Unbabbling

by REYoung

In the tour de force called America, one of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses struggles upward to the penthouse of God, discovering too late he's taken the elevator marked down. Resurrected from the rubble of dreams as a messiah and accidental revolutionary, his cry for freedom echoes like a broken record as they lower him into the ground. Like a hopelessly lost coal miner, he digs on, deflating the gloom with slapstick, pensive as a clown, gathering strength for the next round.With Unbabbling, REYoung bursts onto the American literary scene. Bristling with anger and rantings, taking place in cities that seem utterly familiar and completely strange, and cutting across times and countries with the speed of light, Unbabbling is a time machine that stretches back to the Tower of Babel (and before) and moves forward into a distant, twilight future, and along the way descends into Hell. "This bizarre work rattles readers' sensibilities with a rich literary montage of the preposterous that carries with it a very strong social indictment of our times. Highly recommended." (Library Journal 9-1-97)"If you're up for a challenge, or if you ever wondered what it would be like if Beckett were a lowlife American revolutionary, this is the book for you. REYoung's voice is distinctive, and his intellect is powerful." (Mining Company)"The enigmatic REYoung's Unbabbling reads like a wild romp through the subconscious of such esteemed modernists as Joyce, Pynchon, and Kerouac. REYoung has come virtually from nowhere to deliver this stunningly well-crafted novel. . . . It is the dynamic prose style that really makes the novel. REYoung alternates between a Pynchonesque vaudevillian satire to a tortured, rapid-fire stream of consciousness more typical of Jack Kerouac. A truly inspired piece of work." (Booklist 11-1-97)"REYoung unveils a social babble that masks the bankrupt spiritual and emotional quality of human existence. . . . It is a disturbing book, but it is disturbing because it effectively captures how the centrality of humanity has been wholly drowned out by the babble of money." (Rain Taxi Winter 97)"Ambitious and passionately written. . . . REYoung's style of compressing material is unique and viable; time passes so swiftly that events seem pancaked on one another." (Harvey Pekar, Austin Chronicle 5-15-98)

Genres: Fiction, Literature, American, Novels

Paperback

First published June 1, 1997

Reviews

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Check out the Interview George and I conducted with the author here: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/07/1...

This Dalkey Archive discovery is deceptive in its approach but memorable in the extreme. The prose is packed with slapstick, imagery and song, an equal ratio of panic and satire, passion and heartache, while it bubbles over with bombast, belligerence and, after acclimatization, brilliance. Truth be told, it took about a hundred pages to convince me, but after that I became a REYoung reader for the foreseeable future. Now out to purchase the other books, before they disappear…

What is an Unbabbling? After finishing the novel, I can only guess: an unrivaled unraveling, a midsummer night’s Babel. Like one of the narrators, I drank long and deep, but from the book’s intoxicating style. The plot is marked by simplicity, but it is also rich with experience. The value lies in the language, the luscious, exuberant, frolicsome wordplay, and the lucid undercurrent of anger, terror and hedonism.

The first part’s forward-slashing prose deluges verge on delusional, while REYoung introduces the reader to a hoarse, slavering, wage-slave schmooze, a deadbeat, a deadened, heartless Bukowskian complainer, whose days and nights blur like a grainy tape on fast forward, until the sick joy of haggard reminiscence instills a palpable dread. The pages drip with ecstatic sweaty spasms of laboring paragraphs, wherein images swarm like the cross-section of a beehive.

The impact of real life can often be moving, and the horrid prospect of merely living is disturbing when described in the gritty, greasy manner here employed. Our main character reaches for the bottle, murders a part of himself every night when he comes home, gets back up in the morning, and that weight gets heavier and heavier all the time. A Sisyphean accumulation. I, for one, sympathized with the amassing burden experience imparts.

The unhinged descriptions continue in part 2, as the context shifts. The unremitting anger is reminiscent of Ellison’s underground man – a scenario which occurs in Part 3 to full Dostoyevskian effect. Here, cynicism, is a form of wisdom. Interior monologues merge with dialogues – yet which pieces are pretend, which manifestations are real versus imagined? The monster of self-loathing morphs into a universal loathing, but it is somehow crystalline, even amid the frazzled, frenetic, hectic burping prose avalanches, which gurgle forth in volcanic bursts. It is perhaps because of the marvels of compression the author pulls off, that his hypnotic storytelling takes on such depths.

In Unbabbling, REYoung tunnels straight through the heart of America, down into its rotting belly, excavating the fear and disgust which has piled up for centuries like the bedrock holding up the guv'na's house.

[knig · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Dalkey, understated even by Dalkey standards. Who is Reyoung? How can there be nothing out there on this man? Complete blackout, true ‘man of mystery’. ‘Unbabbling’ also debuted without fanfare in 1997: unassuming, unpromoted, and frankly unread. A real shame.

The novel is arranged in three ‘silos’ : standalone stories loosely seamed together through the narrative consciousness of Harry, who morphs into new personas whilst preserving the Harry moniker as a signifier of a macabre continuity.

I read the first part ‘Unbabbling’, and skimmed through the rest before setting it aside: nothing to do with quirkiness of this gem and everything to do with my own idiosyncrasies: I don’t do trilogies in one book at the same time. (Tourettes, you know).

Set in some indeterminate future, and unspecified town (so vaguely alluded to I didn’t realise it until the story was almost over: I thought it was happening in NYC), protag Harry seems to have been plucked from the heart of Bukowski’s oeuvre, fleshed out to ‘Roman’ proportions and loosed in 3D: a Pinnochio ‘unbabbled’.

Harry is a vet, suffering from shell shock, immersed in a haze of booze and drugs, plagued by war terrors, sweating it out in a stone quarry by day and meshing with ‘his people’ at night: the underbelly of society, the salt n’ pepper miscreants whose unheard lament echoes across the battlefields of American wars (well its true, isn’t it? I don’t think the American soldier on the ground is a senator’s son, now, is he?). And, he hates himself, and life of course is meaningless.
The problem of course in situations like these is that if you hate yourself, you have trouble believing anyone else could possibly love you. Therefore, they must all have nefarious purposes: they must be out to get you. And with this philosophy in mind, Harry undergoes a Mephistophelean metamorphosis whilst fucking over his wife and kid.(E.g. rises up the corporate ladder, makes a load of money, starts sleeping with his boss: the usual deal). Needless to say, happiness remains an unattained illusion whilst the death of soul, if not body, count around him rises. Mephistopheles with a Medusa touch: everyone he turns his hand to withers and shrivels to husk.

Its not a unique story by any means. What wins me over is the raw, unpurified anger, the electrifying intensity of emotion, prose, purpose and praxis of anguish. A pancea of pain and helpless rage ooze like treacle off the page, and Reyoung hovers somewhere in the wings, holding an electric cattle prod, which he periodically brandishes with unbridled relish straight into my neural network, so that I’m unbabbled right alongside Harry, in tandem.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Darkly fascinating debut (and only) novel from an odd Russian linguist styling himself with the solo nomenclature. And why not? This novel is divided into three parts, each written a different narrative register. The first part, ‘Unbabbling’, is in the first person and tells of a Vietnam vet’s ascension from hell to, uh, another hell. The style is furious, bile-filled and fun. ‘Hell Squared’ is the shortest section, and the least interesting. A po-faced story of a street criminal writhing in his own filth, it pads out the novel but is sorely lacking in irony. ‘Manhole,’ the longest part, certainly isn't lacking in irony. It tells the surreal tale of Erde, a hard-working construction worker who stumbles upon a corporate plot to build a deadly bridge. He is blamed for the accident and thrown down a manhole as punishment, whereafter he becomes a celebrity and then gradually retreats into an underground world of striking unusualness. This is the weirdest, fiercest novel you will never read.

[D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here it is, the beginning of one of the most interesting careers in modern American writing.

In Unbabbling, REYoung gives readers three separate but connected story-worlds that seem to represent the eternal return of a single spirit/soul/character as he climbs the planes of consciousness towards something like enlightenment, revolution, or maybe just pizza and a beer.

Its an effective and well-executed conceptual framework for the themes REYoung seems to be exploring such as working-class resentment and individualism. And if you're not one for high concepts, fear not, the sections could all conceivably be read completely separate of each other as novellas that stand strong on their own. There are rewards for those who read it as a complete work though, and REY is happy to make the journey as funny (or at least as funny smelling) as possible along the way. The wordplay and surrealism grow with each successive return.

You begin with Harry, in a sort of dystopian future version of a Selby Jr. novel to wallow in booze and sex and resentment and failed dreams. From there we are thrust into the post apocalyptic night-world of Nakt (or maybe Joseph or Peter) as an awareness of how truly f***ed we've become emerges from the dark. And finally we are given the true gift of the book in Erde, and all the wild plotting and wordplay that comes with him. It is this section on which the book's power truly rests. A tour-de-force of absolute insanity and fun and revenge on everyone and everything that has turned this world into a collection of collapsing bridges and gestapo Boy Scout troops.
In this final section REYoung emerges as the writer they will be remembered as, zany and vaudevillian and hard edged but heartfelt. A style explored even further in their next book "Margarito and the Snowman" - the opus thus far.

But it is here in Unbabbling where an unsuspecting world was introduced to a literary Zappa, an heir to Pynchon, and a truly unique voice of REYoung's own.

[Jordan West · Rating 5 out of 5]

You Bright and Risen Angels if it'd been written by Sorrentino, Le Clezio and Godspeed You Black Emperor - REYoung another pseudonym for Frank's World scribe George Mangels maybe?

[Van McNeil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Embarrassed by original review lol