Doom Town

by Gabriel Blackwell

A professor of Linguistics in a Gulf Coast college town causes an accident that destroys his marriage and sends him into a breakdown, in which he perceives that the world is falling apart with him. Even his language becomes fractured, in a parallel to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

Genres: Fiction, 21st Century

202 pages, Paperback

Published May 10, 2022

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

The dog, my feeling of doom in the Macy's, the broken bowl, the remnant in the garage, the classroom incident, the shooting one of the things I've come to most distrust about language is that it makes things that can be communicated with even the tiniest bit of specificity seem as though they're being recalled perfectly in every detail, when, if I search my memory for any of these events, and even after all I've already said about them, I always discover that I in fact remember very little about their actual circumstances.

Doom Town is the first of Gabriel Blackwell's works I have read but won't be the last. I came to it I think courtesy of a mention by the brilliant Jen Craig on a podcast, and it lived up to her recommendation.

The first chapter of the novel, titled "In Which He Describes a Feeling" (all of the chapters are similarly titled) opens in Macy's with our first-person narrator and his wife buying a decorative vase to replace one broken, over a year earlier, by their young son. En-route to the store he had witnessed, in visceral detail, a dog hit and killed by an SUV. The "Feeling" that first comes on to the narrator, suddenly, is an all-encompassing feeling of desperate, frantic numbness, of doom:

What I mean to say is, and I want to be clear on this point, what I mean is that I knew then - at that exact moment - that all, all of my efforts in that area, that is to say, in the area of attempting to heal the rift between my wife and myself (and why not be blunt? all of my efforts in every area, every single one), had been and would continue to be futile.

This is a very doom-laden novel, where the narrator often drops in a subtle reference to some catastrophic event- to a campus shooting, a bomb, climate-change induced flooding and most notably the death of his son - whose details only emerge later. For example, the 'um, what, hang on...' feeling induced in the reader by this passage where he is telling a bedtime tale to his son - about the Alvarez hypothesis, with a diversion into zombie apocalypse movies - when his thoughts are suddenly interrupted by this rather left-field development:

I saw then that my son’s arm, dangling over the edge of the bed, had an unnatural bend in it at the shoulder, as though the point at which the arm met the shoulder sat below the socket I'd made with the rubber band and the T-shirt, his arm looking, in other words, like it might fall off, and so, while I tried to get back on track in what I'd been saying, to, I think, explain about the Chicxulub crater, I reached over, grabbed the boy's arm, and tested it, slowly, gently pulling his arm back into place. I'd been worried about this earlier, about, I guess, the suitability of this particular toy a wrestler, I thought, or some hero or villain whose profession or secret identity required that he wear scant clothing made out of what looked like Spandex (a dancer? an Olympic athlete?) and who had hands that could be manipulated into a variety of grips (this is what had, I thought, suggested the toy's use as an arm, or really, as a hand, in the first place).

Blackwell's prose is wonderful. Thomas Bernhard is clearly one of the authors who has inspired Blackwell although he has described this book as one where the great Austrian both is (in general terms) and isn't (in terms of the specifics) a key influence. The style is best appreciated by an extended passage such as the one featured here in Socrates on the Beach.

A key part of the novel's theme is around communication and language - and its failings, including his own inability to communicate with his wife about the tragedy at the novel's heart (the purchase of the vase a form of displacement activity). The narrator resorts to different means of language including a "speech-acts-language project" his own agglutinative form of English (sadly not featured in the novel) and, at the time of the novel, communicating by stories often rather indirectly related to the topic at hand.

Part of the novel concerns the narrator's travails in academia. This was less successful for me, other than for comic relief (e.g. his lectures in the form of unrelated stories): the topic of how US colleges have turned from centres of academic research into teaching-process-centred extensions of high school is clearly a key one for the author, but rather less a concern for this reader.

But overall, a very impressive novel. 4.5 stars and an author whose work I will continue to seek out.

Publisher

This is from Zerogram Press, the US indy, whose catalogue looks wonderful, including one of my most anticipated releases of 2023, Jen Craig's Wall.

Zerogram Press is dedicated to contemporary literary fiction written in English. We are primarily interested in novels, short story collections, and novellas, but also publish collected literary reviews and essays. Zerogram was founded on the belief that the literary publishing machinery in the United States is broken: with a few rare exceptions, the editors at major imprints use literary agents to screen new fiction; literary agents, under extraordinary time constraints and industry pressures, may not respond to query letters from authors they’ve never heard of; and most of the prestigious independent presses are very nearly closed to new submissions. If you or someone close to you has written something brilliant, and found no one in the publishing world even willing to read it, you know why Zerogram Press was founded: to discover new voices that might otherwise go unheard.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting. What starts out as a fairly trivial disagreement between a married couple over the choice of an ornamental bowl spirals out into something much weirder.

The narrator is the husband and he's struggling to articulate his feelings in the face of (multiple) setbacks in the past. The most important of these (no spoilers from me on this) is only gradually revealed.

I'm definitely going to seek out more books by this author

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took awhile for me to warm up to the dense, obsessive prose. It's riveting, but I could only read small chunks of it at a time. The narrator reminds me of individuals in my life who are similarly trapped in their own heads; all of which makes this more painful.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review
https://youtu.be/oQCrbhY68BI

[Greg Gerke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning book--a look inside the worst tragedy imaginable, as well as an indictment of the US and academia, that put me in mind of Lydia Davis's novel and all of Gerald Murnane. One of the great short novels of our time.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

“For me, there was a sense that, because I couldn't think of myself as an authority on anything…it was difficult for me to act with authority without also feeling as though I'd harmed myself in some way, as though I was, as a result, making myself more inauthentic and so less myself, a kind of assault on the core of my being…I don't know why my wife found it difficult…there were moments when I felt she was waiting for me to act, when I knew I was expected to act, and yet in which moments I held back, thinking to my own great shame-that I couldn't act, couldn't make the obvious decision, precisely because I was being counted upon to make exactly that decision. Though that may seem unnecessarily antagonistic, I'm not sure that it was, or, actually, at the time, I remember I felt certain that it wasn't. In those moments…especially when I held back or refused to make the obvious decision, I felt as though I was being the bigger person, by which I mean I felt I was taking the blame for not acting so that my wife or my son could have the opportunity to exercise their own agency, taking on a responsibility they might not otherwise have had.”

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

This tightly wound, forever second guessing, forward glancing and backward looking narrative—shades of Bernhard at his most, think "Yes," humane if he was to write a domestic tragedy set in suburban America—is brilliantly realized from beginning to end. It takes a while to get the rhythm of the troubled narrator's prevaricating, passive self analysis as he tries to recount the story of the disintegration of his marriage in the wake of the most unimaginable loss while the rest of his immediate world implodes in the most incredible yet thoroughly contemporary American way, but soon one is swept up in his desperate attempt to make sense of it all.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/01/22/no...

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book. Full video review here: https://youtu.be/y4M0P0IcDPQ

[Franco Romero · Rating 5 out of 5]

maybe the only novel I've read that captures so well the feeling of doom that is ever present for most of us living in contemporary society, at least in the United States. we cannot seem to escape the ever present anxiety that is layered into our world, and the narrator of doom town shows us this through his thoughts— meandering, explaining slowly, gliding from one observation to the next— that the sense of things ending, things closing in, things perpetually breaking apart despite our best efforts, cannot be escaped. and yet, there are still those of us who try to tell stories. what I loved about doom town is it isn't a recycling of the adage we are all so familiar with— we tell stories in order to live— but instead it asks how such a thing can be possible when living is increasingly more difficult and the conditions of our lives seem, quite simply, doomed. I read the first sixty pages in one sitting. wonderful prose, especially for fans of Borges, Gaddis, Stephen Dixon.

[isaacq · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the world of horror cinema, there's been a term bandied about for several years now: Elevated Horror. The term is now reviled by many, but it serves as a good umbrella for the particular flavour of horror film that's become so prevalent in the last decade, where personal trauma and grief are either textually or subtextually the real villain of the piece, rather than any monster or masked slasher.

Doom Town by Gabriel Blackwell is probably the closest analog I've seen in literary fiction to elevated horror cinema. While "horror" in the traditional sense is somewhat present in the novel (mostly in the absurdist acts of quasi-random violence that seem to surround our protagonist everywhere he goes), make no mistake: the big baddies that lurk over the story are grief and trauma.

Paragraphs are very long and very dense, without any breaks for dialogue. Paging through this book before reading, I noticed the paragraphs looked like the last couple published DFW books, especially Oblivion. Individual paragraphs are enormous odysseys of thought and concept, with a recursive and obsessive cadence.

The truest and most uncomfortable feat here is how Blackwell captures the meta-thoughts and meta-meta-thoughts during an argument, and the enormous involuntary gap between our words and the intent behind them. If you've ever had a tremendous row with your spouse, and afterwards found it difficult to explain what the fight was even about, then you will find many passages of this book familiar and painful, because the protagonist's fights with his wife are about that nebulous everything and nothing.

This was my first time reading Gabriel Blackwell, but I absolutely must find and read more.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection of short chapters, narrated by an extremely circumspect speaker, a prof of linguistics whose marriage is collapsing after the death of his son. The setting for the book, in FL, is also unraveling, between terrorist attacks and weather and invasive insects taking up residence in his garage. The novel flirts between horror and humor, between the doom of the daily life and the frustrated prof's inability to really deal with it. Though this is a very writerly book, very interested in language and what it can and can't say with certainty, it also has a strong emotional thread, one that somehow builds to an emotionally rich conclusion from the banal and awful things that have preceded it.

[Travisimo5 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book after I read CORRECTION, which is dystopian short prose. This book is totally different. A story of loss and grief told through the eyes of an extremely depressed and neurotic man. Two of the main subjects in the story I had a deep personal connection with and that made this quite a difficult read. The end result from this story, for me, was a look inward, and acceptance accountability.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dark and brilliant book, embodying the nightmare side of fatherhood, as compelling as Katixa Agirre's Mothers Don't and a great companion to that book's exploration of maternal violence, loss, and guilt. Where Agirre's narrator searches without flinching to find truth and reason in the public nightmare, Doom Town's narrator circles perpetually away from his central horror, all the while leading himself and the reader into it. And by the magic of language, without spoilers, both books ultimately find their way to an all but inevitable melting of the heart.