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Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag
To capture the details of Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag would be difficult enough—to capture the spirit of it, however, would be impossible. Johnson has delivered a desensitizing, blistering, yet highly literate document of madness from the front lines of the criminal justice system, blending transgressive wit with genre-bending inventiveness.
250 pages, Paperback
Published July 31, 2022
26 people want to read
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February 17, 2023One approach that I think is very effective for an author is to try to write like Vladimir Nabokov. Very easy style to imitate and very endearing to the reader. Always write with a wink and a nod self-consciousness about "breaking all the rules" of fiction with the well-earned belief that you, the author, alone are the exception to all these rules. Always make sure to try to come off as intelligent and cultured as possible. The reader will love you for it.
Beyond that, I read this whole book and was COMPELLED to read it. Like, despite everything, it was an enjoyable read. Compelling. I was also compelled by the sight of the big deer I hit with my car the other day, IN TOWN, TWO BLOCKS FROM MY FUCKING HOUSE, as it twitched and writhed and tried to crawl to its hooves on the side of the road. So maybe there's something sick inside me.
ALL THAT BEING SAID, Adam seems like a swell guy in the limited interactions I've had with him. He's probably nicer than Christ, I would say. And the story he wrote for Expat about the old Nazi or whatever was fucking great. Check that out. Too lazy to link.
Beyond that, I read this whole book and was COMPELLED to read it. Like, despite everything, it was an enjoyable read. Compelling. I was also compelled by the sight of the big deer I hit with my car the other day, IN TOWN, TWO BLOCKS FROM MY FUCKING HOUSE, as it twitched and writhed and tried to crawl to its hooves on the side of the road. So maybe there's something sick inside me.
ALL THAT BEING SAID, Adam seems like a swell guy in the limited interactions I've had with him. He's probably nicer than Christ, I would say. And the story he wrote for Expat about the old Nazi or whatever was fucking great. Check that out. Too lazy to link.
November 28, 2022
I’m a little biased about this book because I was one of its early readers and I helped bring it to the publication you see here with this entry. I’ve talked a lot about this book elsewhere but I will just say: the reason why I think this book is so good and deserves high accolades is because it manages to be highly disturbing and shocking (the insides of its main character are an uncomfortable place to be) but the highly literate, clever prose style and polish of the writing sets it apart from what might have otherwise been a Nabokov/Bret Easton Ellis/William Burroughs facsimile. The position of the reader inside an unhinged protagonist’s (?) POV is handled really well, especially as the book progresses and things go into stranger and more upsetting places. The psychological understanding of the novelist is very wide and developed. Did I mention how funny the book is? It’s a very dark, unsettling humor but it’s there nonetheless and helps to pull you through the subterranean passageways and dungeons. I hope he writes another novel sometimes. Something different somehow? I don’t know how though…
February 11, 2023
CVGJ is a slow march to insanity. It is Chinese water torture via writing. Drip drip drip. The reader buys in and by the time you realize what you’ve committed to it’s too late to put the book down. CVGJ is horny and delicious. Disgusting and embarrassing. It goes to show that a book can be about anything if you stick to the concept and keep banging the nail. Don’t even get me started on the flowing quality of the prose. My mind would wander in and out of paragraphs but the author has an uncanny ability to direct the prose back to where it needs to be to grab your attention before it drifts too far.
Highly recommend.
Highly recommend.
July 3, 2023
In my younger and more vulnerable years, I used to have a very bad habit that routinely got me into trouble. And I call it a habit, but really it was probably something closer to a crosswired tic—a kind of subconscious psychic defense mechanism—I couldn’t help it, I swear—but regardless, my insistence on its innocuous, autonomic nature rarely passed muster with whatever authority figure I’d pissed off that day. You see, until sometime in my mid-teens when I finally managed to get a better handle on my maxillofacial muscles, I was afflicted with the unfortunate reflex of smiling at bad news. To this day, I couldn’t tell you where it came from, or how or why it started. The best I can do is to say that, somewhere in the depths of my limbic mind, I’ve often struggled to take the world, up to and very much including myself, seriously. I’m not a sociopath or anything. I actually feel an often overwhelming amount of empathy—even for those I wholeheartedly disagree with—even for those I actively dislike. It’s one of the things that, I think, makes me a good writer (YMMV on this). Likewise, I don’t remember ever smirking at war, or violence, or death, or even more abstractly political issues like racial injustice or gender inequality or climate change (though I definitely smirk at a certain brand of insular, academic wokeness at times, depending on its pitch and tenor). I still remember, vividly, curling up in the fetal position and sobbing at Columbine footage. Walking around in a shellshocked daze on 9/11. Feeling fearful, and physically sick the morning after the Trump election. I know serious when I see it. But I can admit that there is something about people insisting, with every fiber of their being, that their own (comparably) low-stakes personal issues aren’t funny, which has always made them just a little bit funnier to me.
The lines we draw between what is and isn’t funny have changed a lot, even in the time since I was a smart-aleck kid who’d say almost anything for a laugh. And they’re lines I’ve been thinking about quite a bit these past few years as I’ve shepherded my own dark, satirical first novel, Troll, to the brink of publication, but nothing I’ve written, and none of the lines I’ve carefully considered and/or crossed during that time, can hold a candle to what Adam Johnson has pulled off with his psychotically erudite gonzo death trip Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag, an unhealthily obsessed stalker’s love letter to transgressive literary history. Johnson’s central antagonist, who only ever provides us with the vaguely self-deifying mononym Goddard, is an unrepentant antihero on par with the all-timers. Swan diving from the ivory tower lechery of Humbert Humbert, plummeting down through the dipsomaniacal rapacity of John Self, and landing with a sickening splat amid the unhinged gutter depravities of Burroughs’s Interzone, this is a man effectively ticking off “the evils that men do” like a frenzied cancer patient’s stage-4 bucket list, determined to sate every appetite; refusing to leave one morsel of meat on the bone. Through his rhapsodically itemized psychic disintegration, Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag draws a swerving, staggering line from the highest-minded to the lowest-browed of criminal behaviors (call it upper crustpunk) that puts the lie to all the different reasons authors have trotted out over the years (myself, again, very much included) for writing subversively about the worst humanity has to offer. A grandiloquent grab at the final word on the subject, it cracks an inappropriate smile that doesn’t stop widening, clacking, cackling, until at long last it bites your face off, and swallows it whole.
At the outset, Goddard seems, at best, like a pompous, narcissistic windbag with some deeply unsavory sexual proclivities. That is the absolute kindest impression one could possibly glean from his immersive inner monologue (which comprises virtually the entire text), and even it proves extremely shortlived. As he begins his book-long confessions, Johnson brings to life this fiend’s piss-stream-of-consciousness with an unnerving patience and control, his thoughts deftly deteriorating from the grandiose pedantry and multilingual wordplay of the first act to the gin-soaked lunatic ravings of the third—a hyperliterate roadmap of his all-too-traceable highway to Hell. A tale of wickedness and woe that begins with nothing more harmful (though obviously disgusting) than listening at the bathroom door while his newly-betrothed daughter-in-law takes a pee, only to escalate over the course of a few months to a point where (spoiler alert) he’s literally fucking corpses (plural).
It’s not funny.
But also, it really is.
To say much more about the plot of this wild-eyed, foamy-mouthed, and gleefully deranged novel would be giving much of its masterful game away, but it hurtles forward with the three-sheets, pell-mell momentum of its besotted central figure’s titular Jaguar, clipping every guardrail, fire hydrant, and slow-footed squirrel it encounters along the way (not to mention more than a few innocent pedestrians), and daring you on a nearly page-by-page basis to pop your door latch and tuck-and-roll to safety before it’s too late; before the needle ticks into the red and you’re carried right over the edge of oblivion with it. Goddard is irredeemable. And what’s more, he is not looking for, or likely even disposed to the idea of redemption. As the book’s opening epigraph states plain as day, he sees his admission of guilt as a way of making him stronger. Love him or hate him, he owns his villainy. Cherishes it. Polishes it bright and displays it for all to see. He is smarter than any system that would seek to contain him, such that even his descent into total, old school asylum-worthy madness feels like a logical move—one that he intentionally engineers in order to continue living some semblance of the foul manner to which he’s grown accustomed. He has no patience for the nuanced self-doubt of a Harry Haller, or even the strained social niceties of a Patrick Bateman. He is pure, unadulterated id. I don’t make this assertion lightly, but even with all the touchstones I’ve already mentioned, I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever read a character quite like him.
Having said all that, what I do think bears more discussion is the why of it all. Why do authors write characters like this? Why do we engage with them? Why have they coalesced, since at least the days of Dostoyevsky and Ducasse, into their own unofficial genre of misanthropic one-upmanship and vicious anarchy? An ersatz subterranean genre which has been asked at every turn, by stuffy, serious, and vehemently unsmiling critics—hands planted firmly on their morally upright hips—what exactly it has to say for itself? Are they seeking to diagnose society’s ills, in order that we might better recognize and combat them? That seems a little namby-pamby now doesn’t it? Are they working to provide a bay window onto the abyss? To allow others to ogle the darkness like a tranqued out lion at the zoo without having to risk getting too close themselves? That’s maybe closer, but still a tad altruistic, don’t you think? Is it just a nihilistic lark? A middle finger to notions of karmic justice, egalitarian narrative convention, and the cult of the happy ending? A disillusioned scream into the void that none of that, but rather this, this is the way things really are? Yeah. That’s definitely part of it. But even that is a bit stale on its own. It’s been said a lot. Loudly, and a lot.
So why then?
Where do these books come from?
What do they want from us?
Where do they expect us to go?
Obviously I can’t speak for Adam Johnson, nor would I presume to try, but I can tell you that in interrogating my own motivations these past few years for swimming around in and giving voice to the inmost savageries of a wholly repugnant sort of mind, I have had occasion to describe the writing process as everything from a detoxification, to an amputation, to an exorcism. I’ve talked to other transgressive authors about this uncomfortable disconnect and heard them make similar comparisons. And as many times as I’ve insisted to early readers that my book is not “about me” in any “meaningful way,” (and it really isn’t), I’ve still had to grapple with the fact that a hideous creation, and his relentless inner diatribe which comprises virtually my entire text—whether I like it or not—did spring fully formed from my brain. I can only imagine Johnson dealt with this too. A kind of personal reckoning. A knowing in your bones that something is both terrible, and terribly important, and feeling that if you don’t get it down—get it right—get it out of you—that it might well take hold for good. Metastasize into places inoperable. Grow from one demon, into Legion. And so we write—as therapy—as outlet—as defense—as release—the psychic equivalent of “fighting over there” (in your work) “so you don’t have to fight over here” (in your head). A devilish smile at the outer dark.
Or perhaps the reason this once-outsidery strain of writing has become so codified is because the world has finally forced enough optimistic normies to admit that their presupposed happy ending isn’t coming. That we’re all increasingly racing toward our personal dooms in the grips of whatever substances and scant pleasures we can get our hands on. That enough people’s individual breaking points have been reached—whether due to economic instability, or media saturation, or climate catastrophe, or forever war—that things once considered too serious to joke about are now the only things we have left.
