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In the Suavity of the Rock
Looking back on his earlier selves at a time when all seems lost, a man reflects on a series of abiding memories. But these are not memories of milestones and waymarkers, of the events and experiences that have shaped his life. They are memories of what has occurred in the negative space around his core being-brief encounters, passions thwarted, relationships cut short and desires not pursued-and, in being reflected on, they shape another self that is both powerfully of the world and concealed from it.
In his prismatic début novel, In the Suavity of the Rock, Greg Gerke explores an existential crisis that doesn't seek to define a stable self so much as to rescue beauty from instability. With the observant eye and intricate style that characterise his acclaimed essays, Gerke probes at an identity disturbed by its own mercurial nature and asks the essential questions of a life conceived in narrative Do we distort our own self-awareness when we select experiences for retelling? Is there true continuity between our past and present selves, or is an identification with the past a way of chaining oneself to it? And might it be the case that a self is not the source of a story? Might it be, instead, that by forcing fluid experience into a story's form, we manufacture the illusion that our essence isn't chaos?
In his prismatic début novel, In the Suavity of the Rock, Greg Gerke explores an existential crisis that doesn't seek to define a stable self so much as to rescue beauty from instability. With the observant eye and intricate style that characterise his acclaimed essays, Gerke probes at an identity disturbed by its own mercurial nature and asks the essential questions of a life conceived in narrative Do we distort our own self-awareness when we select experiences for retelling? Is there true continuity between our past and present selves, or is an identification with the past a way of chaining oneself to it? And might it be the case that a self is not the source of a story? Might it be, instead, that by forcing fluid experience into a story's form, we manufacture the illusion that our essence isn't chaos?
292 pages, Paperback
Published June 28, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 30, 2024
I started this book because I was quite impressed by a few pieces published in Socrates on the Beach, the literary journal the author publishes. I had also been quite impressed by the author's presence on Twitter: he seems like a very literate dude. My goal is to better understand what's happening in "contemporary" literature, so I decided I would try to see what he sees.
I'm not sure where I got the idea in my head that this is autofiction, since it doesn't actually seem to be present anywhere in the marketing, but for whatever reason I entered into the novel with the idea that there is some correspondence between the narrative and the author's personal experience. This is somewhat reinforced by the fact that the book is written in the first person, and that there is a certain banality of action / proximity to the event that I personally associate with the autofiction genre (obviously, My Struggle being the exemplar here). The coming-to-be of a Writer is also a theme present throughout the text, and my understanding is that "autofiction" is distinct from memoir or autobiography in that the inscription of the text is part of the text's narrative. There is no explicit reference to "In the Suavity of the Rock" (at least that I picked up on), although the phrase does appear towards the end of the first section...and I have to say, the title drop hits very, very hard.
As the book winds on, it became more and more obvious that there's no way all of the events recounted could be True. If they were, I am certain I would have a more clear picture of who the author is. You would not be able to write a book with as much confession without the confessor being a more obvious aspect of the marketing. You can't write autofiction without positioning yourself as a public figure. Not only have I never seen an image of the author, but I think the narrator might have been named as Rick?? Idk, I could be wrong: like a lot of heavily formalist, modernist fiction, I can't help but phase in and out of the narrative.
This is very much a language-forward book that puts a lot of stress on individual sentences---fitting, since one of the author's favourite authors seems to be William Gass, who is well known for doing the same. It was not uncommon for me to come across a sentence where I would think, there must be some kind of typo here; but upon repetition, you figure out where the emphasis is and the syntax becomes clear. This is honestly more impressive than having sentence structures that are immediately alien. Instead, I would describe the sentences here and elsewhere in Socrates on the Beach as "uncanny." The surface appears calm, but you perceive a ripple and, when you follow in its wake, you find something wholly bizarre beneath the surface. It is not quite on the same level as Garielle Lutz, who compounds this effect through unusual syntax, a complex vocabulary, and completely alien imagery. This book has some vocabulary, sure, but it's a normal level of big vocabulary. Instead, the virtuosity is presenting the sort of quotidian events and imagery typical of realism or autofiction, but in a way that reveals their strangeness. The book is a big, dense block of text, with long titled sections broken up by paragraph breaks that give you some breathing room. It has a rhythm, though, and I was definitely able to settle into it.
