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I Didn't See It Coming
I Didn’t See It Coming is the dark and exciting culmination of William E. Jones’s trilogy of novels set in Los Angeles. The new book begins several years after the end of the second novel. I Should Have Known Better’s former art school students and their companions face decisions about whether they should continue their frivolous adventures or begin to lead more conventional lives. As these bright young things approach middle age―and gentrification swallows up affordable neighborhoods―they find themselves dealing with real life in all its unpleasantness against a background of news about the war in Iraq. Due to stubbornness or inertia, the narrator sticks to his bohemian ways, finding work in the porn industry, while his friends settle down, flourish as artists, leave town, or destroy themselves.
I Didn’t See It Coming continues the stories of all of the major characters in the trilogy, including Moira, the idealistic leftist who emigrates to Mexico; Bernie, the brilliant but wildly impractical teacher and book collector; Paul, the promiscuous and acidly witty fop; and Winston, the Balkan immigrant who returns to Europe and is catapulted to art stardom. The novel also reveals the fate of Temo, the love of the narrator’s life, who disappears under mysterious circumstances at the conclusion of I Should Have Known Better. I Didn’t See It Coming is a page turner bristling with energy and brimming with the kind of explicit sex scenes that readers have come to expect from the author of I’m Open to Anything and True Homosexual Experiences.
I Didn’t See It Coming continues the stories of all of the major characters in the trilogy, including Moira, the idealistic leftist who emigrates to Mexico; Bernie, the brilliant but wildly impractical teacher and book collector; Paul, the promiscuous and acidly witty fop; and Winston, the Balkan immigrant who returns to Europe and is catapulted to art stardom. The novel also reveals the fate of Temo, the love of the narrator’s life, who disappears under mysterious circumstances at the conclusion of I Should Have Known Better. I Didn’t See It Coming is a page turner bristling with energy and brimming with the kind of explicit sex scenes that readers have come to expect from the author of I’m Open to Anything and True Homosexual Experiences.
288 pages, Paperback
Published June 15, 2023
67 people want to read
About the author
William E. Jones
42 books24 followersWilliam E. Jones is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. He has published the following books: Is It Really So Strange? (2006), Tearoom (2008), Heliogabalus (2009), Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (2009), Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010), Halsted Plays Himself (2011), Between Artists: Thom Andersen and William E. Jones (2013), and Imitation of Christ, a catalogue for the exhibition he curated at UCLA Hammer Museum in 2013. Recent books include Flesh and the Cosmos (2014) and True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell (2016). His first novel, I'm Open to Anything, was published in early 2019. Jones's writing has also appeared in periodicals such as Animal Shelter, Area Sneaks, Artforum, Bidoun, Butt, Frieze, Little Joe, Mousse, and The White Review.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 23, 2023
Readers of Jones' earlier novels know what to expect: interesting art-talk/gossip and artworld hijinks, complex, messy friendships and affairs, lots of colorful local detail, and of course, fisting. And again it's hard not to conflate the author with the narrator. The latter's failed porn project is obviously a reference to the author's Tearoom.
This is a bit chatty and gossipy, but it captures the queer artist in pre-gentrication urban environments so well. Obviously I enjoy the Berlin section more than I should. Ostkreuz these days is obviously a lot more mellow than 20 years ago, but it's still far from the tourist hotspots (unless they're trying to find their way to Berghain). So another highly entertaining novel, and with the narrator moving to Berlin, perhaps we'll see another sequel chronicling his adventures there.
This is a bit chatty and gossipy, but it captures the queer artist in pre-gentrication urban environments so well. Obviously I enjoy the Berlin section more than I should. Ostkreuz these days is obviously a lot more mellow than 20 years ago, but it's still far from the tourist hotspots (unless they're trying to find their way to Berghain). So another highly entertaining novel, and with the narrator moving to Berlin, perhaps we'll see another sequel chronicling his adventures there.
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September 24, 2023I Didn't See It Coming forms the conclusion to a trilogy of novels that constitute a loose bildungsroman of a life lived against a background of rural deindustrialisation, urban gentrification and the failure of the Iraq war. The three novels take the narrator from the Midwest rustbelt, after the death of his unemployed plant manager father, to Los Angeles. His time in Los Angeles takes him through a series of precarious jobs, most notably working in a communist bookstore, which ends up being closed down to house a gallery before eventually getting sold for real estate redevelopment. The bookshop owner compares the experience of being able to live in London for next to nothing by squatting through to ending up commuting to work for the California prison system. By the end of the final novel, most of the characters will have been displaced from Los Angeles to Mexico, Pomona and East Berlin.
Given this background, you'd probably expect a fairly leftist slant to the novels (and that isn't entirely incorrect) but the novels are equally formed against the background of communism's ultimate failure and collapse. For example, the narrator's best friend Moira espouses a communist worldview that isn't quite capable of dealing with the failures of revolutionary politics: "Cuba's revolution was a fundamental step in liberating oppressed peoples... but unfortunately, Cuba's revolution has become authoritarian." In the second book, Moira complains that the narrator's stance is more punk than leftwing when he says "Why would I want a revolution? Society as it exists now allows me to revolt. Revolutions supress individuality. They're all about the collective good and they eventually become authoritarian... I'd prefer the world not to change so I can be against the world... I'm the product of decadent American individualism." Some of that comes over in the depiction of the narrator's circle of friends, who range from impecunious academics, illegal immigrants to a successful gallery owner whose ruthless efficiency the narrator grudgingly admires.
In practice, it's not that simple though. The narrator is later criticised for his use of communist imagery in his artworks as if 1989 had never happened: "I think the society where gold is so worthless that it's used to manufacture toilets never happened must be a utopia. Obviously, this utopia never came into existence but that doesn't mean we should stop hoping for it." At another juncture he characterises socialist states as having manufactured realities to cover the gap between utopia and reality, before essentially describing the capitalist utopia as equally phantasmagoric for doing much the same in the wake of its slow decline since 1973.
One of the more interesting critiques of political ideology in the novels comes from an Albanian immigrant who goes by the Orwellian pseudonym of Winston, who escaped Albania's post communist political collapse and recreates its communist past in paintings of figures like Hoxha and Stalin: "I live under capitalism. The capitalist system has as its inherent condition for functioning that its own ideology must not be taken seriously. The ideal political subject is one who has ironic distance from the system. Therefore the only way to be subversive is not to develop critical distance or irony at all, but to take the system more seriously than it takes itself." Winston's paintings become very successful and by the final book he's experimenting with imagery of money and investments in a manner that suggests this seriousness has been displaced by fatalism: "finance is the highest level of aspiration. The promising graduates of elite universities no longer becomes artists, historians and scientists - they work for banks and brokerages... the proletariat has no choice, no future."
The more observant reader may well note at this point that I've managed to get thus far without mentioning the best known aspect to the novels: sex. The narrator spends much of the first book working as a clerk in an adult video store before ending up working editing porn films after his art career fails to cover his costs. Most obviously, the novel focusses on sex that's far removed from heterosexual norms, whether the narrator's fisting or Winston's voyeurism. I think the point here is that for all that Genet and Cooper get referenced, these depictions aren't trying to transgress sexual norms as much as they're just not very interested in them. A lot of the Jones's thinking seems to be that mainstream norms are fundamentally broken and the only alternative is to create spaces for alternatives, like , where logical communities replace those that existed by accident of birth. It's perhaps an odd outcome and there's no real focus on any lgbt community in either Los Angeles or Berlin. There's an obvious contrast with the fate of Temo, who ends up .
Given this background, you'd probably expect a fairly leftist slant to the novels (and that isn't entirely incorrect) but the novels are equally formed against the background of communism's ultimate failure and collapse. For example, the narrator's best friend Moira espouses a communist worldview that isn't quite capable of dealing with the failures of revolutionary politics: "Cuba's revolution was a fundamental step in liberating oppressed peoples... but unfortunately, Cuba's revolution has become authoritarian." In the second book, Moira complains that the narrator's stance is more punk than leftwing when he says "Why would I want a revolution? Society as it exists now allows me to revolt. Revolutions supress individuality. They're all about the collective good and they eventually become authoritarian... I'd prefer the world not to change so I can be against the world... I'm the product of decadent American individualism." Some of that comes over in the depiction of the narrator's circle of friends, who range from impecunious academics, illegal immigrants to a successful gallery owner whose ruthless efficiency the narrator grudgingly admires.
In practice, it's not that simple though. The narrator is later criticised for his use of communist imagery in his artworks as if 1989 had never happened: "I think the society where gold is so worthless that it's used to manufacture toilets never happened must be a utopia. Obviously, this utopia never came into existence but that doesn't mean we should stop hoping for it." At another juncture he characterises socialist states as having manufactured realities to cover the gap between utopia and reality, before essentially describing the capitalist utopia as equally phantasmagoric for doing much the same in the wake of its slow decline since 1973.
One of the more interesting critiques of political ideology in the novels comes from an Albanian immigrant who goes by the Orwellian pseudonym of Winston, who escaped Albania's post communist political collapse and recreates its communist past in paintings of figures like Hoxha and Stalin: "I live under capitalism. The capitalist system has as its inherent condition for functioning that its own ideology must not be taken seriously. The ideal political subject is one who has ironic distance from the system. Therefore the only way to be subversive is not to develop critical distance or irony at all, but to take the system more seriously than it takes itself." Winston's paintings become very successful and by the final book he's experimenting with imagery of money and investments in a manner that suggests this seriousness has been displaced by fatalism: "finance is the highest level of aspiration. The promising graduates of elite universities no longer becomes artists, historians and scientists - they work for banks and brokerages... the proletariat has no choice, no future."
The more observant reader may well note at this point that I've managed to get thus far without mentioning the best known aspect to the novels: sex. The narrator spends much of the first book working as a clerk in an adult video store before ending up working editing porn films after his art career fails to cover his costs. Most obviously, the novel focusses on sex that's far removed from heterosexual norms, whether the narrator's fisting or Winston's voyeurism. I think the point here is that for all that Genet and Cooper get referenced, these depictions aren't trying to transgress sexual norms as much as they're just not very interested in them. A lot of the Jones's thinking seems to be that mainstream norms are fundamentally broken and the only alternative is to create spaces for alternatives, like , where logical communities replace those that existed by accident of birth. It's perhaps an odd outcome and there's no real focus on any lgbt community in either Los Angeles or Berlin. There's an obvious contrast with the fate of Temo, who ends up .
October 1, 2023
A wonderful end to a modern tale of gentrification, friendship, and fisting.
July 11, 2024
I did see it coming... it wasn't that good
December 15, 2024
An optimistic conclusion to a wonderful trilogy
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews