Novel Explosives

by Jim Gauer

Ambitious, groundbreaking, and fiendishly funny, Novel Explosives travels down the mean streets of venture finance, money laundering, and the Juárez drug wars on a torrent of linguistic virtuosity infused with a rarefied business I.Q. and mastery of everything from philosophy to pharmaceuticals, poetry to thermobaric weaponry. While an amnesiac, two gunmen, and a venture capitalist entangle and entwine in a do-or-die search for identity, at the palpitating heart of this novel, at its roiling fundamental core, lies an agonizing reappraisal of the way America behaves in the world, a project as worthy and urgent as it gets.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Contemporary, American, Literary Fiction, Novels, 21st Century

722 pages, Paperback

Published October 11, 2016

Reviews

[George]

I’ve been sitting on this review for many months. I don’t like writing negative reviews, but I was encouraged by a friend to post this because he said that we need contrarian opinions within the maelstrom of optimism. This is one of his favorite books, and one of my most despised. I simply cannot fathom how someone could enjoy this type of writing:

“the place was a wreck” “lull in the conversation” “cigarette dangling from his lips” “tarnished reputations” “slammed on the gas” “came up for air” “not doing much of anything” “razor-thin” “the memory is a little hazy” “unfinished business” “a little off the rails” “soaking up sunlight” “the place is now so still you could hear a pin drop” “woke up [...] with the sun in my eyes” “out of the blue” “laughing out loud” “to be honest” “let me in on a little secret” “a question that has plagued” “only time would tell” “blind luck” “put it bluntly” “just killing time” “burning the midnight oil” “the place is crawling with” “cool crisp night” “everlasting kiss” “waking nightmare” “I myself haven’t the foggiest” “all things considered” “her home-is-where-the-heart-is home […] where everybody loved her, and made her feel at home” “it was high time I…” “on the tip of my tongue” “that fork in the road” “smoking-gun proof” “the business end of the weapon” “drawing a blank”

Ad infinitum with no small dose of nauseum.

If this novel is an explosive, then it’s a dud that whimpers after the timer has reached 00:00. This book is ‘encyclopedic’ in that it gathers together just about every cliché that even an MFA candidate would know to excise if not obliterate, averaging two or more per page. Yes, there’s technical terminology at times, but it doesn’t take much effort to regurgitate from any gun manual, IKEA instruction booklet, or psychiatrist brochure.

While the Wake is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, the reverse is true of Novel Explosives. And so many people whose opinions I trust and even admire, are in love with this book, which is utterly bewildering. One theory I have is that certain people in our tight-knit group are blinded by a thick spine without regard for content, but this can’t be true, can it? What is the reason, then? Because I find it impossible to believe that someone actually enjoys reading cliché writing, at least not the same people who are comparing this book to the masterpiece that is Infinite Jest, or Gravity’s Rainbow. The similarities are superficial at best and utterly nonexistent at worst. Forget about the emperor lacking clothes, this emperor has lost his epidermis. That it took Gauer 7 years to write it gives me vicarious embarrassment.

Before I even read this novel whose anatomy is atomy, the plot sounded like the same one you’d find in several hundred Hollywood movies. A man wakes up with amnesia and has a mysterious cache of copious cash with him (then there’s the imposing boss and his two dullard assistant goons, etc. etc.). I had thought, As long as the prose is as “jacked-up” as the blurb on the back says, then surely the plot won’t matter. See above for how wrong that turned out to be. That same blurb—coming from someone who is often perspicacious, making this disappointment all the Moore potent—uses the terms “literary masterpiece” and an “amazing novel.” A blubbery hyperbole of hyper-blurbery if I’ve ever seen it!

There is talk of war and weaponry in this novel. Martin Amis said that great writing is a war against cliché. If that’s true, then this book is the bloody fecal skid mark on the not-so-whitey tighties of a gassed and garroted and guillotined and bayoneted and buggered and bulletbrained soldier.

However, one of the good friends of mine who loves Novel Explosives is writing the introduction to the new edition, so if you aren’t immediately repulsed by the artillery barrage of clichés above, you should read the book and cum to your own cuntclusions. As for me, NE is a phat dose of ED.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Forget A Naked Singularity. Forget the novels of Evan Dara. Forget Pynchon Lite (but knot Pynchon=Hevy!). You could almost forget You Bright and Risen Angels (but this is not as loony as that). And forget all those other recent baggy monster=sized novels built of monster=sentences published these past few years/decades/whatever that you've never heard of (except for the Pynchon) but which far surpass the fare of the prizes and awards and million dollar contracts. If only because these novels are fun. And smart. And probably socially important for whatever reason. No, not 'probably'. These are all novels more than 'probably socially important.' They are all unambiguously important. (Frankly I don't know if the "fare of the prizes and awards and million dollar contracts" are important or not (beyond their sales figures) and I don't really care because, well, you already know about them. But unless you're a member of a certain cult which communicates in a certain code down here at the bottom corner of goodreads, you're likely never to have heard of de la Pava and Dara and Vollmann and but you know Pynchon of course (his children are numerous and just as good and but you've heard them dismissed as 'hysterical realism').

I just want to say, this will be the smartest funnest novel you read this year. If you are so lucky as to have even once heard of it. Don't wait for The U of Chicago P to discover it. Discover it today!

Here's the Steven Moore blurb from the back page :: "An amazing novel, a literary masterpiece that reads like a thriller, propelled by its narrative ingenuity, outlandish erudition, and jacked-up prose style... the most fun reading I've had in ages." [Saunders' novel had a real budget so they could afford a Pynchon blurb ; lucky=lucky bastard!]

Here's the company it keeps today at amazon (@ US$10.97 amazon is selling it for less than the price of a movie ticket) ::
Customers who bought this item also bought -->> Bottom's Dream, Recounting: Antagony Book I, Between Dog and Wolf. [Novel Explosives is nothing like these three novels (maybe) but you see who's been buying what!]
Customers who viewed this item also viewed -- > Einstein's Beets, My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays, Fragments of Lichtenberg, Zibaldone, Shadowbahn. So again, you know it's a cult! Join us!
[and at the Kirkus site we get "Similar Books Suggested By Our Critics :: The Mark and the Void [maybe? I dunno Paul Murray but I doubt it], Bleeding Edge [NE is much better ; Bleeding Edge is kinda forgettable Pynchon], Book of Numbers [definitely definitely definitely ; these two pair very well and both will continue to be knot read.]]

"Subversive, heart-piercing, mind-altering. Also hilarious. What a read, what a ride, and so sublimely far from well behaved." --an amazon Reviewer [honestly, I'm trying to dig up anyone who's said anything about this fat brick. And there's like seven-now-eight gr=Reviews and there's like four amazon=Reviews (four & five *). And the Kirkus below. And the Moore blurb. And that's it.], who also drops the following names :: Saramago, Michael Lewis, the Coen Bro's, James Joyce, Bolaño, Chris Hayes, de la Pava (it's not just me!), César Vallejo, and the Holy of Holies. [!!! okay so her's is also one of the gr=Reviews ; but I won't hesitate to count it twice, puff up the numbers a bit!]