As for the story itself...well, for me the highlight is the long section describing the narrator's relationship and breakup with his live-in girlfriend. This kind of story is catnip to me, as I think it is to many. Indeed, it is so relatable, so elemental, and especially so typical of my demographic, that it has become a cliche and I feel like there is some hesitancy to approach the subject head-on. This particular story doesn't succeed (for me) because of the language or any other trick, but rather because of the sincerity. I doubt that every aspect of this plot arc is True in the sense of Accurate to Life, but it is True in the sense of sincere and relatable. It's a simple love story, well told. I will make another Gass comparison and say that it reminded me of the part of "The Tunnel" where Koehler talks about the first apartment he lived in with his wife. The shitty apartment with the thin walls, where they came to know the neighbours and the difficulty of married life.
Another part that stuck out to me is, in the final section, when the narrator, now separated from his wife and the mother of his child, is so committed to his art that he is unable to commit to parenting his daughter. That status of being half-in, half-out of one's obligations is also highly relatable.
As for the themes, or the profundity of the book...if we are to give license to the publisher's description, then, going against what I said at the beginning of this review, I think we have to look at the meta of the text. Again, I'm quite stupid, so a lot is definitely lost on me, but if the book is about whether "we distort our own self-awareness when we select experiences for retelling...[if] there is true continuity between our past and present selves, or is an identification with the past a way of chaining oneself to it," these themes exist as subtext. They become apparent at the end, when we close the book and reflect on the timeline. Although we are moving around a lot through time, the notion that the narrator is relating memories recedes somewhat into the background. The end happens quite a bit later on than the beginning or the middle, so it is apparent that we have been treated to a recollection---and to what end? There's a lot that's left unsaid about the why of it all.
I'm not sure where I got the idea in my head that this is autofiction, since it doesn't actually seem to be present anywhere in the marketing, but for whatever reason I entered into the novel with the idea that there is some correspondence between the narrative and the author's personal experience. This is somewhat reinforced by the fact that the book is written in the first person, and that there is a certain banality of action / proximity to the event that I personally associate with the autofiction genre (obviously, My Struggle being the exemplar here). The coming-to-be of a Writer is also a theme present throughout the text, and my understanding is that "autofiction" is distinct from memoir or autobiography in that the inscription of the text is part of the text's narrative. There is no explicit reference to "In the Suavity of the Rock" (at least that I picked up on), although the phrase does appear towards the end of the first section...and I have to say, the title drop hits very, very hard.
As the book winds on, it became more and more obvious that there's no way all of the events recounted could be True. If they were, I am certain I would have a more clear picture of who the author is. You would not be able to write a book with as much confession without the confessor being a more obvious aspect of the marketing. You can't write autofiction without positioning yourself as a public figure. Not only have I never seen an image of the author, but I think the narrator might have been named as Rick?? Idk, I could be wrong: like a lot of heavily formalist, modernist fiction, I can't help but phase in and out of the narrative.
This is very much a language-forward book that puts a lot of stress on individual sentences---fitting, since one of the author's favourite authors seems to be William Gass, who is well known for doing the same. It was not uncommon for me to come across a sentence where I would think, there must be some kind of typo here; but upon repetition, you figure out where the emphasis is and the syntax becomes clear. This is honestly more impressive than having sentence structures that are immediately alien. Instead, I would describe the sentences here and elsewhere in Socrates on the Beach as "uncanny." The surface appears calm, but you perceive a ripple and, when you follow in its wake, you find something wholly bizarre beneath the surface. It is not quite on the same level as Garielle Lutz, who compounds this effect through unusual syntax, a complex vocabulary, and completely alien imagery. This book has some vocabulary, sure, but it's a normal level of big vocabulary. Instead, the virtuosity is presenting the sort of quotidian events and imagery typical of realism or autofiction, but in a way that reveals their strangeness. The book is a big, dense block of text, with long titled sections broken up by paragraph breaks that give you some breathing room. It has a rhythm, though, and I was definitely able to settle into it.
As for the story itself...well, for me the highlight is the long section describing the narrator's relationship and breakup with his live-in girlfriend. This kind of story is catnip to me, as I think it is to many. Indeed, it is so relatable, so elemental, and especially so typical of my demographic, that it has become a cliche and I feel like there is some hesitancy to approach the subject head-on. This particular story doesn't succeed (for me) because of the language or any other trick, but rather because of the sincerity. I doubt that every aspect of this plot arc is True in the sense of Accurate to Life, but it is True in the sense of sincere and relatable. It's a simple love story, well told. I will make another Gass comparison and say that it reminded me of the part of "The Tunnel" where Koehler talks about the first apartment he lived in with his wife. The shitty apartment with the thin walls, where they came to know the neighbours and the difficulty of married life.
Another part that stuck out to me is, in the final section, when the narrator, now separated from his wife and the mother of his child, is so committed to his art that he is unable to commit to parenting his daughter. That status of being half-in, half-out of one's obligations is also highly relatable.
