy as well as mortality. Hospitals are
another form of prison, and so, indeed, is the
biological body: ‘Just machines running out
of battery power.’
The novel is perhaps more of a depres-
sive meditation on the human condi-
tion than a protest. Most of the action
takes place in the benighted town of Pat-
erson, New Jersey, where ‘the most basic
social reassurances... had faded out of
view’. Violence, accidental and deliberate,
‘is what human beings do to each other. Not
some human beings, not sometimes. This
is what humans are,’ concludes one char-
acter. Others come to feel that ‘every-
thing’s already a mass grave with some
of the corpses dreaming of life’; that ‘the
resting state of life is a kind of dull pain’;
or that ‘the main thing humans are meant to
do is die’.
As consolation, the reader is invit-
ed to fall in love with the two main char-
acters. ‘Impossibly magnetic Nina Gill’
— born wealthy; terrorisingly curvaceous in
middle-age — is the world’s foremost genius
of American football management and, by
implication, of everything else besides. ‘That
magnetic guy’ Nuno DeAngeles, meanwhile,
has the potential to be at least as brainy, and
even more artistic — but he’s also, somehow,
the most feared inmate of the notorious
Riker’s Island jail complex in New York.
Both are contemptuous of others to the
point of nihilism. They are most often seen
either threatening people or lecturing them
pedantically about the definition of ‘highest
art’. But their real aloofness comes from the
fact that — unlike the other characters, the
residents of Paterson mired in their inherent
limitations and heading for grim outcomes
— Nuno and Nina are not at all realistic.
Nina’s chapters have the feel of a hip,
lightly postmodern children’s cartoon. Oust-
ed from her role at the Dallas Cowboys, she
breaks into ‘celebratory dance’ in a board-
room, and daydreams about leading an army
of ‘heavily armed half-monkey-half-robots’
in a war against the United States. Instead,
she takes control of a novelty team called the
Paterson Pork, and leads them in a quixotic
challenge to the NFL.
American football is, of course, a vio-
lent sport. In ‘A Day’s Sail’, a short, charm-
ing essay available online, De La Pava
used narratives of obscure boxing match-
es alongside a reading of Virginia Woolf to
unfold a metaphor for perseverance in the
face of despair. But here sport serves more
as a kind of antic, distracted dance. Nuno’s
story, on the other hand, revolves around
the notion that someone who thinks, let
alone talks, about Descartes and Shake-speare could indefinitely stare down the
population of Riker’s Island. Both charac-
ters are manic creations.
Meanwhile, the supporting cast mem-
bers go about their mundane business in
the shadow of inevitable trauma. Emu-
lating David Foster Wallace, De La Pava
dives into their interior states, the casual
impulse jostling with the cerebral for the
reader’s attention: ‘Ever wake up after
misfortune and into momentary ignorance
of or at least ontological doubt re: the mis-
fortune?’; ‘Problem is, everywhere Nelson
looks he sees a transience he cannot build
back into permanence.’ Unfortunately, the
book is also awash with tautology: ‘ves-
tigial remains’; ‘linearly straightforward’;
‘referential citations’; ‘ephemerally trivi-
al’. The ‘Problem is’ tic — sentences begin-
ning ‘Point is,’ ‘Truth is,’ ‘Fact is’ — also
becomes a bit of a problem itself.
There is one sustained passage of great
writing, a discrete chapter in which the
stoned-email prose style mysteriously drops
away. It begins: ‘On that block in Paterson
there’d lived an amputee.’ And proceeds
from there, bleakly, but exquisitely observed
and measured. Later on, its protagonist is
killed by a random brain tumour, without
his having made even an indirect connection
to Nina or Nuno.
Those two have ‘that presence thing
that can make you question little concepts
like reality and human limitations’, in the
words of one character. The mere juxtapo-
sition — that presence thing — is the key. It
isn’t quite satisfying, but the world is ‘a play
written by an unmedicated schizophrenic’,
after all. And ‘this playwright cares not the
slightest fuck for our notions of appropriate
storytelling’.Jay for Japan
Anne Margaret Daniel
Killing Commendatore
by Haruki Murakami, translated
by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen
Harvill Secker, £20, pp. 704Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commend-
atore was published in Japan in Febru-
ary last year. Early press releases for
this English version hailed the book as
‘a tour de force of love and loneliness, war
and art — as well as a loving homage to The
Great Gatsby’. Anyone familiar with Muraka-
mi’s 17 preceding novels can vouch for love
and loneliness as his great themes; and war,
art and F. Scott Fitzgerald are not new to him,
but in Commendatore all enrapture.
The narrator, a man with no name strug-
gling with his own art — and, concurrently
and inseparably, the women he sleeps with
— recalls Murakami’s earlier nameless nar-
rators, all the way back to Hear the Wind
Sing (1979). A damaged, constant observer,
he is also something of a Nick Carraway,
while his neighbour across a rural mountain
valley, the mysterious, wealthy Mr Menshi-
ki in his shining solitary mansion, recalls
Jay Gatsby.
The name Menshiki means colourless-Subscribe for
only £1 an issue
9 Weekly delivery of the magazine
9 App access to the new
issue from Thursday
9 Full website accessINTRODUCTORY OFFER:Auto-renewing payments only. $1 a week in Australia
call 089 362 4134 or go to http://www.spectator.com.au/T051A0330 333 0050 quoting A346Ahttp://www.spectator.co.uk/A346ANina dreams about leading an army
of heavily armed half-monkey-
half-robots in a war against the US