Here's the Kirkus Review, which is an anomaly because typically Kirkus trashes this kind of novel, pleading for all kinds of, what do they plead for?, treacle of the pscyho=social novel variety? I dunno. At any rate, they do pretty well by this infinitely hysterical novel ::
"A man with amnesia and $20 million, a well-read venture capitalist adrift after a hot deal, and two drug lord gunmen combine to perform a time-twisting minuet in this big, brainy, trippy, Technicolor noir of a debut." --> That's the plot. Now you can get on with the novel!
"Take Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace at their densest, some Malcolm Lowry–esque south-of-the-border malevolence and lots of technobabble, financial arcana, and myriad ad hoc drivel sessions—that may start to suggest what Gauer is up to here." --> I mean, if Kirkus can say "Pynchon" and "DFW", who I am I to object?!
"The closing pages include one horrific scene that unfortunately is later replayed" --> Technically they're a bit wrong on this point, but I'll let them have it. But the scene itself is no more horrific than the rhinoplasty bit in V.
"an epic Mexican standoff that more or less starts with a man citing Ovid, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger within six lines." --> I'll give it to Gauer that the philosophy bits in here work much better than they did in A Naked Singularity. But just to be clear, Wittgenstein pretty much rocks the entire novel, beginning with the epigraph -- > "To Imagine a language means to imagine a form of life." Which, if you think about it, is what a novel does ; at least if you've read your Bakhtin.
"There’s a lot of verbal and postmodern high jinks in these 700-plus pages, and they will likely strain anyone’s patience and commitment, but for readers who enjoy this kind of thing, it will be worth the effort." Yes yes yes. Not every novel is for every reader. If you have any kind of argument whatsoever about how Infinite Jest ends, please don't bother reading this novel ; you'll be happier elsewhere.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...

And forget about Kirkus. Here's the Bursey treatment ::
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2016/11...
"Gauer’s novel is a burst of fresh air, and it resembles a Tarantino movie in the energetic drive of the prose, the jumbling of time, unexpected humourous lines or scenes, quasi-rhapsodic passages about the quotidian, direct addresses to the reader along with other meta-fictional flourishes." and -->>

"For a long time, writers have been advised to be economical in their speech; to exercise restraint in the use of adverbs and adjectives (if they were compelled to use them at all); to show, not tell; to keep in mind that consumers want (or can only handle) friendly texts that are easy to grasp, mentally and physically; and to not mix genres overmuch for fear of sowing confusion. Exceptions to these rules include the works of Thomas Pynchon, William T. Vollmann, Richard Powers, and Joseph McElroy, living exponents of the encyclopedic novel. (Past members range from Gustave Flaubert through James Joyce and Robert Musil to William Gaddis, Roberto Bolaño, and David Foster Wallace.) After reading Novel Explosives, with its rich vocabulary owing much to philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Marx, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and others, to armaments manuals, to oenology, and to the inner workings of Mexico as well as the geography of Ciuldad Juárez, among many other apparently unrelated groups and sub-groups of knowledge, I consider Jim Gauer of the United States a member of that select group. I also feel, foolishly and falsely, that, at various times in my reading of his long, but never too long, first novel, I would be able to identify guns despite never seeing or touching them in real life, to know the purpose of different scalpels, and to slow down the world so as to notice everything, from the perspective of a turkey buzzard or a child astride a garbage heap."

In short. Big thumbs up. And, since the season is coming, don't forget to take this with you to the beach --> Lemme Take You To The Beach .

[Chris Via]

Video review + free giveaway of the new edition!
https://youtu.be/IiRZ5mm5hMw

[5 June 2019]: Original video review here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkJCh9...

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoever the person was that had burned the midnight oil, learning so much about computers and stack frames and assembly language that it literally made my head hurt, must have been the same person who was struck on the head, and while that person was clearly me, I had an unhealed wound to prove it, it was equally clear that I no longer lived there, and had forgotten to leave myself a forwarding address.

Superlatives come quick in our day and age and the cheaper ones will flow from on high after Friday. It is with a weight of self-awareness that I regard Novel Explosives as a towering ethical novel of our bleak, fragmented time. So, I ponder--why is this the sixth review on GR of such an important endeavor? It may be easier to probe why it isn't more popular. The cover and, frankly, the title don't pretend to tingle a proverbial spine. But just let anyone crack that garish TV adaptation Logan's Run cover and-- well, this is a novel of ideas, certainly, but removed from taxonomy and thrust into our organic reality.

The novel concerns a venture capitalist, one penning a memoir and dealing with some crippling dependence issues. There's a varnish of American Psycho present, but don't allow that to confuse. The other two timelines (all of which transpire in the same week in April 2009) concern an amnesiac in Mexico, the cartels and two narco footsoliders at the point of impact of these divergent narratives. This is the novel I wish Vanessa Place would have penned.

The details about hedge funds, pharmacology and munitions are savagely over written in a stylized overly technical argot. Characters speak in these nuanced manners about features of sidearms and wireless networks in completely implausible specificity. Yet it pulls and holds. The reader becomes word drunk. Then when the fauna and flora of highland Mexico have received their fair over-descriptive due, it is time to turn to the ideas. Poetry and philosophy receive equal billing. the former in a fascinating, though ominous, conversation about the political implications of Portuguese verse during the Salazar regime. The latter is trickier. This isn't about Popper and Wittgenstein. Forget about the poker, this is Wittgenstein agon Heidegger--and fuck the firewood, ponder the utility of a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. The theory keeps tumbling into the reader's lap. Kristeva? Wait, her work on melancholy, abjection and severed heads? Perfect- but who thought of that before? This is a scorched cornea of a work and that is a compliment. I bought this for my best friends and we've sweated pale ale and High Life while texting about it. Do yourself a favor and venture forth.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 1 out of 5]

THE NEOPHYTE'S GUIDE TO YET ANOTHER MADE TO ORDER BIG FAT BRAINY ENCYCLOPAEDIC AMERICAN NOVEL PT 9 (AND COUNTING):
(This Review is sponsored by Spot the Bullshit Hedge Fund)

Trump This!

To label this mildly amusing, occasionally thrilling, perpetually indulgent sow’s ear of a novel a "literary masterpiece" because of its atrociously conceived and executed pomo pretensions (as does the habitually massive hyperblurbolist Steven Moore) is hardly enough to make it a silk purse.

Perhaps, if anything, it’s a fair to middling attempt to cruft some kind of an extravagant (Donald) Trumphalist American folly replica (1) of "semiotic detective fiction" like "Foucault’s Pendulum" or "The Name of the Rose". (The Europeans are far better at this sort of thing.)

This work, a "triple-shrink-wrapped brick" and "elaborate contrivance", is, after all is said and done (to excess), to literature what a Trump property is to architecture. Yes, Virginia (and Mario), it sucks. Big time.

In the words of Jim Gauer, "Do yourself a favour. Stick to cold beer." (p 517)



Sergei Eisenstein's Mexican Dream

"Send Lawyers, Guns and Venture Capital"

"Gauer could be Post-Modernism's Answer to Warren Zevon" - Emeritus Professor Murray Jay Siskind, "Numero Sanque"

The Ghost-Written Heteronym versus the Pseudonymic Self

There are three main narrative strands in "Novel Explosives". I’ll discuss them in reverse order:

The third concerns the "verbal constructs" (p 342) Ray and Gene, two hired gunmen who work for a Mexican drug cartel. They’re in Ciudad Juárez (the city in which the female homicides referred to in Roberto Bolano’s "2666" occurred; also, Gauer says of the city - "Juarez, like death, is packed with information; the problem, if anything, is that it’s a little overwhelming, and there’s far too much of it to properly absorb") trying to locate and exterminate "the no-name grey Ford Fusion guy" (AKA "Douchebag"), who has somehow ripped off their boss (Gomez, who quotes Shakespeare and comes off “sounding literary”). Gomez hasn’t given them the name of their intended victim (although it turns out that his codename within Gomez’ Organisation is "The Poet"). How can and why should you assassinate somebody whose name and identity you don’t even know?

The second involves a "douchebag" venture capitalist who has sat down the Monday after Easter to start writing his memoirs ("a little pirate fantasy" called "Tales from the Crypt"). His name might or might not be Frederick Hobart Edie Mertz the Third (or possibly the First). He might go by the name of Fred (or Edie). He is only "formerly authentic" (p 446), a "derealized self" (p 484), "emptied-out and hollow", "the one true zombie", and pretends to be "a man of humble origins and very little consequence", while at the same time he boasts that he comes from "a long line of high-caliber drunks and functional alcoholics" (p 444), and claims to be "a closet Marxist, one in a hundred million, the real fucking deal, the master Alchemist, the new Zozimos of Panoply" (p 420). He says he’s translated the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa (the author of "The Book of Disquiet", which was retrospectively assembled from a trunk full of miscellaneous notes)(p284).

The first concerns a person ("a theoretical construct" (p 387)) who claims to be both a venture capitalist and a former poet. Somebody or something has struck him on the back of the head, and he has awoken in Guanajuato, Mexico (the home of the Museo Iconográfico del Quijote and otherwise a city on a "twirling blue jewel of a planet among the galaxies"), with amnesia. Of course, the cause might have been a near lethal dose of bourbon and opiates ("So what’s my point? Not really sure; what were we just talking about?"). He has retained his wide body of knowledge (AKA his "trunk full of knowledge") and mastered both "acronymic technobabble" and "inexplicable doctor jargon" (which he proceeds to share indiscriminately with readers in the mode of encyclopaedic fiction), but has no personal context for it. He’s prone to reading Hegel, Marx, Heidegger and Sartre (not to mention Lacan and Julia Kristeva), "acting strange and completely implausible", talking "luminous bullshit" (p 382) worthy of Bill Vollmann, and "laughing out loud about his own improbability". (p 375).

He describes his drunkenness as "sublime inebriation" (p 376). His drug use rivals Cheech and Chong, and Hunter S. Thompson. Like Bill Vollmann, he can’t tell whether he’s rapidly aging or has turned into a child, whether he’s looking for drogas or putas, or both. He infers from his ATM card that he goes by the name of Alvaro de Campos, which is one of the heteronyms used by Pessoa (though he knows he is Probably Not Alvaro). Is he the person who Gomez calls the Poet? Is he a/the (one and only) douchebag?

Too Many AKA's

This character might or might not be the same person as Fred (or Edie)(does anybody really care?), or he might be a heteronym for whatever person is writing some (or all?) of the venture capitalist’s memoirs (either Fred personally or an unnamed ghostwriter) or a character or heteronym invented by the ghostwriter. He seems to have been a postgraduate student in postmodernist literature, philosophy and mathematics (much like Jim Gauer himself), who I’ll refer to as Joffrey Scoffling (assuming it’s not actually Bill Vollmann).

Depending on your perspective, the sections of the novel apparently written by Joffrey Scoffling are either the main game, or interstitials written, to order, especially for the delectation of promoters of supposedly difficult encyclopaedic novels like Steven Moore, Michael Silverblatt and Jeff Bursey (the evangelical Mooreist Brothers, all of whom have done their bit in spruiking this novel to their respective lapdogs and acolytes)(2).

Filled with a Sense of Their Own Vacuity

Ray and Gene sound like inventions of Elmore Leonard or George Pelecanos as they might be directed by Roman Polanski, Brian De Palma or Quentin Tarantino. Fred Mertz the douchebag could have crawled out of an 80’s Tom Wolfe novel, except that he reveals enough familiarity with the noughties high-tech venture capital world inhabited by Gauer to be credible, if not necessarily respectable or likable.

In Gauer’s interview with Michael Silverblatt, they both refer to the main character as "the Douchebag", which is quite appropriate because the venture capitalists are virtually indistinguishable (especially when it becomes apparent that there might only be the one protagonist or douchebag after all - as if you didn't see that coming).

You get the impression that Fred Mertz and Joffrey Scoffling reflect two schizophrenic sides of the actual author (or the author of the self or selves who wrote the novel), and that he has used the book/memoirs as a vehicle for some enematic existential probing, which we soon learn deposits and loses him (and us) in a "self-inflicted labyrinth" (p 508), his identity "an elaborate joke at my own expense" (and ours, regrettably).

Having pulled his protagonist apart, can we expect him to "reassemble any semblance of a self?" (p 704). Can it be of any comfort or importance to discover that "we're all interwoven and in this together"? (p 578). Ugh! Ho hum.

Lunatic Fiction

This "pharmacological haze" (p 641) of a book is post-Vietnam money-, alcohol- and drug-fuelled schizophrenia (HPPD)(3) dressed up as the philosophy and literature of identity. As it turns out, Gauer dug "himself into a deep Hegelian hole", "made quite a pseudonymic mess of his own identity" (p 566) and eventually realised that "Your entire sense of self, your unified identity, was either a sick cosmic joke or a lunatic fiction" (p 655):

"All things considered, this is not an entity that should be trying to write a book; this is an entity that needs a thorough rewrite." (p 568).

This much is true!

A Poisonous Abundance of Gibbering Figments and Cognitive Incongruities

This haphazard 713 page opus could have been half as long, if somebody (author, editor, publisher, reader?) just stripped out all of the repetition. This haphazard 713 page opus could have been half as long, if somebody (author, editor, publisher, reader?) just stripped out all of the repetition...and half that again if they stripped out all of the pretension.

Too Much of Nothing

"When there's too much of nothing
It can 'cause a man to weep
He can walk the streets and boast like
Of what it's like to keep
But it's all been done before
It's all written in the book
And where there's too much of nothing
Nobody should look"
Bob Dylan - "Too Much of Nothing"

In true neo-Hegelian helmet-cam fashion, Gauer/Douchebag ("shitfaced on money") ingests everything and digests nothing. Almost instantaneously, it’s all regurgitated or belched or defecated back out in illiquid Gasseous or solid-state Vollmanniac form (i.e., voluminous non-fiction masquerading as a volume of fiction). Which, in Gauer’s words, leaves the reader, like the author, "up to his neck in shit" and having to "breathe his own exhaust" (p 414). Still, he has only himself to blame, a prime example of the cause and effect that has infiltrated the laboured and plotless plot.

For readers who enjoy this kind of thing, it might still not be worth the effort.

A Viscous Pool of Nothingness

Gauer hints that both substance and style are squandered on this "thousand dollar lemon" (p 414), "the whole [a] mangled mess of poor judgment and blunders" (p 420), an "information-excess absorption overload" (p 498), "this enormous pile of nonsense" (p 531), "a hideous twisted joke" (p 690), imbued "with an improbable air, an aura of deliberate and calculated artifice", which isn't disguised by its resemblance to a mash-up of a detritus exhibit and a pina colada slush, yet, profoundly, is nevertheless "so close to its own non-existence":

"Maybe you’re mumbling dysleptic nonsense, something to do with the Abyss showing up, wearing an enormously satisfied shit-eating grin, taking it all in with a single glance, and spewing it back out so the world would have to deal with it." (p 491)

This much is spew!

A Grave and Sententious 100-Point Enthusiasm (An Excerpt) (Seemingly from The Bonfire of the Vanities Playbook):

Perhaps an excerpt will convince you?

"VCs have nothing much to do with building companies; we have everything to do with Board Meetings, and most of all, Board Dinners. The Board Dinners at Elicit were strictly regimented, drinks first upon arrival while the five of us gathered, standing room only, at the marble-topped bar, then on to our upstairs table where the first wines would be ordered, two or three bottles of Cabernet to get us started, while we contemplated the menu, though we knew it by heart, and a bottle of Chardonnay, in a silver ice bucket, standing next to Chase, to supplement the reds. The reds would start out at moderate levels, maybe a Mondavi Reserve or Phelps Insignia or Silver Oak Cabernet, before progressing to the true cult wines, the signature wines of the great 1990s technology bubble, wines like Araujo and Bryant and Dalla Valle “Maya”, Harlan, Screaming Eagle, Grace Family Vineyards, and maybe Colgin or Dunn’s Howell Mountain or Sine Qua Non, with its magnificent Rhone-style “Red Handed” Syrah, each of them ten times what I’d paid for my first car. If we were feeling particularly optimistic about the coming quarter, we might follow our sixth or eighth or twelfth bottle of Araujo with something more lavish from the Bordeaux region, a Chateau Lafite or Mouton or Margaux, particularly the 1982s that made Robert Parker famous, when he showed more than a few of these indelible creations a grave and sententious 100-point enthusiasm."

http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2016/11...

How to Get Five Stars (in the Heavens) for Your Encyclopaedic Novel from the Herd of Independent Minds
[Manipulating the Market for Derivatives]

1. Make sure your sentences average half to one page in length.

2. Make sure your paragraphs extend to 4 1/2 pages.

3. Drop the names of Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and/or Lacan into the text gratuitously.

4. Randomly use polysyllabic words you've found in your dictionary (but never encountered or used before).

5. Quote liberally from your American Physicians Desk Reference.

6. Make the "temporal arrangements" of your narrative (if you choose to have one) irrational or incomprehensible.

7. Include lots of arbitrary lists.

Dropping A Post-Modern List of Brand Names

You have to wonder whether Jim Gauer is just a pretend Post-Modernist channelling Tom Wolfe. Certainly, it's a mistake to compare him to Thomas Pynchon, whose style consists of more than the length of his sentences and the size of his vocabulary (in case you hadn't noticed). Note however that he's mastered the brand name dropping of one Bret Easton Ellis. Radical, dude!

This leads Jeff Hyperblurbole to admire Mouton-Marxist Gauer's encyclopaedic knowledge of oenology. (Isn't oenology more about the making of wine than any proficiency in collecting or drinking it?) For a Post-Modernist critic, a list necessarily implies encyclopaedic knowledge and expertise. If you can make a list, you must know what you're talking about.

Here, the brands extend to philosophers (the wikipedia depth of allusion is proof it's an Encyclopaedic Novel). Friend Jeff comments admiringly on the novel's "rich vocabulary owing much to philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Marx, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and others." (Don't you hate it when a list just ups and fizzles out innocuously like that!)

"What Thou Lovest Well Remains, the Rest is Dross."

It's now enough for the purposes of post-modern literary appreciation and promotion to merely place a book on a (wish)list...then photograph it on your shelf (even if you haven't taken the plastic wrapping off yet). This allows you to indulge in your own little piece of brand name dropping. The post-modern brand matters above all, and it must be protected and perpetuated at any cost (to your credibility). Of course, you don't even have to read a 713 page novel to award it five stars. A blurb will suffice! If nothing else, the Occupy Shelf Space movement works insistently away as a massive blurb factory!

On the one hand, to quote Lou Reed, "I'm told, in the end, that none of this matters." On the other hand, to quote Jim Gauer, you just might find that "all that you thought angelic turns out to be pedestrian...[It's] a paper-thin facade that's not fooling anyone."

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TRUTHFUL HYPERBOLE...(4)

Non Gratum Anus Rodentum

You could say this novel is "not worth a rat's ass" (p 599), "a drawing only a blowfly could love" (p 690), or "a Monument to Futility" (p 702).

FOOTNOTES:

(1) "I'm living in a replica. Reduplicative paramnesia it's called." (p 297)

(2) When Silverblatt tries to tell Gauer how difficult his novel is, Gauer responds, "My belief is that whatever level of difficulty I wanted to make it as easy on the reader as possible." Silverblatt then talks Gauer down, and makes it clear that his interviews are always about himself (his predilections and opinions), not the author.

(3) Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (p 520)

(4) Tony Schwartz, co-author of Trump: The Art of the Deal.

SOUNDTRACK:

Warren Zevon - "Lawyers, Guns and Money"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP5Xv...

Lou Reed - "Tatters"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_Z0v...

John Cale "Dying On The Vine"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qOhVEtT...

John Cale "Everytime the Dogs Bark"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc9Us6q...

Spoon - "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkA-L...

Luna - Pup Tent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PQoV...

"My mind is taking photographs
Of every little thing."

The Dream Syndicate - "How Did I Find Myself Here"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv2nK...

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book needs more space and consideration, but for now I'll say that Jim Gauer, a poet, mathematician, and a Marxist venture capitalist has written a maximalist, inventive, specialist dictionary-delving, achronological encyclopedic thriller that takes place in the u.s. and mexico, in the abstract and the very physical, within the confines (exploded confines) of philosophy and the literary novel, and outside all of those fictional boundaries as well. Steven Moore's endorsement is on the back, and for good reason.

A long review of this book is here:

http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2016/11...

Here I'll add a few lines from the review:

... in his novel Gauer, self-described on the back cover as “a mathematician, published poet, and possibly the world’s only Marxist Venture Capitalist,” gathers together facts and data, transforms them into knowledge about systems that are then distributed among his main characters, and through this understanding of how things work, the author creates a narrative that indicts his home country for, at best, and only in some instances, willful blindness, but more often for serious and long-standing morally criminal activity concerning drug use and commerce in weaponry. It is also a performance that expresses deep anger, and possibly loathing, for his country, authority, and human behaviour. Those emotions are not plentiful enough in our better-known contemporary novelists, and may be considered impolite, unseemly, undisciplined, and not easily aestheticized. Yet this book is not a rant or screed. Alongside the anger, and not contrarily, it is playful, replete with narrative ingenuity and a command of form. It has a middle finger unflaggingly raised against the rules [of writing]...

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally, a book for those who recognize the impact of the rift between discourse worlds, for those who appreciate fractals, for those who like the poetry and philosophy of heteronyms, but also don’t mind guns and drugs. Yes, this is a crufty, maximalist work. Yes, there are many periodic sentences. Heck, there’s even some cataloguing. But the sum of the outrage is deeply ethical. And the damn thing is fun to read.

[My only minor qualm was the sheer number of times the word douchebag was used. And, as another reviewer has pointed out, the sheer number of cliches. However, I think that there’s the point of the discourse worlds to consider, and the ready-made language is the price of admission. There’s a knowingness there, I believe.]

“To Raymond’s immediate left, where the child in flowing red is climbing toward the rock face, the hillside has been terraced and planted with spring wheat, which won’t be ready to harvest until sometime in July, using hammer-peened scythes that are honed on a whetstone, in a process nearly as old as wheat cultivation, which is itself roughly as old as human civilization, which is in turn about as old as organized slaughter, in wars over wheat and agricultural surplus, created by scythes, honed on a whetstone.” (702)

It’s the people just as much as the institutions.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite really taking his time in the last 200 pages, relishing WAY too much in his own technical glossolalia of high-end savage weaponry...Despite the showboating prose that often reads like Matt Damon's How-Do-You-Like-Dem-Apples agrarian economics oneupsmanship...This book is ridiculously spectacular. Phenomenal even.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maximalist metafiction is dead! Long live maximalist metafiction!

Tl; dr – Proust’s and DFW’s ghosts playing spades with Pynchon and You

BuzzBlurb – “Dis book… go boompow just like biggest hottest fastest summerest blockbusterest action rollercoaster thrill movie event of (your) life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Jim Gauer is writing for a very small audience, surely you recognize. Readers are rare enough, how much rarer those willing and eager to indulge long, relentless, abrasively experimental texts. If you don’t feel compelled to google every lexeme like “oneirogogic” or “SC-FDMA uplink amplifiers” or “Portuguese modernism” or “Heckler and Koch G3’s, with the Brugger and Thomet railed forend” or “the shattering detonation velocities of nanometric RDX in a porous chromium(III)-oxide matrix,” it’s a fairly fast read. Most of what I’d like to say here will spoil at least some of the pleasure you might find in enduring and interpreting the book; you’ve been warned.

The beginning is a criminally good hook, the middle is quite a trial, and in the end the verdict is irrevocable: life is guilty, we are sentenced to life. Tracing the gradual interweave of the three narratives and chronologies to their eventual knot binds together this book “about” exploding. Amnesia (broadly speaking) is about as clever and original a plot device as putting a character in a coma, but for the most part Gauer deftly utilizes it as a pretext to interrogate predominant commonsense notions of personhood, subjectivity, identity, memory, responsibility, and so on and so on. Thankfully there is not a whit of plangent sentimentality involved, for at its best it demonstrates that thoroughly disillusioned yet immortally curious sensibility which makes self-conscious literary-philosophical works more than mere hand-wringing eulogies over Our Fallen World. At its worst, you’ll have to speedread pages of high-grade artillery jargon; I believe their purpose is warranted and their function justified, however, for just as Melville set out to know the whale, Gauer renders every miniscule detail of the ultra-tech militarized reality that is the guardian of every First World privilege. Imagine a Proust hellbent on commodity de-fetishization, that’s the sort of awakening going on here. Juarez is YOUR problem. Yes, you, Dear Reader.

Regarding the level on which this is ostensibly the failed memoirs of a (failed) Marxist (but lucratively successful) Venture Capitalist, wracked better late than never with an unremitting identity crisis, I can’t avoid the lurking suspicion that he’s trying to smuggle in a justification/rationalization/contextualization of a loathsome life his lofty ideals condemn. There’s plenty of soul-searching (spoiler: none is found) and to the extent that the novel is indeed Gauer’s self-reckoning, he is a paradigm of candid self-criticism. Still, after decades of profiteering, can one simply recant and reinvent, shed their skin as a snake-oil salesman? Isn’t that gesture itself beholden to the inexorable logic of Capital, wherein if you don’t like something (say, yourself) you can just throw it away and start investing in a Brand New You? Such questions lead us fruitfully far afield into the minefield of contemporary subjectivity, subjectivization, and evermore rapidly commodified subject-positions. Please note that none of this is intended to impugn Gauer himself or his “sincerity”; but a fortune reaped through willful duping and dispossession makes lonely mid-life introspections dubious when delivered from a luxury villa. Hegel is paraphrased (I daresay bowdlerized) several times—“a man is his acts”—yet notably absent is explicit consideration of the more acidulous infinite judgment, “Wealth is the Self.”

No matter the authorial contingencies that necessitated its writing, the book stands alone, and stands formidably well on its own merits. A difficult book only rewards readers who thrive on a challenge, and precious little else in recent publication provides such an opportunity to hone your interpretive skills. To my mind, the premier accomplishment here is the formal ingenuity employed, as if lives depended on it, to collapse any gap between title, text, themes, signs, space, time and matter. Ambitious and undaunted, the mad method offers plenty to ponder. The prose nearly runs right off the page.

[Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subversive, heart-piercing, mind-altering. Also hilarious. What a read, what a ride, and so sublimely far from well behaved. Novel Explosives plays on so many divergent emotional and intellectual registers that at a certain point the omniscient narrator has to stop and reconsider his tone. I love that. And we need this. At point-blank range, Gauer examines economic inequality from the obscene top (where businesses are left to self-regulate under free-market morality – what could possibly go wrong?) to tragic bottom –- a bottom that punishes most all of our fellow inhabitants on this spinning blue jewel of ours.

How to prepare for the read? My advice: Think of José Saramago’s mastery of the utterly improbable circumstance; Michael Lewis’s wicked-priceless exposés of finance; the Coen Brothers’ idiosyncratic genius for tragicomic crime; James Joyce’s penchant for parodying crazy-extreme discourse; Roberto Bolaño’s magical-to-horrifying renderings of Mexico; Chris Hayes’ laser assessments of geopolitical absurdity; and Sergio de la Pava’s real-life-professional-insider urgency against a corrupt system; and maybe while you’re at it, consider the blueprint of a tabernacle, because in the last chapter, that’s where I found myself, smack inside the holy of holies, where Gauer delivered something César Vallejo might well have called A Miracle of the Spirit.

Yup, I love this novel!

[Josh Pendergrass]

Wow, I've never read anything like this!…Who is Jim Gauer?  Is he a real person, or is it just a heteronym for some hidden author? Don't be put off by the novel's size! If you stick with it what you will find is a remarkable critique in novel form (a Novel Explosive!) of the global economic system (including the symbiotic relationship between the finance industry, the drug trade, the tech industry, and the military industrial complex) and the pathological culture that this system creates and encourages on our planet.  Included are heavy doses of philosophy and musings on poetry to help with the existential issues that arise with an understanding of this system, which, whether we acknowledge it or not, we are all a part of.  That is where the novel's greatest strength lies - it is an urgent moral call for us to take account of what it means to be a human being on this planet right now. Somehow Gauer is able to accomplish all of this with stylistic humor and curiosity. Our language, our selves, and our spinning blue jewel of a planet are all deeply intertwined. I will need to take some more time to digest this novel, there were times where it seems to straddle the line between insanity and genius.  A serious work of art, recommended!

[Zachary Tanner · Rating 5 out of 5]

My new favorite 21st century English language novel

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first 2/3 are absolutely superb, as good as anything I've read in the last year. But then I found it started to drag and there are 2 main plot points that (as far as I'm aware) are never explained. Still, well worth a read

[Nick Black · Rating 5 out of 5]

i'm hesitant to give this five stars, as it is quite imperfect, and gauer's comma-extended sentence style is at times annoying. there are furthermore at least two chapters (of about thirty) that could have been left out. at the same time, ulysses could have probably done without "Scylla & Charybdis" and been not greatly diminished, and infinite jest, the book gauer clearly aspired to and considered defense of his worst impulses (even if he's never read it, which i very much doubt) is riddled with maddening mistakes (it's nice to have an actual mathematician write such a novel, rather than DFW, who apparently thought that if you could fool a bunch of MFAs, you don't need worry about getting the math right). reads like DFW's most manic passages throughout its entirety, with the obscurantism of Gravity's Rainbow. in a word: delightful. probably in my top ten books of all time, though it'll require further reflection and a reread to know for sure. almost certainly my favorite book of the 21st. well worth reading; gauer threads the line between an exquisite and excessive style beautifully (most of the time). sections are pure brilliance: see for instance Ciudad Juárez. the end meanders a bit, but doesn't subtract much from the work overall.

"the colorectal crimson of an oncogenic sunrise"

[Andrea · Rating 1 out of 5]

I received this book in a Goodreads giveaway.

DNF. I only got 30 pages in and had to stop. The author was so redundant he could have writen the first 30 pages in 15 pages. For one train of thought, he takes a page and a half when 3 sentences would do the trick.

This book feels like a student who needs to hit a word count in his paper and writes a bunch of similar sounding but vaguely different sentences to illustrator the same point.

[Andrew Merritt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had high hopes and an abundance of excitement going in Novel Explosives, whose compelling and erudite narrative seemed perfectly up my alley. Unfortunately what started as maximalist fireworks turned old hat somewhere around the halfway mark, and I found myself dragging towards a less than thrilling conclusion that I wish had come 200 pages earlier.

Please don’t let my less than positive review dissuade you from reading Novel Explosives though. Despite my tepid feelings towards it, the mountain of praise heaped upon the novel is not unwarranted - Gauer’s work will ultimately stand tall alongside the other great literature of the 21st century. There’s plenty to love in this book, unfortunately at the end of the day it just wasn’t for me.

[Maxwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

The negative reviews I see, some readers seem to feel insulted by the very existence of this book. It imposes itself as yet another encyclopedic novel, one written by an author we’ve never heard of, that obsessive readers are seduced into spending 30+ hours of their lives with through some gravitational Stockholm abracadabra. Personally, I never want to run out of novels in this style, as long as they are well written. This is a worthy addition that brings some unique things to the format, but I also have some issues with it.
This is basically a 200 page cartel-mystery-romp with 500 pages of Tristram- Shandy-level digressions stretching out the narrative. A lot of it is quite fun. The absurd amount of detail in the Venture Capitalist chapters works well and reminds me of JR. However, pretty much every character seems to just be a stand-in for Jim Gauer. The protagonist pontificating quantum mechanics for 5 pages while eating a 20 page snack of tortillas and wine is indistinguishable from the third person narrator in another section pontificating the theoretical physics of teleportation for 5 pages while a cartel hit man is attempting to save his abducted partner. Mob bosses have an encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare and a whole slew of philosophers at their disposal. It’s all very clever—the author is one clever boy—but was utterly draining by the time I reached the book’s mid-point. With that said, Gauer is incredibly talented, and I won’t hesitate to buy whatever he releases next.

[David Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wellwell, what we have here is not so much a thing of beauty as a thing of density, uncertainty, and--holy fuck--more information than wholly necessary.

[Greg Gerke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the most aesthetically interesting and most underread US novel of the decade.

[Manuel Armenteros · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first review I've written for goodreads, and to be honest, I hope I won't have to write many more. But sometimes you've got to reply when you perceive something unfair is being said about something you deeply care about. I've read Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow", "Mason & Dixon", "V." and "Against the Day", I've also read plenty of DFW, Bolaño and others, of the Great Authors Pantheon. I've seen popular posts here by fans of these authors, saying that this book is simply cliched postmodernism or technical obscurantism for the sake of it.

Now, I'm the first to admit, I may be missing a gene for "good taste in books". It's entirely possible. Heck, seeing how many books some of the reviewers here have read and rated, it's likely inevitable. But here I am, missing a gene, seeing a few popular or influential reviewers saying this novel is garbage. On such occasions the ignorant speak up, risking embarrassment from those that know more or maybe even know better. It's certainly true that Novel Explosives is technical and verbose in many parts, but so too are Pynchon and Wallace. It's also certainly true that there are cliché's here, but again so does every great author have numerous phrases said by the many, unless they're creating a new language from scratch.

What does Gauer have that Pynchon and Wallace lack, in certain aspects of their works? For one thing, NE is actually fun. Really fun. I don't ever remember reading a novel that was not an "airport bestseller" that was this action packed that was of such a high quality. Another aspect that Gauer has, that is found with less frequency in others, is that, despite the difficulty involved in reading parts of it, the messages found here - important messages - concerning existentialism, philosophy of language, the essence of poetry, the total confusion and deceitfulness found in those who gamble with the world’s finances, the chaos of the drug war, the crime of inequality, all of these messages can be found without having to consult a "skeleton key" or "companion guide”, to the books great merit. Perhaps the biggest merit in all the book is how the nature of identity is dealt with here. I know a thing or two about philosophy, and I’ve never seen such a fantastic perspective on this most difficult topic and I’ve never thought about “the self” in the same way since. In fact, for this alone this book is worth reading, however difficult or dense it may otherwise be.

Now, all this plainly subjective. Clearly. Still, I find a genuineness in Gauer that is rare, a deep and urgent need to communicate about the perils and thrills of life in a manner that comes off as real and all the technicities, wonderful wordplay and so on, are all in service of enhancing your experience with the book. There is just so much here. And while Pynchon and Wallace are true writers that deserve all the praise they get, Gauer clearly belongs in this company. But again, I'm likely missing some "taste buds" so far as my refinement in novels go.

If you like rich, complex, multifaceted, fun, deep, insightful novels, with plenty of soul in them, Novel Explosives is the book for you, it's been the best experience I've ever had reading. To finish on a cliché, not mentioned by others here but borrowed from another person, this book indeed is "a miracle of the spirit".

5 stars falls way, way short. A total masterpiece, and one you should experience, at least once.

[mkfs · Rating 3 out of 5]

This guy watches too many movies. The author suffers from the illusion that drug cartels are inherently interesting, that "woke up with amnesia" is a plausible beginning to a story, and that freeze-frame descriptions of an action scene are appropriate to a written narrative.

These last tend to be crammed with superflous detail (brand names, technical terms, historical data), which exposes another flaw: the tendency of the author to liberally distribute irrelevant information, occasionally in lecture form, while neglecting to attend to core events of the narrative. After sitting through that five page summary of drug cartel history, the development of fuel-air explosives (leading to the terribly misappropriate title, unless the title is intended to warn you of the the topic for the longest, most egregious digression in the novel), and so on, one discovers that a character has entered the car and sat in the passenger seat, or that two gunmen in a standoff have surrendered their weapons, or some other significant action has happened in the background, without the author bothering to inform you. I charitably assume that this is due to mere sloppiness, as the notion that it is by design betrays an astounding lack of competence in basic writing and composition.

Still, an enjoyable enough reading experience, due largely to a cynical tone which proves entertaining in a way that the many failed attempts at humor do not. The run-on sentences work, somewhat, as an efficient depiction of the mental processes of the addled narrator (though when the narrator changes, they are still in evidence - no doubt more sloppiness). The irrelevant detail seems impressive, until the author inevitably stumbles upon an area in which the reader is well-versed, whereupon it becomes clear that much of the alleged-information is gleaned from Wikipedia articles or, worse, online forums.

Reading guide: Skip the first two chapters entirely. You won't miss anything. Hastily skim long paragraphs in action scenes: these are massively redundant, saying the same thing many times, rewording an idea or description, as if demonstrating by example the inherent value of the editorial position, and the danger in allowing unfettered self-publishing. And don't worry about missing something in the course of this speed-reading: in the last third of the novel, the author helpfully includes what I presume are his notes on the novel, re-capping everything that has happened up until now as if he were afraid of losing his place (again, a charitable assumption, the alternative being that he believes the reader is stupid enough to need this, which given how little actually happens in the novel would be an indication of the author's limitations more than the reader's). Come to think of it, given the fact that there's a narrative recap every ten pages in the last hundred, you could read just the last two or three chapters of the novel and not miss anything.

[Jonathan Brammer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plot summary: venture capitalist gets caught up in money laundering scheme, flees the country with a suitcase full of $30 mil, is pursued by two cartel hitmen, ends up losing his memory and ending up in Guuanajuata to try to piece together his past while still being pursued while romancing the woman who set him up?

I didn't get it. At times the mists cleared and I was able to see a story unfolding, the threads of the plot coming together, in a coherent way. The rest of the book is padded out with asides, references (esoteric and otherwise), narrative rabbit holes, and lists of financial products, weaponry, etc. There are parts that are fun, or that resemble fun, while most of it reads like a series of inputs (Cervantes, Wittgenstein, Hegel, McCarthy, Wallace) were fed into an algorithm and this novel was spit out.

What is the purpose of the novel in 2019? In the post-post-truth era? It's an antiquated model for storytelling, for creating the essential narratives that define our collective values. Most people nowadays ingest their narratives pure from cable news or political speech, uncut and unstepped on, with the punditry artlessly just telling people what to think, cherrypicking examples for maximum partisan effect. "Novel Explosives" is the stereotypical doorstop novel hoping to achieve "Great American" status by pummeling the reader with his erudition in what seems like a deep insecurity. The authors is not confident in his craft, so he throws everything against the wall, with the thought that it is always better to overwhelm than to disappoint.

Don't get me wrong - I appreciate books like this, for their ambition, their willingness to deconstruct the form - but hasn't the novel been damaged enough in our late age? Where does the solipsism end and the empathy for the reader begin?

[Emmett · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic novel. Tons going on formally and thematically. Long and complex but also not too abstruse (narrative lines are mostly clear, lots of subtle but still clear correspondences between ideas, events, symbols). Surprisingly tense in terms of plotting. Absolutely worth reading for fans of Gaddis, Wallace, Pynchon, Evan Dara, De La Pava etc.

[CKQ Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

"How does mankind learn to live with itself?"

"We’re people who like to watch…"

Both perennial themes, among others, in this 700+ page behemoth of a novel, are posed several times in different ways through its characters and sprawling depictions of venture capitalism, Mexican Cartels, and Portuguese poets. Novel Explosives is an enormous challenge of a book and not nearly as messy as I had first considered when I started reading its pages weeks ago (having sat on my shelf for a few months if not a year).

The aforementioned behemoth-ness comes from not only Jim Gauer’s ability to string dependent and independent clauses together, sometimes for pages at a time, as they shift and meld and reverse course and build off one another in telling a story, but through its depictions of various characters and how and why they’re able to live with themselves, each in his or her own way putting personal greed and velocity ahead of other concerns and thereby contributing to a problem that affect much more than just themselves.

I can get why some folks might be a bit turned off by Gauer’s prose: the sections mostly narrated by Ramirez and “douchebag” mostly dominate the novel’s length, from which their narration – which isn’t really all so garrulous since I believe it serves many points and is probably more loquacious than anything – is filled with such terse vocabulary that it practically forces the reader to move on lest they get more than acutely familiar with their local dictionary. If the reader isn’t particularly adept at knowing the ins and outs of VC lingo or war weaponry lingo or even that of political concerns regarding Lisbon-residing poets from the 1800s, it might seem quite a boon to continue reading as the book isn’t exactly laying out any of the above subjects in a ready-to-digest manner.

No matter; the plot strings and developments, I think, are teased often enough to keep any serious reader of fiction engaged until the end (the last 100-150 pages being particularly juicy), even if you do solve the general plot confusion, like I sort of did, around pages 125-150. It’s well worth the effort to finish the entire thing.

The crux, for me, was this passage on page 695-696:

"You’ve been wandering about Juarez like a zombie in a though experiment, an experiment in collective guilt, where the zombie is shown the morgue-slab photos, and responds by saying “I’m truly sorry”, and making out a check to Amnesty International, or Nuestra Hijas de Regreso a Casa, or maybe Save the Children or Habitat for Humanity, and then sealing the whole deal by forging his own signature. What’s that you say? You didn’t know it was forged? No wonder the authorities are beginning to get suspicious. We’re sorry to be the ones to break this to you, but the violence that man is doing to his home is not some sort of thought experiment, and the last thing on earth the world needs now is yet another anonymous onlooker, trying to get the picture; our drawing isn’t a drawing exactly, it’s more of a kind of framing device, and you, mon frère, so slow to get the picture, are not only under suspicion, but about to be framed. We didn’t exactly select you at random, and you’re not precisely The Viewer in the abstract sense, and we’re not about to give you a bird’s eye view of anything, or a view of Juarez from high atop a smelting stack; we’re about to put you back exactly where you belong, wearing Douchebag’s shoes, in the middle of the picture, because while Douchebag isn’t you in any literal sense, you appear to be standing in Douchebag shoes, and Douchebag, unfortunately, is now your problem."

God damn, what a sentiment! Read the rest should you wish to figure out the rest.

[Edward Champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm partial to the literary ramblers. And Jim Gauer certainly is one. This is 700 pages of endless digressions on financial systems, Fernando Pessoa, the nexus of tech and capital, and even (at one amusing moment) Crazy Eddie. But there are two fundamental problems here: Gauer doesn't have much of a story (despite the intriguing premise of a man who wakes up with no memory of who is in Mexico) and Gauer believes himself to be a lot more interesting and intellectual than he really is. He is not Gilbert Sorrentino, Vollmann, DFW (although he tries desperately to mimic his phrasing near the end), Pynchon, John Barth, Nathan Hill (the most promising new literary rambler), or any of our dependable rambling heroes. There are large chunks of this massive novel that are completely uninteresting and there are large chunks that are captivating. I think one of the biggest problems that Gauer has is that he is more of a systems guy than a life guy. And fiction is, first and foremost, about life. Once Ray is revealed for who he is, the mystery is disappointing. Gauer does have some flair for action scenes, particularly in relation to the drug cartel. But I don't think Gauer is an especially natural fiction writer. Props to him, however, for his audacity!

[Brent Hayward · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly typical post-Tarantino story, complete with more weapon porn than anyone could shake their stick at, eloquent, verbose bad guys, and a good dose of chopping up, temporally, Novel Explosive's real draw is the insane amount of diversions. (Is that a draw?) Just one split second-- a critical explosion-- went on for about forty or sixty pages, crammed to the margins with metaphysics, speculations, and philosophical musings. This is a novel with ADHD, on crack. Also, like all good books on crack, the story opens with the protagonist, known as The Douchebag, waking up in an unfamiliar hotel room with complete amnesia. Pretty funny, smart, and I learned about a lot of things.

[Descending Angel · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's been a while since I've read a book of this size, and I was expecting something more from this book since I've heard a lot of good things about it, but it just didn't work for me. It reminds me of a number of different books ~ Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (which it mentions a number of times), a Javier Marías novel and infinite jest to name a few. The beginning isn't so bad, it's a slow burn and there are some moments that aren't so bad, the writing is readable and has a rhythm to it, it's not hard to read but it's a drag, it's boring. Ambitious? Maybe. But there's nothing groundbreaking about this book.

[Renton Walter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind Bending

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cross between Pynchon, Don Winslow, and a whole bunch of other things such as an expert on Portugese Poetry, a weapons expert, a quantum physicist, a philosopher, a venture capitalist and I don't know what else. Of course the other seems to be quite a few of these so no surprise.

[Frank Privette · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, at times it’s undeniably self-important and pretentious (it clocks in at over 700 pages to tell a relatively simple story). On the other hand, it’s also undeniably relevant, a page-turner, incredibly well-written, and thoughtful. Plus, author’s Jim Gauer’s life is simply interesting. He’s a mathematician who was hired by Rand to work on certain types of weapons. He turned out to be so good at that job that he was able to use all his spare time to become a poet. And get published. He eventually became quite a successful venture capitalist and has written two novels. Novel Explosives -which has been famously blurbed by none other than Steven Moore- is his second novel. It took him seven years to write it, writing every day beginning at four in the morning before his day job as a VC. Oh, and he’s a self-declared marxist.

Of course an author with that pedigree will write an interesting book. Novel Explosives is certainly that and may be mentioned in the same breath as 2666, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Instructions, The Recognitions, and, yes, Infinite Jest, by some. It’s at least a solid attempt at a maximalist/encyclopedic novel. So if that’s your cup of tea (sometimes, it’s mine), you may like this one. But I stop just short of calling this book a truly experimental, innovative, “novel” narrative. It’s smart, profound at times, reads like a thriller (but don’t think Gauer works at a Neal Stephenson level), philosophical, insightful, current (it’s in part about real, contemporary, post-post modern financial capitalism; and about the US’s “war on drugs,” after all). It certainly reads as a Bolaño-in-Santa-Teresa. It has many David Foster Wallace themes. It may even be called as smart and tongue-in-cheek as Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. But it’s over indulgent. And for all of Gauer’s skills, he certainly could’ve benefited with an editor as ruthless as the drug cartel hitmen that populate Novel Explosives.

Plus, there’s the story. It’s painfully simple for a seven hundred page novel. The action takes place in one week in April ten years ago, right after Easter. A guy wakes up in Guanajuato with a head injury can recall everything except his identity and how he lost it. He’s also obviously smart and has a bunch of cash. Earlier that week a VC writing his memoirs realizes a deal may be linked to drug money. And in the middle of the week two thugs with a violent mission drive from Mexico to El Paso. No spoilers here, and I won’t add anything else except to say that the story is resolved satisfactorily. And characters, I suppose, develop. Plus, the las hundred-odd pages or so feature quite an amazing explosion which is described in a way that convinces me Gauer may in fact be a great poet and eventually a more than decent novelist.

But once again, this book, with this story, with all its themes, could’ve easily been two hundred, maybe even three hundred pages shorter. It took me a year and a half to get through it simply because it’s unnecessarily dense with at times superfluous descriptions of contemporary financial mechanisms, military technology, the chemical composition of narcotics, gruesome passages of drug violence, and Flaubert-length tellings of Mexican towns. Hey, as a Latin American, I appreciate a US author appreciating and respecting Latin culture and urban geography so much. But drive the point home, my man.

Incidentally, I read Infinite Jest in three or four months. Which is roughly what it took me to get through Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day, 2666, and Eco’s longer books.

I certainly hope more people read Novel Explosives- it has many hidden and not-so-hidden jewels. It is not a long-ass narco-novela. But it is also not Bolaño or Foster Wallace. I think Gauer will be the first one to say he doesn’t want to be mentioned in the same breath as them. My point is, with this book, with his evident smarts, skills and hard-headedness, and especially with more experience and a mean editor, Gauer’s future works will be mentioned in the aforementioned same breath.