It’s been a slow slide down this slippery slope, and far be it from me to suggest we’ve hit rock bottom (though there’s no doubt Johnson is gunning for it), but if you can’t laugh—at least a little bit—at the sheer absurdity of the ongoing autosarcophagy of American Democracy, or the subsumption of actual identity into the tribalism of identity politics; at, say, the evangelical-backed President of the United States trying (and failing) to keep a porn star from speaking publicly about the size and shape of his dick, or the richest man in the world trying (and failing) to buy in bulk the love and respect of the entire internet; at the trigger warning-appended newscasters vehemently trying (and failing) to impress upon us just how extremely serious and unfunny all these things are, or, quite frankly, at a middle-aged egomaniac jerking off in a drunken stupor with his son’s wife’s panties over his head while waxing eloquent about the glories of Nabokov and Verdi, then you are perhaps not built for this terrible (and possibly final) century. I don’t think anything would land me in the loony bin with Goddard faster than losing my ability to laugh at all this ridiculous, (comparably) low-stakes trouble. The simple fact of the matter is, sometimes things are funny simply because they’re not supposed to be. And even with things happening in our world every day—and certainly moments in this heroically demented book—that far surpass what I can personally find the humor in, to occasionally crack an inappropriate smile is (and always has been) (and always will be) a matter of survival.
The lines we draw between what is and isn’t funny have changed a lot, even in the time since I was a smart-aleck kid who’d say almost anything for a laugh. And they’re lines I’ve been thinking about quite a bit these past few years as I’ve shepherded my own dark, satirical first novel, Troll, to the brink of publication, but nothing I’ve written, and none of the lines I’ve carefully considered and/or crossed during that time, can hold a candle to what Adam Johnson has pulled off with his psychotically erudite gonzo death trip Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag, an unhealthily obsessed stalker’s love letter to transgressive literary history. Johnson’s central antagonist, who only ever provides us with the vaguely self-deifying mononym Goddard, is an unrepentant antihero on par with the all-timers. Swan diving from the ivory tower lechery of Humbert Humbert, plummeting down through the dipsomaniacal rapacity of John Self, and landing with a sickening splat amid the unhinged gutter depravities of Burroughs’s Interzone, this is a man effectively ticking off “the evils that men do” like a frenzied cancer patient’s stage-4 bucket list, determined to sate every appetite; refusing to leave one morsel of meat on the bone. Through his rhapsodically itemized psychic disintegration, Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag draws a swerving, staggering line from the highest-minded to the lowest-browed of criminal behaviors (call it upper crustpunk) that puts the lie to all the different reasons authors have trotted out over the years (myself, again, very much included) for writing subversively about the worst humanity has to offer. A grandiloquent grab at the final word on the subject, it cracks an inappropriate smile that doesn’t stop widening, clacking, cackling, until at long last it bites your face off, and swallows it whole.
At the outset, Goddard seems, at best, like a pompous, narcissistic windbag with some deeply unsavory sexual proclivities. That is the absolute kindest impression one could possibly glean from his immersive inner monologue (which comprises virtually the entire text), and even it proves extremely shortlived. As he begins his book-long confessions, Johnson brings to life this fiend’s piss-stream-of-consciousness with an unnerving patience and control, his thoughts deftly deteriorating from the grandiose pedantry and multilingual wordplay of the first act to the gin-soaked lunatic ravings of the third—a hyperliterate roadmap of his all-too-traceable highway to Hell. A tale of wickedness and woe that begins with nothing more harmful (though obviously disgusting) than listening at the bathroom door while his newly-betrothed daughter-in-law takes a pee, only to escalate over the course of a few months to a point where (spoiler alert) he’s literally fucking corpses (plural).
It’s not funny.
But also, it really is.
To say much more about the plot of this wild-eyed, foamy-mouthed, and gleefully deranged novel would be giving much of its masterful game away, but it hurtles forward with the three-sheets, pell-mell momentum of its besotted central figure’s titular Jaguar, clipping every guardrail, fire hydrant, and slow-footed squirrel it encounters along the way (not to mention more than a few innocent pedestrians), and daring you on a nearly page-by-page basis to pop your door latch and tuck-and-roll to safety before it’s too late; before the needle ticks into the red and you’re carried right over the edge of oblivion with it. Goddard is irredeemable. And what’s more, he is not looking for, or likely even disposed to the idea of redemption. As the book’s opening epigraph states plain as day, he sees his admission of guilt as a way of making him stronger. Love him or hate him, he owns his villainy. Cherishes it. Polishes it bright and displays it for all to see. He is smarter than any system that would seek to contain him, such that even his descent into total, old school asylum-worthy madness feels like a logical move—one that he intentionally engineers in order to continue living some semblance of the foul manner to which he’s grown accustomed. He has no patience for the nuanced self-doubt of a Harry Haller, or even the strained social niceties of a Patrick Bateman. He is pure, unadulterated id. I don’t make this assertion lightly, but even with all the touchstones I’ve already mentioned, I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever read a character quite like him.
Having said all that, what I do think bears more discussion is the why of it all. Why do authors write characters like this? Why do we engage with them? Why have they coalesced, since at least the days of Dostoyevsky and Ducasse, into their own unofficial genre of misanthropic one-upmanship and vicious anarchy? An ersatz subterranean genre which has been asked at every turn, by stuffy, serious, and vehemently unsmiling critics—hands planted firmly on their morally upright hips—what exactly it has to say for itself? Are they seeking to diagnose society’s ills, in order that we might better recognize and combat them? That seems a little namby-pamby now doesn’t it? Are they working to provide a bay window onto the abyss? To allow others to ogle the darkness like a tranqued out lion at the zoo without having to risk getting too close themselves? That’s maybe closer, but still a tad altruistic, don’t you think? Is it just a nihilistic lark? A middle finger to notions of karmic justice, egalitarian narrative convention, and the cult of the happy ending? A disillusioned scream into the void that none of that, but rather this, this is the way things really are? Yeah. That’s definitely part of it. But even that is a bit stale on its own. It’s been said a lot. Loudly, and a lot.
So why then?
Where do these books come from?
What do they want from us?
Where do they expect us to go?
Obviously I can’t speak for Adam Johnson, nor would I presume to try, but I can tell you that in interrogating my own motivations these past few years for swimming around in and giving voice to the inmost savageries of a wholly repugnant sort of mind, I have had occasion to describe the writing process as everything from a detoxification, to an amputation, to an exorcism. I’ve talked to other transgressive authors about this uncomfortable disconnect and heard them make similar comparisons. And as many times as I’ve insisted to early readers that my book is not “about me” in any “meaningful way,” (and it really isn’t), I’ve still had to grapple with the fact that a hideous creation, and his relentless inner diatribe which comprises virtually my entire text—whether I like it or not—did spring fully formed from my brain. I can only imagine Johnson dealt with this too. A kind of personal reckoning. A knowing in your bones that something is both terrible, and terribly important, and feeling that if you don’t get it down—get it right—get it out of you—that it might well take hold for good. Metastasize into places inoperable. Grow from one demon, into Legion. And so we write—as therapy—as outlet—as defense—as release—the psychic equivalent of “fighting over there” (in your work) “so you don’t have to fight over here” (in your head). A devilish smile at the outer dark.
Or perhaps the reason this once-outsidery strain of writing has become so codified is because the world has finally forced enough optimistic normies to admit that their presupposed happy ending isn’t coming. That we’re all increasingly racing toward our personal dooms in the grips of whatever substances and scant pleasures we can get our hands on. That enough people’s individual breaking points have been reached—whether due to economic instability, or media saturation, or climate catastrophe, or forever war—that things once considered too serious to joke about are now the only things we have left.
It’s been a slow slide down this slippery slope, and far be it from me to suggest we’ve hit rock bottom (though there’s no doubt Johnson is gunning for it), but if you can’t laugh—at least a little bit—at the sheer absurdity of the ongoing autosarcophagy of American Democracy, or the subsumption of actual identity into the tribalism of identity politics; at, say, the evangelical-backed President of the United States trying (and failing) to keep a porn star from speaking publicly about the size and shape of his dick, or the richest man in the world trying (and failing) to buy in bulk the love and respect of the entire internet; at the trigger warning-appended newscasters vehemently trying (and failing) to impress upon us just how extremely serious and unfunny all these things are, or, quite frankly, at a middle-aged egomaniac jerking off in a drunken stupor with his son’s wife’s panties over his head while waxing eloquent about the glories of Nabokov and Verdi, then you are perhaps not built for this terrible (and possibly final) century. I don’t think anything would land me in the loony bin with Goddard faster than losing my ability to laugh at all this ridiculous, (comparably) low-stakes trouble. The simple fact of the matter is, sometimes things are funny simply because they’re not supposed to be. And even with things happening in our world every day—and certainly moments in this heroically demented book—that far surpass what I can personally find the humor in, to occasionally crack an inappropriate smile is (and always has been) (and always will be) a matter of survival.
September 9, 2024
I feel awful that I had to give this book its first non-5-star rating. At the time I'm posting this, I'm one of only 11 fortunate souls who've read and rated Adam Johnson's fantastic novel here on goodreads, and the other ratings — yup, all of them — are 5 stars. Until the final 35 pages, I was relatively sure I'd be following suit with a perfect rating also.
While it becomes apparent to the reader early on that we are observing the irreversible mental decline of the enthrallingly fucked-up protagonist/antagonist/narrator,
But let me tell you, everything up to that point is both narratively enthralling and phenomenally written. The text sang with arrogance and dripped with mood. This is a book that begged to be read aloud; yes, most of the time I literally read it out loud, by myself in a room, feeling every impeccably-chosen word linger on my tongue. Absolutely a book to be savoured slowly and revisited over time.
I do have another nitpick, although it's not one that affected my score at all. While the text showed deep erudition throughout, there was a serious hononym problem. On numerous occasions, he wrote "passed" when he meant "past," or "rationale" when he meant "rational," and (my personal pet peeve), "breath" when he meant "breathe." It would hardly even bear mention, if it weren't for Goddard's frequent praise of his own eloquence and grammatical prowess, which prowess is not brought into question anywhere else in the text.
While it becomes apparent to the reader early on that we are observing the irreversible mental decline of the enthrallingly fucked-up protagonist/antagonist/narrator,
But let me tell you, everything up to that point is both narratively enthralling and phenomenally written. The text sang with arrogance and dripped with mood. This is a book that begged to be read aloud; yes, most of the time I literally read it out loud, by myself in a room, feeling every impeccably-chosen word linger on my tongue. Absolutely a book to be savoured slowly and revisited over time.
I do have another nitpick, although it's not one that affected my score at all. While the text showed deep erudition throughout, there was a serious hononym problem. On numerous occasions, he wrote "passed" when he meant "past," or "rationale" when he meant "rational," and (my personal pet peeve), "breath" when he meant "breathe." It would hardly even bear mention, if it weren't for Goddard's frequent praise of his own eloquence and grammatical prowess, which prowess is not brought into question anywhere else in the text.
March 30, 2023
I had had the good luck to have been acquainted with Adam Johnson's prose, via Misery Loves Company and Bear Creek, before I got my hands on this book, but nothing could have prepared me for this once-in-a-world lynchian masterpiece. I worship this book and will be reading it on loop, so help me Satan.
Mild-mannered surface dweller Goddard goes off the tracks for his own son's wife, abandoning life as he had established it and normalcy in every sense, in a crash and burn spiral. Johnson gives the character a bank account, maniac brain, and thirst each the size of Rhode Island to play with, and away we ride. The plot is not complex, it is that of a biopic without the final arc of redemption, but told from a first person POV restricted to the protagonist's unwell gloating uber-educated eyes. The cultural realia (food, drink, drugs, car, clothes, decor) are in themselves something so Bret Easton Ellis about this work that they may even betray Johnson's own past. A collaborative production from Anxiety Press and Prism Thread Books, the book is a comfortable 250 pages paperback without typos (jk I caught 2...but were they typos? Such was the breakneck speed of the work that it did not madder! Utter for udder was one).
Why this book is like no other is its intensity and drive, that every single sentence contains a joke or cruel punchline, though I hesitate to say joke or punchline because this is not cheap entertainment, no giving up here. As a humor writer I appreciate the feat of this, however, that Johnson has managed to concentrate so much horror and angst (the essence of a good laugh) into every single line. Not that this is a funny book, or genre humor. This is the story of a psychopath, but full of insights and remarks.
Get your hands on this beauty now for your Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag jag, and please fasten up.
Mild-mannered surface dweller Goddard goes off the tracks for his own son's wife, abandoning life as he had established it and normalcy in every sense, in a crash and burn spiral. Johnson gives the character a bank account, maniac brain, and thirst each the size of Rhode Island to play with, and away we ride. The plot is not complex, it is that of a biopic without the final arc of redemption, but told from a first person POV restricted to the protagonist's unwell gloating uber-educated eyes. The cultural realia (food, drink, drugs, car, clothes, decor) are in themselves something so Bret Easton Ellis about this work that they may even betray Johnson's own past. A collaborative production from Anxiety Press and Prism Thread Books, the book is a comfortable 250 pages paperback without typos (jk I caught 2...but were they typos? Such was the breakneck speed of the work that it did not madder! Utter for udder was one).
Why this book is like no other is its intensity and drive, that every single sentence contains a joke or cruel punchline, though I hesitate to say joke or punchline because this is not cheap entertainment, no giving up here. As a humor writer I appreciate the feat of this, however, that Johnson has managed to concentrate so much horror and angst (the essence of a good laugh) into every single line. Not that this is a funny book, or genre humor. This is the story of a psychopath, but full of insights and remarks.
Get your hands on this beauty now for your Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag jag, and please fasten up.
October 30, 2023
This is a fun and twisted ride that will have you turning the pages frantically with anxiety trying and failing to anticipate where you’re going next. Witty and intellectually creative. The book allows the reader to ride shotgun with Godard through his journey of an increasingly paced mental break without getting their hands dirty with the disastrous fallout that would be to live any of this personally. I hope this book gets the circulation it deserves. It’s up there on my list of memorable favorites that I’m sure to revisit with future re-reads. A+
March 25, 2023
Started on Friday March 10th and finished on Wednesday March 15th
60 something year old Goddard is an intellectual elite. He also wants to fuck his son‘s new 23 year old wife and kill anyone that stands in his way
He harbors murderous and suicidal thoughts towards his family and self
He has a belittling antagonistic partnership with his wife fueled by his excessive drinking
He self actualizes into a monster in this retelling as he spirals deeper into the abyss of no return and alcohol dependency
It was strangely synchronistic to read this right after watching a Nabokov lecture and reading Heather by G.C. McKay
The chapters are long arcs full of dense heavily stacked paragraphs crammed with a lot of detail and elegant word smithing.
Every word is carefully and deliberately chosen.
The retelling is in a figurative and literal limbo awaiting judgment for what he’s done
A picture is created of a walking contradiction like a wolf in sheep skin
His self awareness and detached narcissism create a checks and balances that eventually begins to propel his own insanity
Goddard’s narcissism interferes with us learning about anyone but himself
All of his life decisions are procedural and calculated
He’s reductive of people to their base elements
He’s sexually possessed and obsessive of his son’s wife.
He projects onto her virginal pure angelic qualities even though she’s an adult.
He sees her as a fairy tale.
He is in a Sisyphean cycle of marital dissatisfaction; the conditioning of which prevents him from ever doing the right thing.
Holds a murderous resentment towards anyone that reminds him of this existential domestic nightmare he’s created for himself
His wealth has created an insular reality where he gets whatever he wants and won’t accept desiring things he can’t have
His suicidal self flagellation resents this lineage
Out of desperation he creates two worlds for himself but can’t call either a true home
We know these worlds are determined to collapse on each other
Dizzying paranoid stream of conscious finality where he meets judgment in the ethereal and the literal.
It becomes overstimulating and psychedelically disorienting
This section reminded me of Left Hand and how it actively worked to deceive and contradict the readers interpretations as it went along
Touches on themes like viewing life through a screen and creating a projection fantasy that you desire.
Loads of meta textual elements like addressing us and the structure as we read it
Commenting on the unspoken relationship a reader has with a piece while consuming it; a form of being held hostage by an author
Describing his life as a movie
Foreshadowing and alluding to a present that is tainted by the story unfolding
References to classical works that are allusions as well as part of the language style
These comparisons are also ironic and evident of Goddard’s narcissism
The words are seductive in an intentionally lulling drug effect
Romantic era Poe writing juxtaposed with contemporary subject matter
Humorous call back lines to Lolita
Playful with syntax
Morbid sense of humor
Footnotes that leave your stomach in knots
Singular
Industrial
Ruthless
Always engaging
Drags you through the mud and makes you drown in it
Takes you further than you think is the extent of human debasement
60 something year old Goddard is an intellectual elite. He also wants to fuck his son‘s new 23 year old wife and kill anyone that stands in his way
He harbors murderous and suicidal thoughts towards his family and self
He has a belittling antagonistic partnership with his wife fueled by his excessive drinking
He self actualizes into a monster in this retelling as he spirals deeper into the abyss of no return and alcohol dependency
It was strangely synchronistic to read this right after watching a Nabokov lecture and reading Heather by G.C. McKay
The chapters are long arcs full of dense heavily stacked paragraphs crammed with a lot of detail and elegant word smithing.
Every word is carefully and deliberately chosen.
The retelling is in a figurative and literal limbo awaiting judgment for what he’s done
A picture is created of a walking contradiction like a wolf in sheep skin
His self awareness and detached narcissism create a checks and balances that eventually begins to propel his own insanity
Goddard’s narcissism interferes with us learning about anyone but himself
All of his life decisions are procedural and calculated
He’s reductive of people to their base elements
He’s sexually possessed and obsessive of his son’s wife.
He projects onto her virginal pure angelic qualities even though she’s an adult.
He sees her as a fairy tale.
He is in a Sisyphean cycle of marital dissatisfaction; the conditioning of which prevents him from ever doing the right thing.
Holds a murderous resentment towards anyone that reminds him of this existential domestic nightmare he’s created for himself
His wealth has created an insular reality where he gets whatever he wants and won’t accept desiring things he can’t have
His suicidal self flagellation resents this lineage
Out of desperation he creates two worlds for himself but can’t call either a true home
We know these worlds are determined to collapse on each other
Dizzying paranoid stream of conscious finality where he meets judgment in the ethereal and the literal.
It becomes overstimulating and psychedelically disorienting
This section reminded me of Left Hand and how it actively worked to deceive and contradict the readers interpretations as it went along
Touches on themes like viewing life through a screen and creating a projection fantasy that you desire.
Loads of meta textual elements like addressing us and the structure as we read it
Commenting on the unspoken relationship a reader has with a piece while consuming it; a form of being held hostage by an author
Describing his life as a movie
Foreshadowing and alluding to a present that is tainted by the story unfolding
References to classical works that are allusions as well as part of the language style
These comparisons are also ironic and evident of Goddard’s narcissism
The words are seductive in an intentionally lulling drug effect
Romantic era Poe writing juxtaposed with contemporary subject matter
Humorous call back lines to Lolita
Playful with syntax
Morbid sense of humor
Footnotes that leave your stomach in knots
Singular
Industrial
Ruthless
Always engaging
Drags you through the mud and makes you drown in it
Takes you further than you think is the extent of human debasement
July 8, 2023
Nothing can prepare you for the bat shit crazy plunge into the heart of madness that is CVGJ. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Johnson's novel does not disappoint.
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