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A Mortal Affect
Fiction. A MORTAL AFFECT is a satire of meaning systems targeting the role bureaucracy and cultural assumptions play in creating, distorting, and replicating the things we believe to be true. Informed by an absurdism in the Modernist vein, the novel is a celebration of error and folly that questions the wisdom of conviction and the faith in metaphysics. These themes play out in a fictional world inhabited by mortals and immortals, the oppressed and the oppressors. The former understand their condition of being oppressed but have no concept of freedom, while the latter emulate mortals but lack the ability to eat, reproduce, or die, even by suicide. Never allegorical or polemical, the novel operates comfortably within the bounds of comedy, avoiding the earnestness and self-conscious urgency common to the novel of ideas.
189 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 12, 2012
What surprises me most about JA's review is how little a sense of humor he seems to have. I should start, however, by recognizing that my opinion of the book might seem biased. After all, my name is one of the two on the dedication page. This dedication was a generous offering on Vincent’s behalf. But it reflects mostly my dedication to the book.
I will admit to enjoying difficult books, mostly in the genre of fiction, or some kind of hybrid of fiction and poetry, but I would have to say that Vincent’s book is not a difficult read. So perhaps what surprises me most about his review is how wrongly he understood it.
He's right when he says that _A Mortal Affect_ "loosely follows a handful of characters from start to finish," but wrong when he implies that character and plot are the primary concern of the novel. If plot and action are what he was looking for, though, then it's no surprise that he got the details so wrong.
For example, he's wrong when he says that the book is "full of Dante-esque circles of assigned living, painted blue welfare blocs of housing." The welfare blocs turn blue, they're not painted blue. (Big difference.) He's wrong when he says that Lob quests for a new kind of cooking method, or a new kind of anything for that matter. Lob is a weak messenger (a hysterical one) that communicates between The Lineal Descendent and the Rooters. The toaster just happens to be on his desk. It is only farcical that the toaster, like so many other props of the novel, ends up useless, cooking only the hand of the messenger. He's wrong when he says that Dorthea’s name is her "patriarchal" name. It is her "private name" (very big difference, especially in a book that takes great pains to debunk the patriarchy). It'a a private name that could only be known by those who have access to the Archaic Record, and access to this record is strictly forbidden to mortals. That’s why, when Dorthea discovers that someone knows her name, it creates a crisis for rebel mortals.
As to JA's comment that the narrator undergoes a “constant and eventually failing search for a way to be free,” I don’t quite what to do with that. The Lineal Descendent is not the narrator of the book. Sure, he has some first person narrative within the book, but Vincent makes it clear with the shift in tone and perspective (and chapter heading) that the reader is meant to understand The Lineal Descendent as someone very much uninvolved with the rest of the narrative. The Lineal Descendent is a type of solipsistic God who is suicidal. The irony conveyed is his/her failure at death.
Vincent’s book is meant to be understood as a “novel of ideas,” if you enjoy the classification and the term. It is a book very much about the human world and its relationship to power, bureaucracy, and desire. There’s no attempt to “create or envision a world unlike our own” or to “make the imagined feel tangible” because the book’s quest is to convey in a humorous way this irony of power and bureaucracy (though not necessarily desire). This capacity for irony is Vincent’s greatest asset. Only a reader who refuses to think at all about the book at hand as the book at hand would miss the point. And I wouldn’t let my undergraduates get away with that.
I will admit to enjoying difficult books, mostly in the genre of fiction, or some kind of hybrid of fiction and poetry, but I would have to say that Vincent’s book is not a difficult read. So perhaps what surprises me most about his review is how wrongly he understood it.
He's right when he says that _A Mortal Affect_ "loosely follows a handful of characters from start to finish," but wrong when he implies that character and plot are the primary concern of the novel. If plot and action are what he was looking for, though, then it's no surprise that he got the details so wrong.
For example, he's wrong when he says that the book is "full of Dante-esque circles of assigned living, painted blue welfare blocs of housing." The welfare blocs turn blue, they're not painted blue. (Big difference.) He's wrong when he says that Lob quests for a new kind of cooking method, or a new kind of anything for that matter. Lob is a weak messenger (a hysterical one) that communicates between The Lineal Descendent and the Rooters. The toaster just happens to be on his desk. It is only farcical that the toaster, like so many other props of the novel, ends up useless, cooking only the hand of the messenger. He's wrong when he says that Dorthea’s name is her "patriarchal" name. It is her "private name" (very big difference, especially in a book that takes great pains to debunk the patriarchy). It'a a private name that could only be known by those who have access to the Archaic Record, and access to this record is strictly forbidden to mortals. That’s why, when Dorthea discovers that someone knows her name, it creates a crisis for rebel mortals.
As to JA's comment that the narrator undergoes a “constant and eventually failing search for a way to be free,” I don’t quite what to do with that. The Lineal Descendent is not the narrator of the book. Sure, he has some first person narrative within the book, but Vincent makes it clear with the shift in tone and perspective (and chapter heading) that the reader is meant to understand The Lineal Descendent as someone very much uninvolved with the rest of the narrative. The Lineal Descendent is a type of solipsistic God who is suicidal. The irony conveyed is his/her failure at death.
Vincent’s book is meant to be understood as a “novel of ideas,” if you enjoy the classification and the term. It is a book very much about the human world and its relationship to power, bureaucracy, and desire. There’s no attempt to “create or envision a world unlike our own” or to “make the imagined feel tangible” because the book’s quest is to convey in a humorous way this irony of power and bureaucracy (though not necessarily desire). This capacity for irony is Vincent’s greatest asset. Only a reader who refuses to think at all about the book at hand as the book at hand would miss the point. And I wouldn’t let my undergraduates get away with that.
December 5, 2011
"A Mortal Affect, Vincent Standley’s debut novel and the latest release from Calamari Press, is all about creating a world, inventing a vocabulary, and then approaching a proposed conundrum of what it would be like to have a portion of the world immortal, and a portion not. Full of Dante-esque circles of assigned living, painted blue welfare blocs of housing, Rooters (the mortal creatures that populate the novel), and Malkings (the immortals who vie for appropriate living throughout A Mortal Affect), this is a book that attempts to grow a universe, roots and all, in a mere two hundred pages"
Read the full review at Newpages.com: http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/a...
Read the full review at Newpages.com: http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/a...
November 14, 2011
My review at Vol.1: http://vol1brooklyn.com/2011/10/25/re...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews