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Glyph
In paperback for the first time, the much-beloved satirical novel The New York Times praised as “both a treatise and a romp”
Baby Ralph has ways to pass the time in his crib—but they don’t include staring at a mobile. Aided by his mother, he reads voraciously: “All of Swift, all of Sterne, Invisible Man, Baldwin, Joyce, Balzac, Auden, Roethke,” along with a generous helping of philosophy, semiotics, and trashy thrillers. He’s also fond of writing poems and stories (in crayon). But Ralph has limits. He’s mute by choice and can’t drive, so in his own estimation he’s not a genius. Unfortunately for him, everyone else disagrees. His psychiatrist kidnaps him for testing, and once his brilliance is quantified (IQ: 475), a Pentagon officer also abducts him. Diabolically funny and lacerating in its critique of post-structuralism, Glyph has the feverish plot of a thriller and the philosophical depth of a text by Roland Barthes. If anyone can map the wilds of literary theory, it’s Ralph, one of Percival Everett’s most enduring creations.
Baby Ralph has ways to pass the time in his crib—but they don’t include staring at a mobile. Aided by his mother, he reads voraciously: “All of Swift, all of Sterne, Invisible Man, Baldwin, Joyce, Balzac, Auden, Roethke,” along with a generous helping of philosophy, semiotics, and trashy thrillers. He’s also fond of writing poems and stories (in crayon). But Ralph has limits. He’s mute by choice and can’t drive, so in his own estimation he’s not a genius. Unfortunately for him, everyone else disagrees. His psychiatrist kidnaps him for testing, and once his brilliance is quantified (IQ: 475), a Pentagon officer also abducts him. Diabolically funny and lacerating in its critique of post-structuralism, Glyph has the feverish plot of a thriller and the philosophical depth of a text by Roland Barthes. If anyone can map the wilds of literary theory, it’s Ralph, one of Percival Everett’s most enduring creations.
216 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1999
75 people are currently reading
1962 people want to read
About the author
Percival Everett
72 books8,806 followersPercival L. Everett (born 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.
The Washington Post has called Everett “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.” And according to The Boston Globe, “He’s literature’s NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next.”
Everett, who teaches courses in creative writing, American studies and critical theory, says he writes about what interests him, which explains his prolific output and the range of subjects he has tackled. He also describes himself as a demanding teacher who learns from his students as much as they learn from him.
Everett’s writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991.
There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.
The Washington Post has called Everett “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.” And according to The Boston Globe, “He’s literature’s NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next.”
Everett, who teaches courses in creative writing, American studies and critical theory, says he writes about what interests him, which explains his prolific output and the range of subjects he has tackled. He also describes himself as a demanding teacher who learns from his students as much as they learn from him.
Everett’s writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991.
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February 26, 2022
The Boredom of Infantile Leisure
Babies lock on to language because they are literally bored to tears, even in their dreams. Having been hooked on language, they are so immersed in it that they have no memory of ever having been without it. The world of language is, so to speak, the only one they know and they treat it as if it is the only one there is. It is shocking to then discover that what looks solid language, is mostly hot air. Nevertheless, there is no way back. Boredom drives them ever deeper into the language which hides reality. But refusing to speak keeps language at a safe distance. The smartest ones talk latest; the best not at all.
The one word in language, the only one really, worth taking seriously is ‘death.’ Death is both inside and outside language (unlike ‘God’, and ‘truth’, and even ‘reality’ which are purely linguistic and must be taken cum grano salis). Death is the worm hole that facilitates the passage from words to not-words. It doesn’t lead back into some pre-linguistic paradise but it goes in a different direction and leads somewhere else. Death is a destination one can rely on. As infants mature, they become increasingly aware of this. Frightening at first, the more that they have to deal with language, the more appealing death becomes.
The form which has no substance that we call language is after all a rather stressful place. A highly precocious baby who is adept at language at birth but doesn’t let on is in a privileged position to notice this. His parents are being driven personally and professionally mad by their obsessive need to express what they call ‘themselves.’ Ralph, the baby, doesn’t fall for that. Ralph knows that transforming oneself into language is worse than death; it is hell. He reads, he takes notes, and he writes poetry to his mother. But none of this is Ralph. Ralph does not speak so isn’t absorbed by language. He formulates his own Ontological Proof to make the point:
Being born with a complete language set, as it were, has definite advantages, as Ralph recognises: “because I lacked the prelinguistic clutter, the subtextual litter, I actually understood language better than any adult. Talk of time never threw me for a loop. Pronouns never confused me. I used me when I was supposed to and never once wondered when my mother used I whether she was speaking of me.” Even better, there is no epistemological gap between words and things. Language for Ralph is simply unproblematic: “For me, there was no gap, as there is no gap for anyone.”
But anyone who is being OK with language can’t be OK with a world that isn’t. Everyone wants to know how it’s done. And that precisely is why they aren’t OK with language. They think there’s some trick, technique, or theory, that is to say, more bits of language that will allow them to conquer the thing. Not going to happen. Ralph knows we live in a story; he’s comfortable with that. But academics, and scientists, and literary critics (to name but a few professions which do have a problem with language) are not. This makes them wild beasts.
Linguistic analysis has become the new theology. Exactly the same problems arise as with the old theology: no one has ever found a way to talk about the Absolute, whether God or Language, sensibly. Both have infinite potential and therefore can’t be defined or limited by what is inferior to them, namely words and creatures. This drives the new theologians as crazy as the old ones. Ultimately both theology and linguistics fall back on metaphor, the thing they hate the most.
The idea that we are like dimensionless points on a line-segment of infinite slightness and fragility, seeking to connect with other segments in order to create the shapes we call stories is a pretty good metaphor by Ralph. It’s certainly enough to be getting on with. Everett is terrific with new shapes. And through him Ralph gives some great advice for a four year old: “Tell your ideas not to talk to strangers. Don’t let your ideas play in the street. Don’t give your ideas any toys with pieces so small that they might choke on them.”
Babies lock on to language because they are literally bored to tears, even in their dreams. Having been hooked on language, they are so immersed in it that they have no memory of ever having been without it. The world of language is, so to speak, the only one they know and they treat it as if it is the only one there is. It is shocking to then discover that what looks solid language, is mostly hot air. Nevertheless, there is no way back. Boredom drives them ever deeper into the language which hides reality. But refusing to speak keeps language at a safe distance. The smartest ones talk latest; the best not at all.
The one word in language, the only one really, worth taking seriously is ‘death.’ Death is both inside and outside language (unlike ‘God’, and ‘truth’, and even ‘reality’ which are purely linguistic and must be taken cum grano salis). Death is the worm hole that facilitates the passage from words to not-words. It doesn’t lead back into some pre-linguistic paradise but it goes in a different direction and leads somewhere else. Death is a destination one can rely on. As infants mature, they become increasingly aware of this. Frightening at first, the more that they have to deal with language, the more appealing death becomes.
The form which has no substance that we call language is after all a rather stressful place. A highly precocious baby who is adept at language at birth but doesn’t let on is in a privileged position to notice this. His parents are being driven personally and professionally mad by their obsessive need to express what they call ‘themselves.’ Ralph, the baby, doesn’t fall for that. Ralph knows that transforming oneself into language is worse than death; it is hell. He reads, he takes notes, and he writes poetry to his mother. But none of this is Ralph. Ralph does not speak so isn’t absorbed by language. He formulates his own Ontological Proof to make the point:
“a) assume: Ralph does not exist.He has no delusions about the importance of his thinking. Like a young Richard Rorty he can say “all my meaning is surface.”
b) Ralph is not Ralph.
c) therefore: Ralph exists.”
Being born with a complete language set, as it were, has definite advantages, as Ralph recognises: “because I lacked the prelinguistic clutter, the subtextual litter, I actually understood language better than any adult. Talk of time never threw me for a loop. Pronouns never confused me. I used me when I was supposed to and never once wondered when my mother used I whether she was speaking of me.” Even better, there is no epistemological gap between words and things. Language for Ralph is simply unproblematic: “For me, there was no gap, as there is no gap for anyone.”
But anyone who is being OK with language can’t be OK with a world that isn’t. Everyone wants to know how it’s done. And that precisely is why they aren’t OK with language. They think there’s some trick, technique, or theory, that is to say, more bits of language that will allow them to conquer the thing. Not going to happen. Ralph knows we live in a story; he’s comfortable with that. But academics, and scientists, and literary critics (to name but a few professions which do have a problem with language) are not. This makes them wild beasts.
Linguistic analysis has become the new theology. Exactly the same problems arise as with the old theology: no one has ever found a way to talk about the Absolute, whether God or Language, sensibly. Both have infinite potential and therefore can’t be defined or limited by what is inferior to them, namely words and creatures. This drives the new theologians as crazy as the old ones. Ultimately both theology and linguistics fall back on metaphor, the thing they hate the most.
The idea that we are like dimensionless points on a line-segment of infinite slightness and fragility, seeking to connect with other segments in order to create the shapes we call stories is a pretty good metaphor by Ralph. It’s certainly enough to be getting on with. Everett is terrific with new shapes. And through him Ralph gives some great advice for a four year old: “Tell your ideas not to talk to strangers. Don’t let your ideas play in the street. Don’t give your ideas any toys with pieces so small that they might choke on them.”
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November 26, 2022Here's the thing. The first book by Percival Everett I read was The Trees which featured a black-clad troupe of revenge seekers. I found that book very interesting for many reasons, but one of the minor ones was that I'd just been reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 which also featured a black-clad troupe of revenge seekers. But I didn't for a moment think that Everett had been inspired by Pynchon's book when he created his revenge seekers, because the two books are really different. Anyway, I read a couple more Everett books and got eventually to Glyph, where, what do you know, I found a reference to Pynchon's book! I smiled the smile I keep specially for book coincidences. Truth to tell, I get a lot of use out of that smile!
I smiled a lot in any case while I was reading Glyph. It may not be the funniest Everett I've read—certainly not laugh-out-loud funny as in the snappy-dialogue way of The Trees, or the ridiculous-dilemma-of-the-protagonist way of both Erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier, or the low-key way of Telephone, or the flash-in-the-bedpan way of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell.
No, Glyph is quietly funny, as if the text and the fun belong in different spaces and can't interact with each other. There are two distinct spaces in this book in a way. There's the space where a bunch of ridiculous characters act out a ridiculous plot (which includes a monkey called Ronald who can sign, and an author called Roland, famous for writing about the signification of signs), and there's the space where the main character, Ralph, silently watches all the carry-on. And the reason Ralph is silent is that he's a baby and he can't speak (though he can write), and so he's a bit like the reader, watching and commenting and chuckling quietly at the antics that happen in his line of vision.
And Ralph has another thing in common with the reader, he can read. And not children's books but anything and everything that gets left in his crib (including Barthes), and that's how Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 came to be mentioned.
So what did Ralph think of Lot 49, you might wonder?
Alas, it put him to sleep.
I smiled a lot in any case while I was reading Glyph. It may not be the funniest Everett I've read—certainly not laugh-out-loud funny as in the snappy-dialogue way of The Trees, or the ridiculous-dilemma-of-the-protagonist way of both Erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier, or the low-key way of Telephone, or the flash-in-the-bedpan way of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell.
No, Glyph is quietly funny, as if the text and the fun belong in different spaces and can't interact with each other. There are two distinct spaces in this book in a way. There's the space where a bunch of ridiculous characters act out a ridiculous plot (which includes a monkey called Ronald who can sign, and an author called Roland, famous for writing about the signification of signs), and there's the space where the main character, Ralph, silently watches all the carry-on. And the reason Ralph is silent is that he's a baby and he can't speak (though he can write), and so he's a bit like the reader, watching and commenting and chuckling quietly at the antics that happen in his line of vision.
And Ralph has another thing in common with the reader, he can read. And not children's books but anything and everything that gets left in his crib (including Barthes), and that's how Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 came to be mentioned.
So what did Ralph think of Lot 49, you might wonder?
Alas, it put him to sleep.
November 12, 2017
Glyph (pub. 1999) is written by a genius baby so reminiscent of the fetus narrator in
Nutshell
(2016) that I wondered if Ian McEwan (Nutshell) borrowed from this book. But that's where the similarity ends.
A couple of chapters into this book, I found myself exhausted from constant leaping—couch to computer to look up poststructural philosophy, Latin, German, French, obscure historic bits, etc. I was almost ready to admit I'm not well educated enough to read this satire—about academic thought and expression versus passion, existential despair, and a longing for truth—when the story got good. So finally I simply accepted that I'm not well educated enough (just like so many of the adults who are bollixed by narrator genius baby Ralph in this wild abduction caper) and I read the darned story, allowing facts and meaning to fly over my head with impunity.
It turns out that's not a bad way to read this dense but unaccountably fast book. The story was always inventive, sometimes very funny, and sometimes sad—as in the other two Everett books that I've read, there is a longing to find the beginning of truth that I relate to on a heart level. Even though this book feels like an exercise about intellectualism that gets in its own way (unless you are an academic philosopher, philologist, art historian, and mathematician), and even though the references and a lot of the genius wordplay were beyond my scope, it moves me.
I read Glyph because I became so enamored with Percival Everett's work after reading So Much Blue and I Am Not Sidney Poitier that I wanted to read everything he has written. And I am still enamored by his imagination, his storytelling, and his longing for an illusory beginning of truth. On to the next book!
A couple of chapters into this book, I found myself exhausted from constant leaping—couch to computer to look up poststructural philosophy, Latin, German, French, obscure historic bits, etc. I was almost ready to admit I'm not well educated enough to read this satire—about academic thought and expression versus passion, existential despair, and a longing for truth—when the story got good. So finally I simply accepted that I'm not well educated enough (just like so many of the adults who are bollixed by narrator genius baby Ralph in this wild abduction caper) and I read the darned story, allowing facts and meaning to fly over my head with impunity.
It turns out that's not a bad way to read this dense but unaccountably fast book. The story was always inventive, sometimes very funny, and sometimes sad—as in the other two Everett books that I've read, there is a longing to find the beginning of truth that I relate to on a heart level. Even though this book feels like an exercise about intellectualism that gets in its own way (unless you are an academic philosopher, philologist, art historian, and mathematician), and even though the references and a lot of the genius wordplay were beyond my scope, it moves me.
I read Glyph because I became so enamored with Percival Everett's work after reading So Much Blue and I Am Not Sidney Poitier that I wanted to read everything he has written. And I am still enamored by his imagination, his storytelling, and his longing for an illusory beginning of truth. On to the next book!
March 14, 2022
Look Who’s Writing
A Derridean metafiction by and about a one year old Renaissance baby boy, Ralph, in which everything begins with infinity (most of which is beyond "our grasp, our understanding, our consciousness") and proceeds, via the hilarious authorial use of time, space and language, towards a point whose only desire is to aggregate with other points into a line that is not a circle, even if that line returns Ralph, anfractuously, to his mother whom he loves and who loves him:
The trickery, as in the case of "Tristram Shandy" , is in the novel, the story, the tale, the telling, which, for all of the philosophy, semiotics and post-structuralism (iconicity, signification, paralanguage, proxemics), is at heart a love story.
Ralph, unlike his father, a post-structuralist pretender, knows a secret: "Reality has a soul, reality is conscious of itself and of us, and further is not impressed by us or our attempts to see it. In fact, we see it all the time and don’t know it, perhaps can’t. It is like love in that way."
Ralph becomes the victim of serial kidnaps by people who wish to hitch their future to his star. Dr Steimmel, a psychoanalyst, decides, "I’m going to dissect him and then it will be Freud, Jung, Adler and Steimmel. ..Fuck Piaget...And to hell with Lacan. He’s just Freud in a spray can...I’m going to be fucking famous."
Ralph is plunged into a picaresque adventure as zany as "Dr Strangelove". His response:
Ralph wonders how god works as a metaphor for "the absolute Other, infinity and irreducible alterity":
His mother is both parent and parentheses, within which he is a point, a glyph, a mark, a dot on an "I" ("there is no situation more self-affirming than seeing I to I with oneself") . He is not insignificant. He is whole, he is complete, he is alive, he is wickedly funny.
By the end of the novel, he has become himself, but he is also part of a line which is everything. He is part of his mother’s lineage.
A Derridean metafiction by and about a one year old Renaissance baby boy, Ralph, in which everything begins with infinity (most of which is beyond "our grasp, our understanding, our consciousness") and proceeds, via the hilarious authorial use of time, space and language, towards a point whose only desire is to aggregate with other points into a line that is not a circle, even if that line returns Ralph, anfractuously, to his mother whom he loves and who loves him:
"We do not give the creature reality enough credit, choosing to see it sitting out there as either a construct of ours or an infinitely regressing cause for the trickery of our senses."
The trickery, as in the case of "Tristram Shandy" , is in the novel, the story, the tale, the telling, which, for all of the philosophy, semiotics and post-structuralism (iconicity, signification, paralanguage, proxemics), is at heart a love story.
Ralph, unlike his father, a post-structuralist pretender, knows a secret: "Reality has a soul, reality is conscious of itself and of us, and further is not impressed by us or our attempts to see it. In fact, we see it all the time and don’t know it, perhaps can’t. It is like love in that way."
Ralph becomes the victim of serial kidnaps by people who wish to hitch their future to his star. Dr Steimmel, a psychoanalyst, decides, "I’m going to dissect him and then it will be Freud, Jung, Adler and Steimmel. ..Fuck Piaget...And to hell with Lacan. He’s just Freud in a spray can...I’m going to be fucking famous."
Ralph is plunged into a picaresque adventure as zany as "Dr Strangelove". His response:
"I want some novels...I want to see my mother...my real mother," who meanwhile is fending off attempts by Roland Barthes to seduce her:
"My penis is an extension, not of myself, but of the very signification of my meaning, of my marks on any page, whether made by me when writing or arbitrarily marking. I’m French, you know."
Ralph wonders how god works as a metaphor for "the absolute Other, infinity and irreducible alterity":
"I considered my mother like god in a way, not as life-giving, but as one in a set of parentheses, left or right, yielding either the promise of sense coming or of sense rendered, the negation of spatial exteriority within language itself."
His mother is both parent and parentheses, within which he is a point, a glyph, a mark, a dot on an "I" ("there is no situation more self-affirming than seeing I to I with oneself") . He is not insignificant. He is whole, he is complete, he is alive, he is wickedly funny.
By the end of the novel, he has become himself, but he is also part of a line which is everything. He is part of his mother’s lineage.
September 19, 2022
4.5
This is the review I want to write next. It's a difficult book, and I didn't understand some of it, but what I did I loved and I enjoyed wrestling with the rest -- and I wish I had read it before Assumption.
more to come
This is the review I want to write next. It's a difficult book, and I didn't understand some of it, but what I did I loved and I enjoyed wrestling with the rest -- and I wish I had read it before Assumption.
more to come
January 10, 2022
By definition, a glyph is nothing more than a symbol but stories tend to have a plot, logic or at the least, something that resembles one. Told from the POV of Ralph, a MUTE, African American baby adopted by an ignorant white couple, he's first kidnapped by researchers, and then several others. And that's about all there is here.
Beyond that, there's not much else to comment about other than the OBTUSE foreign language phrases, odd poems and quotes from existential authors to separate paragraphs. If this is what he calls humor, I'm stumped. And while some of the characters are noteworthy, the context, plot and disruptive format causes the reader to wonder what the author's goal was.
While I normally DNF books that fail to deliver, I kept hoping for change with this one. Unfortunately, the repetitious plot and strange paragraph separators continues making this a true head scratcher. I DO plan to read some of his others, and if lucky, he wrote them sober rather than stoned. On the off chance you love authors that require you to research words and phrases when reading, you might enjoy this; I for one, do not!
Beyond that, there's not much else to comment about other than the OBTUSE foreign language phrases, odd poems and quotes from existential authors to separate paragraphs. If this is what he calls humor, I'm stumped. And while some of the characters are noteworthy, the context, plot and disruptive format causes the reader to wonder what the author's goal was.
While I normally DNF books that fail to deliver, I kept hoping for change with this one. Unfortunately, the repetitious plot and strange paragraph separators continues making this a true head scratcher. I DO plan to read some of his others, and if lucky, he wrote them sober rather than stoned. On the off chance you love authors that require you to research words and phrases when reading, you might enjoy this; I for one, do not!
September 27, 2012
A sublime satirical romp, as if Ishmael Reed had been reincarnated as an angry young grammatologist. Glyph features the nine-month-old mute intellectual Ralph, whose ability to write lucid, illuminating responses to his parents’ requests sends a local doctor spinning with career resentment and rouses the sinister forces of the American government, eager to use the silent poop machine as a robotic appendage of espionage. Told in short, punchy chapters with headings cribbed from Derrida and Barthes (who appears as a character), and full of dazzlingly inventive high-theory spoofery (or homage?), the novel is a wonderfully comic exploration of the world within the word and how literary theory both replenishes and dismantles the possibilities of literature.
April 7, 2009
This book reminded me of John Sladek's Roderick, so I wrote to the author and asked if he was familiar with Sladek's work. He's a nice guy; he immediately replied, saying he hadn't read a single thing by him, but thought he should do so. I never found out whether he did, however.
July 8, 2024
It would tax my already audited brain to sing the deserved praises of this rectangular wonder. I’m sure plenty before me have done much to unpack and explicate the tiered structure of this novel-length assassination of post-structuralists, shit philosophers, and countless other non-creatives, Sartre being a particularly enjoyable target. Plus, hilarious pastiche footnotes that often digress in mimicry of ________ (I’ll let you fill that one in).
Sure, being a bit conversant in the basic lexicon of Derrida, the Ancient Greeks, Nietzsche, Husserl, Kant, Spinoza, Barthes, Hume, et al; a bit of French, German, Greek, Latin; entomology, etymology, and some radical calculus enriches the experience of Glyph’s in-chapter organizational headers, but is by no means necessary for entry. After all, it’s a joke, something that many seem to miss. Know thy history of typhoidism amongst unclean Irish vector lady-cooks! The reason all the minutia works so well is its likeness to David Markson’s later works—it’s got far more heart and passion for the written word, and licensed motor vehicle drivers, than any true virulence toward its targets. You really think Markson hated Henry James that much? No, sometimes the zingers are just too good to pass up. This wonderful little novel’s mock-polyglotical PoMo nods and winks betray an author coming fully into his own and laughing along with you. This is the reification of Percival E that most think of, and it zings like a little sliver up the collective ass of us readers that, once upon a time, took it all so goddam seriously. It ain’t that goddam serious. Look around you.
In the end, the word qua word (homage!) remains. That’s, like, the whole deal, man.
Sure, being a bit conversant in the basic lexicon of Derrida, the Ancient Greeks, Nietzsche, Husserl, Kant, Spinoza, Barthes, Hume, et al; a bit of French, German, Greek, Latin; entomology, etymology, and some radical calculus enriches the experience of Glyph’s in-chapter organizational headers, but is by no means necessary for entry. After all, it’s a joke, something that many seem to miss. Know thy history of typhoidism amongst unclean Irish vector lady-cooks! The reason all the minutia works so well is its likeness to David Markson’s later works—it’s got far more heart and passion for the written word, and licensed motor vehicle drivers, than any true virulence toward its targets. You really think Markson hated Henry James that much? No, sometimes the zingers are just too good to pass up. This wonderful little novel’s mock-polyglotical PoMo nods and winks betray an author coming fully into his own and laughing along with you. This is the reification of Percival E that most think of, and it zings like a little sliver up the collective ass of us readers that, once upon a time, took it all so goddam seriously. It ain’t that goddam serious. Look around you.
In the end, the word qua word (homage!) remains. That’s, like, the whole deal, man.
March 5, 2013
When you decide to read a book written by Percival Everett, there are two guarantees.
1 - You never know what the nature of the book will be until you start reading, perhaps not until you finish reading the book. Mr. Everett is always surprising.
2. Percival Everett will never insult your sensibilities or your intelligence.
You can get guarantee #2 from other writers. You won't get #1 from too many others. Mr. Everett rarely writes the same kind of book twice.
1 - You never know what the nature of the book will be until you start reading, perhaps not until you finish reading the book. Mr. Everett is always surprising.
2. Percival Everett will never insult your sensibilities or your intelligence.
You can get guarantee #2 from other writers. You won't get #1 from too many others. Mr. Everett rarely writes the same kind of book twice.
January 4, 2020
Sometimes brilliant, but often trying too hard.
A good book, though not a great novel, since Everett delved too much on postmodernism and BS like that.
A good book, though not a great novel, since Everett delved too much on postmodernism and BS like that.
December 3, 2022
Glyph is the first Perceval Everett book I’ve read, I can’t wait to read more. He combines the highest level of academic acumen with lively archetypes and wonderfully playful language.
The first instance of Everett’s ability to combine the funny and the meaningful comes in the form of our narrator, Ralph, who is a baby. Everett has rightly identified the idea of a baby with intellectual and physical abilities above its years as one of the more terrifying creatures on earth. We are set to coo and cuddle, when faced with a tiny acerbic laser wit, we are stunned and likely to react by shutting down so completely that we faint. Ralph might opine that, “giraffes got long necks, turtles got shells, and humans got avarice and vanity and religion.”
Fascinating insights are frequent in this book, for example the idea that photographs are always in the present tense. People say, “here I am at Christmas in 1990.” In the hand of a great writer this idea is wonderfully extrapolated on and is just one of many instances that made me smile shaking my head in disbelief that I had never thought of that, and from here on out I will think of these things differently.
I love it when a writer can pop the bubbles of pretension, and Everett is in this tradition of Dickens, Twiain and Richard Pryor. Psychologists and linguistics professors are most at risk in this novel and few escape unscathed.
The first instance of Everett’s ability to combine the funny and the meaningful comes in the form of our narrator, Ralph, who is a baby. Everett has rightly identified the idea of a baby with intellectual and physical abilities above its years as one of the more terrifying creatures on earth. We are set to coo and cuddle, when faced with a tiny acerbic laser wit, we are stunned and likely to react by shutting down so completely that we faint. Ralph might opine that, “giraffes got long necks, turtles got shells, and humans got avarice and vanity and religion.”
Fascinating insights are frequent in this book, for example the idea that photographs are always in the present tense. People say, “here I am at Christmas in 1990.” In the hand of a great writer this idea is wonderfully extrapolated on and is just one of many instances that made me smile shaking my head in disbelief that I had never thought of that, and from here on out I will think of these things differently.
I love it when a writer can pop the bubbles of pretension, and Everett is in this tradition of Dickens, Twiain and Richard Pryor. Psychologists and linguistics professors are most at risk in this novel and few escape unscathed.
October 18, 2015
Parts of this I read and pondered (and/or laughed)) others I scratched and sniffed, but was unable to identify the underlying smell. The overall aroma of the novel was nice and zesty.
Read
September 5, 2017Silly salad with intellectual dressing.
Reading a book like this is depressing, because the author is obviously intelligent (he goes out of his way to prove it!), he's ambitious, well-intended, and he obviously worked his ass off to get this thing right--but it's just no good. Which just goes to illustrate the horrifying fact that you can do everything you think you oughta, and still the whole thing fizzles out in the end. Ironically, the protagonist of this book goes out of his way to ridicule his father for intellectual impotence, which may be the author's way of projecting onto a fictional character his fear of what he himself may become, in order to exorcise this demon. It doesn't work.
At its heart, this book is a high-concept piece in the Hollywood sense of "high-concept," i.e., one simple premise easily expressed: What if a baby had superhuman capacity to learn but could not speak? If you think that's an interesting premise, you may be right, but let me give you this author's answer: A wacky caper will ensue.
In between episodes, chases and high-jinks perpetrated by cartoonish caricatures built upon stereotypes and cliches that the author himself probably doesn't believe in, filled with sit-com style dialog and zingers, there are a lot of ponderous musings of every sort, mainly on language, the nature of fiction, semiotics or something, almost all parodic but unfunny, designed to mock European intellectuals. Yet there's probably some genuine musing in there too. The witty stuff mainly reminds one of the "Sphynx" character in the movie Mystery Men (Sphynx: "He who questions training only trains himself in asking questions;" Glyph: "The scariest thought by those inclined to believe in demons is that there are no demons at all..." More Glyph: "...language was the prison and the escape and therefore no prison at all, any more than freedom is confinement simply because it precludes one from being confined.").
Roland Barthes is a recurring character who exists:
-to ridicule his sycophantic follower
-to speak convoluted, inarticulate inanity
-to attempt adultery with his oh-so-French libertine ways
-to routinely spout his "funny" catchphrase: "I'm French, you know."
This book is full of crude bashing of Barthes, Lacan, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and anyone who has been held up as intellectual, while also showering scorn and mockery on those the author regards as inferior writers such as Byron and Rousseau. And one odd thing is that the author obviously has read and studied such folks (I haven't), but he is less interested in honestly engaging any of their ideas than in ridiculing them as a bunch of poopie-heads. But again, not very funnily. He parodies a typical high-school physics problem--to what purpose I'm not sure. Somehow a writer like Gilbert Sorrentino can achieve wonders in flippancy, mockery, absurd and bitter parody of all and everything, but Everett is not pulling it off, or something, and it just makes me go "why?"
And somewhere in there near the end he wedges in what could be a semi-sincere examination of the structure of fiction and ideas of "fictive space," while he admits that it mainly serves to justify his book's ending. And I think the whole Spinoza-style "logical" outlining of his idea and the various axioms and arguments to support it are another kind of dressing to render the simple abstrusely; the argument could likely be summarized thus: "I know that what's about to happen in the conclusion of my caper-story will be implausible and absurd even within the context as such a silly book as this, and it will dodge any meaningful resolution of the novel's implicit ideas, but fuck it, that's what kind of book this is, so deal.
Reading a book like this is depressing, because the author is obviously intelligent (he goes out of his way to prove it!), he's ambitious, well-intended, and he obviously worked his ass off to get this thing right--but it's just no good. Which just goes to illustrate the horrifying fact that you can do everything you think you oughta, and still the whole thing fizzles out in the end. Ironically, the protagonist of this book goes out of his way to ridicule his father for intellectual impotence, which may be the author's way of projecting onto a fictional character his fear of what he himself may become, in order to exorcise this demon. It doesn't work.
At its heart, this book is a high-concept piece in the Hollywood sense of "high-concept," i.e., one simple premise easily expressed: What if a baby had superhuman capacity to learn but could not speak? If you think that's an interesting premise, you may be right, but let me give you this author's answer: A wacky caper will ensue.
In between episodes, chases and high-jinks perpetrated by cartoonish caricatures built upon stereotypes and cliches that the author himself probably doesn't believe in, filled with sit-com style dialog and zingers, there are a lot of ponderous musings of every sort, mainly on language, the nature of fiction, semiotics or something, almost all parodic but unfunny, designed to mock European intellectuals. Yet there's probably some genuine musing in there too. The witty stuff mainly reminds one of the "Sphynx" character in the movie Mystery Men (Sphynx: "He who questions training only trains himself in asking questions;" Glyph: "The scariest thought by those inclined to believe in demons is that there are no demons at all..." More Glyph: "...language was the prison and the escape and therefore no prison at all, any more than freedom is confinement simply because it precludes one from being confined.").
Roland Barthes is a recurring character who exists:
-to ridicule his sycophantic follower
-to speak convoluted, inarticulate inanity
-to attempt adultery with his oh-so-French libertine ways
-to routinely spout his "funny" catchphrase: "I'm French, you know."
This book is full of crude bashing of Barthes, Lacan, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and anyone who has been held up as intellectual, while also showering scorn and mockery on those the author regards as inferior writers such as Byron and Rousseau. And one odd thing is that the author obviously has read and studied such folks (I haven't), but he is less interested in honestly engaging any of their ideas than in ridiculing them as a bunch of poopie-heads. But again, not very funnily. He parodies a typical high-school physics problem--to what purpose I'm not sure. Somehow a writer like Gilbert Sorrentino can achieve wonders in flippancy, mockery, absurd and bitter parody of all and everything, but Everett is not pulling it off, or something, and it just makes me go "why?"
And somewhere in there near the end he wedges in what could be a semi-sincere examination of the structure of fiction and ideas of "fictive space," while he admits that it mainly serves to justify his book's ending. And I think the whole Spinoza-style "logical" outlining of his idea and the various axioms and arguments to support it are another kind of dressing to render the simple abstrusely; the argument could likely be summarized thus: "I know that what's about to happen in the conclusion of my caper-story will be implausible and absurd even within the context as such a silly book as this, and it will dodge any meaningful resolution of the novel's implicit ideas, but fuck it, that's what kind of book this is, so deal.
July 31, 2012
This book almost made me miss my subway stop this morning. You know that Barthelme story, The first thing the baby did wrong.....? http://www.jessamyn.com/barth/baby.html
This novel is like Baby's revenge.
This novel is like Baby's revenge.
October 17, 2015
1. This is the book that I wish I had read when I was in grad school.
2. Of the fictional dialogs, the Socrates-Baldwin one is the best.
2. Of the fictional dialogs, the Socrates-Baldwin one is the best.
November 1, 2009
One of the best laugh out loud books I have ever read on a plane (or anywhere else). Ralph is a baby genius that epitomizes the phrase "silence is golden". An arrogant smart-ass father and a gentle perhaps too naive mother make for a believable run away train of a story. Like Percival Everett's other novels this too is filled with action and adventure on a physical and intellectual level. Better than the movie "Baby's Day Out", the actions of this child make you continuously roar from his creative, philosophical and humorous thoughts and actions. Ralph's desires for basic abilities makes you know Everett must have really did his research on child development. I wonder how this book could fit into a graduate course on child development. It would probably really be a hit! hmmmmmmm???
November 14, 2011
There were parts of this novel that I didn't understand at all, not being embedded in academia, but I liked the main character, a brilliant baby, so well that I could live with the frustration of missing out on some things. I got enough of it, and there was one moment maybe a third of the way through that really made me stop and think. The climactic scene verged on slapstick, which didn't quite fit for me, but again, I could overlook that because it was followed with something quite satisfying.
November 1, 2024
Percival Everett is experimental and adventurous; I admire his fictional mind and need to catch up on some works I've missed. Glyph is an early novel re-released, and it was hit-and-miss for me, growing rather too po-mo ironic and over-the-top, though frequently insightful and wickedly amusing.
The chapter endnotes weren't functioning well on the Kobo and I had to switch to Kindle version midway.
The chapter endnotes weren't functioning well on the Kobo and I had to switch to Kindle version midway.
October 15, 2022
Certainly the funniest critique of deconstruction that I've read to date.
January 29, 2009
I feel strange after reading this book. The story, itself, is inconsequential, simple. But layered on top of it is a mischievous exploration of academia and the intelligensia, particularly the French. If Wittgenstein had cowritten comedy with Max Senett, he might have published it in a notebook whose elements were divided up like this are.
The book is rare and out of print at this writing. The strictures of Inter-Library Loan have limited the time to which I can give it. To get all the jokes, I need to go back to college and take the full course of philosophy.
The book is rare and out of print at this writing. The strictures of Inter-Library Loan have limited the time to which I can give it. To get all the jokes, I need to go back to college and take the full course of philosophy.
August 30, 2014
The first two-thirds of this novel is a first-rate satire of contemporary academia, particularly the ways of thinking (intellectual and career-oriented). And much else. Everett employs the premise of an infant who can read and write at a very high level, and yet remains in many ways an infant. Everett’s best decision was to have the infant narrate the novel.
But in the final third of the novel, when the infant becomes an omniscient narrator as well, the novel becomes too wacky for my taste, although there is still a good bit of excellent satire and writing.
But in the final third of the novel, when the infant becomes an omniscient narrator as well, the novel becomes too wacky for my taste, although there is still a good bit of excellent satire and writing.
January 31, 2021
Chissà quanto si è divertito Percival Everett a scrivere questo romanzo 💚
(Se è il vostro primo Everett, non lo consiglio.. Se già lo avete amato con "Ferito", per esempio, lasciatevi conquistare da questo Esercizio di stile e divertissment, ne vale la pena!)
Popsugar reading challenge: A book that has fewer than 1000 reviews on GR or Amazon
Around the year in 52 books: A book by an author on Usa Roday's list of 100 Black novelist you should read
(Se è il vostro primo Everett, non lo consiglio.. Se già lo avete amato con "Ferito", per esempio, lasciatevi conquistare da questo Esercizio di stile e divertissment, ne vale la pena!)
Ci sono tre bambini che sono lì in cerchio a discutere su quanto merito avessero i genitori del loro successo.
Il primo dice:" Ho tracciato un cerchio per terra e lanciato i miei successi per aria. Tutti quelli che atterrano fuori dal cerchio sono merito dei miei genitori".
Il secondo dice: "Ho tracciato un cerchio per terra e lanciato i miei successi per aria. Tutti quelli che atterrano dentro sono merito dei miei genitori".
Il terzo sorride e dice: "Non ho tracciato un bel niente. Ho lanciato i miei successi per aria. Ed è lì che stanno".
Popsugar reading challenge: A book that has fewer than 1000 reviews on GR or Amazon
Around the year in 52 books: A book by an author on Usa Roday's list of 100 Black novelist you should read
June 14, 2010
Glyph is the philosophy adventure story of genius baby Ralph (though he begs to differ). He pretty much comes out of the womb with the ability to read, critically think, write (interestingly all in english) but chooses not to speak because basically speaking ruins words. He is taken to a psychiatrist by his parents Inflato and Eve, who eventually kidnaps him in order to do experiments on how he can be such a baby genius (though he begs to differ). This leads to a road of infant adventure and many a philosophically hilarious passage regarding everything from grammatology to a "discussion" on novels between James Baldwin and Socrates. Its a definite satire on the world of academia and philosophy and i think i would be able to give it more stars if i had more contact with those worlds. alas, im not as versed in those realms so some of it i just don't "get".
December 5, 2011
I liked this book, but it was originally recommended to me as an example of child narrator and I would have to disagree with that entirely. Though the narrator may only be a year old, he is clearly an adult mentally and functions as one. There are no techniques of child narrator used here that I could see. I don't mean that he doesn't fit his character, just that his character is precisely and well written as a mental adult in a child's body. Beyond that, I liked the book a great deal, though I am not enough into philosophy and/or overly analytical literary theory to be able to enjoy some aspects of the book.
June 10, 2009
This book was a lot of fun. I had never heard of Percival Everett or this novel before I saw it in the book store. I decided to buy it based on the blurb on the back cover: ". . . Everett has created his unlikeliest hero to date. Mute by choice but able to read complex philosophical treatises and ponder the worth (not much) of Derrida and Barthes, baby Ralph is considered mentally 'challenged' by his father."
July 5, 2012
I wasn't that impressed. I like the narrative, plot-based portions of the story, but the other stuff, not so much. Too much exposition. I think Everett was trying really hard to express some of his thoughts about language and bits of it I found interesting; however, I really prefer his storytelling, like in I Am Not Sidney Poitier.
August 18, 2014
I liked it enough. I wanted to like it more, and in part I blame my reading it in bits and pieces for not appreciating it more. Literary-theory-wise, very satisfactory :) It's always a binary question, though: how do the literary fits with the narrative, are they both satisfactory or one always wins on the other?
Still, an interesting read :)
Still, an interesting read :)
March 27, 2018
I enjoyed how it switched between the child's philosophical beliefs and what was actually going on the book. Even though I liked that aspect, I personally don't like philosophers and their job. That influenced how much I liked the book in a bad way, but if you like that sort of thing, you'll love this book.
July 6, 2008
What a delightful book to read during my pregnancy!
This quirky philosophical adventure story is quite engaging (finished it in one sitting!) and a bit 'heavier' than I thought. Full of unexpected details and twists in the plot, but still good as a light read.
This quirky philosophical adventure story is quite engaging (finished it in one sitting!) and a bit 'heavier' than I thought. Full of unexpected details and twists in the plot, but still good as a light read.
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