98.6

by Ronald Sukenick

A group of people, trying to contend with the failure of hope that took place at the end of the sixties, withdraws from what they call "The Dynasty of the Million Lies" and creates a settlement in the woods of the far west. These refugees from our culture, trying to live a healthy, normal life as pioneers of a latter-day frontier, find they are forced to pay heavily for thier retreat in terms of sexuality, death and insanity. The novel consists of three parts: "Frankenstein", "The Children of Frankenstein" and "Palestine." The first section is a disjointed documentary collage expressing the violent chaos of the culture, the second is a narrative about the settlement with its communal and sexual experimentation, and the third, "Palestine," is a utopian vision of Isreal that takes place on a perfect kibbutz in which all problems are solved. 98.6 is a novel that marks the end of a generation of hope without giving in to hopelessness.

Genres: Novels, Fiction

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Ronald Sukenick was an American writer and literary theorist.

Sukenick studied at Cornell University, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens, at Brandeis University.

After Roland Barthes announced the "death of the author", Sukenick carried the metaphor even further in "the death of the novel". He drew up a list of what is missing: reality doesn't exist, nor time or personality. He was widely recognized as a controversial writer who, frequently humorously, questioned and rejected the conventions of traditional fiction-writing. In novels, short stories, literary criticism and history, he often used himself, family members or friends as characters, sometimes quoting them in tape-recorded conversations. He did stints as writer in residence at Cornell University, the University of California, Irvine, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. But his books were never best-sellers. Sukenick once commented that he had “only forty fans, but they’re all fanatics.”

He referred to his career as a university professor as his "day job". He taught at Brandeis University, Hofstra University, City College of the City University of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, Cornell University, the State University of New York (Buffalo), and l'Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France. His most prolonged teaching career was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was professor of English from 1975-1999.

He was actively committed to publishing and promoting the writing of other unconventional writers. He was founder and publisher of American Book Review, and a founder of The Fiction Collective (now Fiction Collective Two). Sukenick was chairman of the Coordinating Council of Little magazines, and on the executive council of the Modern Language Association and the National Book Critics Circle.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ron Sukenick, co-founder of the Fiction Collective (FC2) and deceased as of 2004, left behind a strange corpus of avant-garde works, of which this 1975 FC-pubbed novel is one. A triptych concerning communes and failed utopias, the first section is composed in the form of third-person diary entries, eliminating commas from the punctuation entirely (used for the whole novel, in fact), and contains the most inventive humour and language. Section two is longer and is closest to straight narrative, introducing us to the dropouts in an extremely zany commune whose free love philosophy is falling apart—content-wise, this section is reminiscent of T.C. Boyle’s excellent but overwritten Drop City. The third section is the most experimental—a staccato monologue that would require a Sukenick seminar to be understood (by this reader at least). The overall tone and impact of the novel is disquieting and one of nervous laughter. Despite occasional dull patches this one is a success.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

For the past 18 months I have been not=reading Ronald Suckenick. Prior to that time I was also not=reading Suckenick ; with the significant difference that prior thereto I had not once(?) heard the name “Suckenick.” Now 18 months later I have finally read my first Suckenick. There will be more. Many more? As many as there are Katz perhaps.

98.6 == Normal. But, um, this Frankenstein story, please, don’t mis=take it as normative. There can be really not any question about that. Frankenstein’s Children, naturally, take after their parents. And as for Palestine (I typed “Palestein”) , “Interruption. Discontinuity. Imperfection.” Which is something to a T.

Well, so my first Sukenick. And it’s pretty great. I mean, not like Argall is great, but like how something short can be just dandy(!) What I mean to ask is really how much great stuff can there really be out there. Either there’s a hell of a lot and one can never run through it all to it’s cliff=edge ; or there is a very limited quantity of great stuff out there and I just happen to have found myself pretty much knee=deep with little alternative. Either way, I seem to be within a pretty jim=dandy fine horizon of books as far as these eyes can see.

Here’s the new thing for your next road trip (I recommend those Scrabble tiles for you Mosaic men and women) :: A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter in the alphabet once but only once. Here a few which some Suk=character cobbles together;;

Fork jugs vex’d nymph waltz bicq.
Nymphs waltz jig fuck vex rod bq.
Hymn waltz fuck vex prod big sqj.
Hymn waltz fuck sex gip v.d. bjorq.
Vex’d nymphs waltz jig fuck borq.
Futile. Forget about it. Life has its own resolutions. Like sex. Like power. Like death. End quote. So it would seem some kind of useful technique for psychosynthesis. Or whatever.