As for the themes, or the profundity of the book...if we are to give license to the publisher's description, then, going against what I said at the beginning of this review, I think we have to look at the meta of the text. Again, I'm quite stupid, so a lot is definitely lost on me, but if the book is about whether "we distort our own self-awareness when we select experiences for retelling...[if] there is true continuity between our past and present selves, or is an identification with the past a way of chaining oneself to it," these themes exist as subtext. They become apparent at the end, when we close the book and reflect on the timeline. Although we are moving around a lot through time, the notion that the narrator is relating memories recedes somewhat into the background. The end happens quite a bit later on than the beginning or the middle, so it is apparent that we have been treated to a recollection---and to what end? There's a lot that's left unsaid about the why of it all.
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June 21, 2024Ruinous, horrible. Improbable amount of metaphor & simile per page. Excellent lesson in vocabulary. Painfully upsetting and hard to read. ahh.
August 15, 2025
What a sad story this is: a first person narrator with literary aspirations who finds himself endlessly “held back” by he knows not what engages in relentless self-excoriation and reaches for increasingly far-fetched poetic expressions to convey his sense of creative and personal frustration.
As it happens, I can personally identify with many aspects of what the narrator describes, in the novel’s opening sentence, as his “blight”, and I found much of this work engaging. I was particularly interested in hints the narrator drops on how his own creative manifesto has evolved over time, culminating, presumably, in the writing of the book that is in our hands. I did, though, find the last part of the novel, where we see more of the life of the narrator in his fifties or sixties, a bit of a grind, as it becomes increasingly clear the narrator is unlikely ever to free himself from all that mentally ails him, and that all the fragments of his experience to which we have been introduced are likely to remain… well, just fragments.
The work forms an interesting contrast to the oeuvre of Gerald Murnane. Both this work and much of Murnane’s seem to invite the description “autofiction”, yet the two writers’ approaches to this genre could not be more different, with Murnane preferring to tease and tease away at the significance some image in his memory, working outwards from that image to other associations, while Gerke appears to have adopted an approach more like “if I throw enough mud from my past at this wall, perhaps eventually some of it will stick, and I will be free at last from what troubles me”.
Personally I’m not convinced that Gerke’s approach creates a more satisfying work of art. However, I do think this is a damn brave try.
As it happens, I can personally identify with many aspects of what the narrator describes, in the novel’s opening sentence, as his “blight”, and I found much of this work engaging. I was particularly interested in hints the narrator drops on how his own creative manifesto has evolved over time, culminating, presumably, in the writing of the book that is in our hands. I did, though, find the last part of the novel, where we see more of the life of the narrator in his fifties or sixties, a bit of a grind, as it becomes increasingly clear the narrator is unlikely ever to free himself from all that mentally ails him, and that all the fragments of his experience to which we have been introduced are likely to remain… well, just fragments.
The work forms an interesting contrast to the oeuvre of Gerald Murnane. Both this work and much of Murnane’s seem to invite the description “autofiction”, yet the two writers’ approaches to this genre could not be more different, with Murnane preferring to tease and tease away at the significance some image in his memory, working outwards from that image to other associations, while Gerke appears to have adopted an approach more like “if I throw enough mud from my past at this wall, perhaps eventually some of it will stick, and I will be free at last from what troubles me”.
Personally I’m not convinced that Gerke’s approach creates a more satisfying work of art. However, I do think this is a damn brave try.
September 19, 2025
A book club read that was ultimately the definition of a slough. Gerke is clearly a smartiepants with an extensive vocabulary but it's employed in the most distracting way here that constantly undermines any momentum you start to build as a reader. And it was challenging enough to build that momentum in the first place since these hyper-detailed accounts of seemingly random experiences in this tragically failed writer's life were not that engaging to begin with. There is a reveal of a pretty heinous childhood trauma suffered by the protagonist buried late into the book and more or less glazed over and that did help me to feel more investment or at least softness towards him.
July 26, 2024
Kindle version is unobtainable
I preordered this book on Kindle, and have only ever received a five page document announcing the book will be available at a date now a month past. Have written to publishers and Amazon and have so far had no reply from either. This is not a rating of the book as such, which I have been unable to read.
I preordered this book on Kindle, and have only ever received a five page document announcing the book will be available at a date now a month past. Have written to publishers and Amazon and have so far had no reply from either. This is not a rating of the book as such, which I have been unable to read.
January 2, 2026
A profound study of how we experience time, to the extent that we can permit ourselves to feel the pressure of memory, and of the self-knowledge and sense of choice that result. A sad and beautiful book, and written with great energy.
March 12, 2025
The inescapable weight of memory presses a man’s disappointed creative ego into a dark and beautiful gemstone.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews