Captain's log, supplemental

Some personal literary news

So… I have a novel coming out next month from the ever-loving Spuyten Duyvil Publishing. How Long Is Now is a shaggy-dog story about love and grief, and a lot of it is very nearly kind of true. You can pre-order a copy right now, or you can read a bit more about it and then pre-order your copy. Either way is fine with me.

What are fathers for?

People ask me how I write so much. They don’t ask why but that is what they mean. They can’t quite conceal their fascinated disgust, so easily mistaken for envy. They peer sidelong at the freak that I am.

How Long Is Now is a novel, a memoir, a travelogue, a shaggy-dog story, and a tragicomic sequel of sorts to my first novel, Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy. A middle-aged poet flees his responsibilities and the specter of his father’s impending death by traveling to Berlin, to Morocco, to Spain, pursuing the equivocal evidence of an epochal meeting of two ghostly literary fathers, Samuel Beckett and William S. Burroughs. Behind him, like the backdrop of a film, unspools the story of his father as a young man, an assimilated Chicago Jew who moves to 1960s New York City and falls in love with the brilliant and depressive daughter of Holocaust survivors. They will become the narrator’s parents. He will become a son, a husband, a writer, and the fool for love he was always going to be.

By turns lyric and hypnotic, How Long is Now examines the delicate membranes separating past and present, authenticity of experience and transgressive truth. A Jewish-American writer, plagued by poetry and history, leaves his dying father and faithless marriage to travel to Germany and later Morocco to attend a William Burroughs conference, an unwritten novel on his plate. Enter a mysterious film, a cocktail of wild characters, and a fractured narrative that attempts a reimagining of his parents’ early courtship while his own life destabilizes into a sad, metaphysical travelogue, and we’re left beguiled by the wondrous, bitter nature of a reality that’s more cut-up than consistent, a Beckett play on deepening failure and paranoia. Hope is not lost, however—it just comes with a price—and as we’re ushered through a lengthening series of psychological obstacles and aesthetic quandaries, we come closer to understanding what that price may be.

—Joe Pan

How Long Is Now is a work of autofiction: I take that term not to mean simply a fiction about one’s own life, but a fiction of and about the self and the various straws one might grasp at to form something that can pass as coherent. Paternity is the chimera my protagonist hunts; yet to quote the song by the Smiths to which my title alludes:

I am the son
And the heir
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
I am the son and heir
Of nothing in particular

To be honest, I’m feeling a bit shy about the criminal vulgarity of this novel. The territory it covers is more personal and autobiographical than anything I’ve yet attempted, with the possible exception of a digital essay I wrote a few years back that layers together the story of my distant cousin the boxer Barney Ross with the accident that paralyzed my dad and led to his eventual death. (My current novel project, incidentally, focuses on Barney Ross and his lifelong friendship with the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby.) I feel peculiarly exposed by this book’s existence, sensitive to what seems to me the obvious criticisms: that it’s self-indulgent and plotless and centers on the kind of sad middle-aged white male narrator from which absolutely everyone is sick of hearing. Mea culpa, friends. It was in me, and it had to come out.

Here’s how the book begins, a little excerpt by which you may judge whether or not this is the sort thing you might like:

I promise there are some funny parts.

If you think you might write a review, please drop me an email or comment, and I’ll make sure you receive a copy. But if you want to support me and my work, pre-ordering a copy would be a particularly excellent thing to do! The book will be officially published next month.

With thanks for your interest and support,
The Fiend