COMATOSE

by J.A. Tyler

In and out of a coma, a man sees his world truncated - legs up the stairs, legs down the stairs, trees out the window - but there is so much more than an endless array of dreaming, a steeping in the semi-conscious, a climb through and up and toward all that is mental (col)lapse.

130 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2012

About the author

J. A. Tyler is the author of The Zoo, a Going (Dzanc Books). His work has been published in Denver Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, and New York Tyrant among others. He is also an interviewer for Ploughshares.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

On a purely language level I think this has to be some of J.A. Tyler's most impressive work to date. It is certainly his most poetic. The lines are just so evocative, they hold an amazing amount of power. I sat down to start and suddenly realized that I had finished without pausing or looking up once from the book. It just held me in there the whole way through.

[Lisa Basile · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Comatose will wreck you. It will make you remember you are dying, and that you have dared to wish it were otherwise, that you have longed for a world that will last. Reading it hurts like shitting pinecones, like digging hole after hole until you’ve buried everything: your stillborn young, your love, your words, the world. J.A. Tyler doesn’t write mythsof creation and destruction. He makes language-shards that refract your consciousness, that draw blood and make you wonder if it’s real. If you exist. At the end of the book, you won’t know.”
----Joanna Ruocco

[Michael Seidlinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

A six pack of Guiness, a CAO x2 cigar, and 2 hours of this lacerating, hallucinatory text.

That's how I devoured the book and that's how the book devoured me.

Love the language, but don't love it expecting it to love you back. You'll be shocked, turned to stone, by how it'll treat you. But, like someone with a self-destructive behavioral disorder, you'll keep coming back, page after wondrous page.

[ipsit · Rating 5 out of 5]

What kept me reading Comatose was the imagery and the changing tone, yes, but was mostly that way in which I wanted to put together an idea of reality, to piece together which world (that of myth or dream, that of memory, that of overheard sensory detail or comatose stuck-ness) was real, which layer of the palimpsest was dominant, which layer of the ice cream cake was the chocolate crunch. And in the end? I’m still unsure. But that’s what I like the most about Tyler’s Comatose, is that it wears the reader down and it hurts, that the repeated images get mangled, any discernible timeline gets tangled, and that by the end you’re generally uncertain, maybe shaking, and left with the idea that you’re (everyone is) in the same existential boat as the narrator, trapped between worlds physical and mental, between now and then, between the concrete and the imagined, all of it somehow real and unreal at once.

[Doug O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some works you read because the plot, the insidious compulsion to find out “what happens” keeps your eyes lancing back and forth across the page, the screen; some books you read and keep reading because you love the ideas, the psycho-philosophical biscuits of thought, the nibbles; and some books you read because of the ensorcelling language, the shavings of metaphor, the beautiful pockmarks of music in each word, word after word, like a symphany of destruction that enraptures even as the world crumbles around you. J.A. Tyler’s Comatose is that symphony of destruction.

I don't usually comment on a book's cover. This one is disturbing: a black and white etching of a heavily bearded giant with white, pupil-less eyes, his hands wrapped around the trunks of two watery red trees, perhaps using them for balance as he stumbles through the forest. His suspenders dangle lifelessly on his thigh like lost thoughts. The rest of the landscape is bleak-white, and a lone gray crevice stretches across the ground in the distance, like an earth smile that never wanted to manifest. The cover, contrasted with the blocks of prose poems, radiates an eerie, lost sensation, like two empty and incompatible geometric shapes attempting to make love.

Oh, Comatose is no conventional novel by any stretch. Even a book like Marabou Stork Nightmares, where the narrator is in a coma, conscious of himself in a coma, trying to keep his invented coma world and the real world and the past from intersection one another--and it gets crazy--still maintains some kind of definable narrative trajectory. Comatose upends the structure a novel brings and abandons language to a metaphoric space, a “myth,” a hybrid life sizzling between undiscovered and undiscoverable worlds. We are less concerned about what happens and more atuned to the language and the cryptic psychological space forged by that language.

The novel begins, "The pillow talks to me and says things I can't repeat." A few pages later: "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear boy." A few pages later: "The bear looks at her and growls a thundering voice it never knew it had because in her womb it's speaking was burbled-water, closeted on a closed mouth, those womb-walls." Where are we? In some phantasmagoria of a mind, a consciousness struggling to surface yet cannot yet continues to try, like a toothless dog gumming a meatbone. There's a hint of cogency, yet something is off.

Let's take a closer look at some language:

"A woman who believes in heaven, a place where people go when they go. Through the blue veil of a colored sky, painted in glass, the directions a family went."

The narrator invites us to his space, to visit a woman who believes in heaven. We don’t know who she is and it’s likely he doesn’t either. Moreover, the sentence has no verb. It’s a just a woman in space, the blue veil of a colored sky. It’s the final sentence here that clues the reader into something: “the directions a family went.” Did someone or more than someone die? Why directions annd not a single direction? What myth is this mind creating for us and how much can we trust it? Later, the narrator claims: “I feel nothing that I want anyone to believe in.” There’s a sad and uncomfortable logic in that declaration. Are all these vignettes clues to his past life? We cannot be certain. Where are the boundaries of this world? They are like haphazard clues that may be clues to more clues, a layered uncertainty:

"This myth is not a cabin. This cabin is a womb. This cabin is a balance. This cabin is the logs that we together stacked one on another until it was percolating, and we could rest our feet. Until the baby came out dead, and we went to dog another hole in our already rocky ground."

We have a narrator struggling to communicate in whatever splintereed and logically fragmented mind remains to him--trying to communicate something about his past, shape it into something accessible to him and to us. Could these be symbols? Is this myth he constructs be founded on a bedrock of his pre-coma life? Was there or wasn’t there a dead baby? It remains inaccessible--yet, what comatose mind is accessible?

So here is the danger in positioning a narrator in this space: the loss of accessibility. As readers, the space is undefined, yet from that undefined space evolves an ethereal, ever-morphing moment that desires to be more than itself and yet nothing at the same time. Tyler’s work reminds us of the stinging fragility and boundlessness of the fractured mind. That there are no page numbers might say everything there is to say about Comatose.