Free Mystery Girl: A Novel by David Gordon Page A

Nazis, ungentlest of gentiles. I remember my amazement when, picking up a stained one-dollar paperback of Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles in a sidewalk stall one chill fall day, I found all the terror and wonder of my own middle-class Jersey childhood somehow reanimated in this tiny book by a little-known small town Pole whose prose blazed out like embers under my breath as I stood and read. I remember the scene in Biely’s St. Petersburg where the Bronze Horseman, the statue of Peter the Great,takes off into the air, and the moment in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita when the devil, wandering 1930s Moscow, sits beside a bureaucrat and whispers in his ear of Pontius Pilate, transporting us, in the turn of a page, to ancient Jerusalem. I remember exactly where I was when I finished Molloy, in a hammock, on vacation with my family. Head deep in the postwar European wasteland while they frolicked in the sun nearby, I felt the walls in my mind collapsing as, in its final sentences, Beckett’s novel of negation negates itself, disappearing up its own arse, as the Irish genius might say. Then there was Pynchon. My copy of Gravity’s Rainbow has blood on it, nonfiguratively, from when I couldn’t stop reading long enough to make a sandwich and ended up trying to decipher terminal brainfucker prose while slicing cheese. Gaddis! I summited The Recognitions in winter, as if on a foolish dare, but had a deeper, summery love for JR: 800 pages of unattributed screwball dialogue about a drippy-nosed kid who becomes a millionaire stock baron. To me, a man who would do such an absurdly noble thing with his life was mythic, half Groucho Marx, half Hercules: like flying to the moon just to plant the pirate flag for the rare voyager who might sail by and salute. As for Kafka, what can I say? He commanded that his papers be burned after his death. He was disobeyed and now his work is the eternal flame, the bonfire into which all other writers should toss their own failed efforts. I will restrain myself here to reminding the reader of the moment toward the end of The Trial when, just before his execution, Josef K puts up his arms and says: I have something to say!
    Is it (a) weird, or (b) sad, that I remember these Great Moments in Reading better than I remember my own life? That they ring out in the mind and tingle the spine with the power of the present, and of the real, while reality seems like the poor copy, badly printed and full of typos? Don’t answer. I bring up my early and perhaps deformative exposure to books here only to explain what happened next.
    Much like experimental drug users, most troubled young experimental fiction readers pass through the gateway and, with late adolescence,college graduation, and the need to get a life, outgrow the dangerous phase. But some poor fool always gets hooked, and so I found one day, that I had myself a habit. I hit the hard stuff, V. Woolf, G. Stein, F. Wake, but soon found that merely consuming these books wasn’t enough to feed my demon. I began to write them.
    And now, a couple of decades later, while most men had careers, families, bank accounts, health insurance, and wives who didn’t openly despise them, I had these books no one in the whole world wanted to read weighing down the bottom drawer of my soul. My disasterpieces. My monsterworks. My wastebasket of a life.

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    HOW MUCH OF MY MARITAL discord could, if I was honest, be laid on that pyre of pages? Let’s see: years of unrewarded labor, hundreds upon hundreds of rejections, all “free” time, all weekends, evenings, holidays, and vacations, devoted to a private obsession no other human could share, resenting the world that ignored my efforts while despising myself most of all, raging and ranting against literature as a bad joke and then slinking away, late at night while Lala slept, to indulge my wretched vice. These things might tend to make a person difficult to live with, like being married to a junkie, without the