Just for kicks too one could switch up the alphabet itself, for example, instead of the latin abc one could take the greek alpha beta gamma or the hebrew alef bet gimel or the cyrillic or the arabic or the thai ;; etc.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

The end of the 60s and the Fall of Utopia. Ideals eviscerated by history, what future may we turn to? A survey of life in Frankenstein and Palestine, in three parts rated by stylistic tendencies SLOW, SLOWER, and FAST. I think reading this right after Double or Nothing makes it seem formally less exciting, but it's part of the same vital impulse.

[Tim]

Bjorsq.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read 98.6 because I have been watching David Lynch movies and wanted to read something weird that wasn't fantasy exactly, and this was one of the stranger things on my shelf that seemed to fit that description. Somebody gave 98.6 to me nearly 30 years ago, but I never read it.

98.6 has three separate sections, but there are ideas that tie them together in places.

Part 1 Frankenstein started interesting and weird. What is the Ancien Caja and why does it tie these stories together? What is this place, village (?), town (?), Frankenstein?

Then, in Part 2 The Children of Frankenstein, the story turned into this Kerouacian stream-of-consciousness story about a bunch of young professionals (?) who went to live hippy in the forests of California (but not as hippy as those hippies over there, at least not to start with). There were a lot of characters that I couldn’t keep straight, so I didn't ever care about them much. It didn’t help that most of them changed their names half way through and the author went back and forth on the names for at least one of the characters (I think?!). There was a lot of sex, but little character development. Also, there were a couple of uncomfortable stories about women being raped and eventually liking it.

The writing in 98.6 was non-conventional. To my understanding, the author was involved with the creation of the Fiction Collective. The history of the Fiction Collective is pretty cool, especially that it published things that wouldn't get published otherwise. Still, at times, Part 2 felt like something a 20 year old would write to be different in a sophomore literature class. I wasn't looking for a traditional linear narrative here, but I tend to like character development in my novels, and it didn't happen at a level I wanted. I love books with a large and interesting cast of characters, like Dostoyevsky or even George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. And while it's always hard to keep those characters straight when their numbers rise, the most effective authors do that by building meaningful characterization. It's hard enough to actually tell a story that conveys information and emotion to people, but when there's a whole bunch of people interacting, it can be even harder. Part 2 just didn't get that done in my eyes. Sometimes punk works, sometimes it just seems amateurish. I suppose there was potential here, but it was just okay to me.

Part 3 Palestine
Part 3 was a stream of consciousness conversation with a guru (?) from Israel who said Yiss a lot. Maybe this was a product of the time, but it just seemed really tropey that there was this foreign person who could guide some Westerner through the philosophies of life. It was clear that the author didn't think much of gurus, based on part 2, so yes, the guru was kind of silly. But at the same time, why did we have to be from Israel? That was just confusing for me.

Part 3 was a hodgepodge of kind of Eastern philosophy intersecting with more rape and sex talk. At one point, the author presented an equation, L = P/J where love equaled passion / jealousy. However the author went on to say multiple times that “the greater the love the greater the jealousy”. I'm not sure if he intended the absurdity of this, but it didn't work for me, and I just kept thinking that the equation was wrong. Based on what happened in the second part, I think he just screwed up the equation. I mean it's not really there for a real mathematical reason, but come on, if something is equal to the inverse of something else, as one thing goes up the other goes down, this is pretty basic and caused me to become distracted from the story.

After reading 98.6, I couldn't decide if the problems I had about it had more to do with the mind space of people in the early 1970s or the fact that it wasn't a really well thought out novel. All of the sex-related material seemed so dated and at points uncomfortably violent, but maybe that was just the way people thought about it back then?!

So, I'm not sure I understand 98.6. Maybe I don't have to understand it, maybe I just need to love it and feel it, but unfortunately I really didn’t, at least not most of the time. If I had to sum up 98.6 and one word, it would be bjorsq.

2.5 stars because maybe I'm rating this on modern standards, versus in the context of when it was written.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

a cool and cute example of lesser known 70s american post modernism.

[Split Foster · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'd need to read some of his other stuff to see what he's all about, but this just seemed like lazy pomo wankery.