Five of Christopher Miller's Favorite Books About Imaginary Authors
(Christopher Miller is the author of the recently published novel The Cardboard Universe, a book that I will soon be reviewing elsewhere. Suffice to say, I enjoyed his book enough to invite him on to talk about a topic that cuts to the core of his recent novel: imaginary authors. Here is a description of Miller's novel in his own words and five of his favorite books about imaginary authors.)
The Cardboard Universe is a comic novel about a dismal but prolific science-fiction writer named Phoebus K. Dank--in some ways modeled on Philip K. Dick (though Dick was a better writer) and in some ways a kinder, fatter, more prolific version of myself. The book is written in the form of an encyclopedia or reader's guide to Dank's life and works, with entries for each of his fifty-seven novels and numerous stories, plus entries for important people in his life, like his four wives, and entries for topics like Clothing and Diet. The guide is co-authored by two critics: a sycophantic professor named William Boswell, who worships Dank (and even teaches courses in Dank Studies), and a bitter, sarcastic poet named Owen Hirt who constantly disparages Dank.
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut. Though our almost ostentatiously omniscient narrator spends more time inside the troubled head of Duane Hoover, a demented Pontiac salesman, the book’s most endearing character is Kilgore Trout, author of The Planet Gobblers, The Gutless Wonder, Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, The Gospel from Outer Space, Oh Say Can You Smell?, Gilgongo!, Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore, and more than a hundred other horrible-sounding science-fiction novels. Trout lives in demoralized squalor in Cohoes, NY, and installs aluminum storm windows for a living, since up to the point to which the novel brings him, his own have brought him neither fame nor fortune. We’re assured, however, that he is destined for both—destined, indeed, to win a Nobel prize.
Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino. As in several of his other novels, Sorrentino here imagines a whole rotten World of Letters, like a corpse aswarm with maggots: sellouts, show-offs, sycophants and parasites, poetasters, obfuscators, opportunists, self-promoters, poseurs and yoyos, claquers and hacks, immi¬nent suicides, eminent drunks, tubthumpers, logrollers, thumbsuckers, shoegazers, chairwarmers, scaremongers, crotchgrabbers, creeps. Of the dozens (hundreds?) of imaginary authors skewered in this funny and merciless book, my favorites are Tony Lamont, an experimental novelist who suffers equally from the hostility of narrow-minded critics and from his bathyscaphic lack of talent—in the excerpts from Lamont’s own fiction that comprise a good part of the novel, he charts a Mariana Trench of badness; Lamont’s old friend and rival, Dermot Trellis, whose early hasty only-for-the-money pornographic novel The Red Swan has just been “rediscovered” and made hip by literary shotcaller and tastemaker Vance Whitestone; the duplicitous Lorna Flambeaux, whose slender volume of hilariously bad erotica, The Sweat of Love, gives poor Lamont the mistaken idea that she’s “easy”; and a crotchety Nabokov-lookalike named Thomas McCoy.
Orlando, Virginia Woolf. Though Orlando’s literary efforts are upstaged by his impossibly long life—a life of which the highlights include a miraculous and unrequested sex change, two comas, and all sorts of Zeligesque encounters with the famous of all eras—we should never forget that Orlando works on a single poem, “The Oak Tree,” for upward of 300 years. That makes him (I use the male pronoun because the character is more convincing in his male incarnation) our all-time best example of artistic perseverance and perfectionism. Compared to Orlando, Milton was dilettante, Valery a hack. And—like Kilgore Trout’s—his perseverance pays off in the end: “The Oak Tree,” when finally published, becomes a bestseller.
The next sentence may strike some as a digression. Back when my ex-girlfriend was writing her PhD thesis on Woolf, I kept urging her to do it as a pop-up book: during bouts of clinical depression, Woolf would pop less peppily, or wouldn’t pop at all; and on the last page she’d be seen, just afloat, in the Ouse—the river where she drowned herself—with a paper tab the reader had to yank to pull her under.
Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle. Not quite a novel, though it’s hard to say why not, Sartor Resartus (“the tailor retailed”) masquerades as a long essay on a German thinker and his monomaniacal magnum opus, Clothes, their Origin and Influence. Diogenes Teufelsdrockh—Professor of Things in General at the University of Weissnichtwo—sometimes echoes Carlyle’s own heartfelt opinions, which were laughable enough, but is funnier when used to spoof the excesses of ivory-tower metaphysics. Carlyle doesn’t do much to distinguish Teufelsdrockh’s prose from his own, but that’s okay because Carlyle wrote the most exuberant, exhilarating comic prose of any 19th-century English author. And anyhow, Teufelsdrockh is among other things a self-parody, not least in the incontinent gush of his words. We’re told that whenever the metaphysician opened his mouth, everyone in earshot would fall silent, “as if sure to hear something noteworthy.” As always, the narrator elaborates:
Nay, perhaps to hear a whole river of the most memorable utterances; such as, when once thawed, he would for hours indulge in, with fit audience: and the more memorable, as issuing from a head apparently not more interested in them, not more conscious of them, than is the sculptured stone head of some public fountain, which through its brass mouth-tube emits water to the worthy and the unworthy; careless whether it be for cooking victuals or quenching conflagrations; indeed, maintains the same earnest assiduous look, whether any water be flowing or not.
The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien. The closest thing we have to a real nonsense novel. It’s set in a world where nothing but bicycles really seems to matter. When the narrator reports a stolen watch, the policeman is astounded: “Why should anybody steal a watch when they could steal a bicycle? Who ever heard of a man riding a watch down the road or bringing a sack of turf up to his house on the crossbar of his watch?” The funniest parts of the book, though, are the long footnotes concerning the life, opinions, experiments, and publications of a mad scientist named de Selby, for whom the narrator developed an lifelong obsession as a schoolboy. Among other things, de Selby believes—and says so in hilariously self-hypnotic academic prose—that motion is an illusion, that “hammering is anything but what it appears to be,” that water is “too strong” for certain purposes and must be diluted (by means of de Selby’s special water-box, “probably the most delicate and fragile instrument ever made by human hands,” though in the course of its construction de Selby somehow smashes three heavy coal-hammers) and that that night is caused by air pollution:
Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.
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