Sam Riviere, _Dead Souls_

SO MANY NOVELS of late have no table of contents. This bothers me.  The new Zadie Smith novel, for instance (which I am enjoying very much so far), has chapters that are both numbered and titled and moreover divided into eight "volumes" (not literally--it's all one book). all these carefully designated parts, but no table of contents. Frustrating.

Poet Sam Riviere's first novel has a table of contents, I am pleased to report, one I found myself consulting frequently, and moreover has one in spite of the fact that it has no chapters, not even divisions indicated by blank pages or extra spacing. In fact, his novel is all one paragraph from beginning to end. By having recourse to the table of contents, however, a reader can quickly locate the pages on which one or another character had been mentioned earlier--an indispensable aid, given the monolithic presentation of the text.

Riviere thus had me as an ally before his novel even commenced, and everything after that confirmed me a stalwart in his camp. For one thing, the novel is very reminiscent of the work of Thomas Bernhard. This could have gone very wrong, of course, but here it is skillfully sustained. 

For another, the writing is consistently surprising, keen-eyed, and even graceful (even when it goes in for some of the intentionally graceless Bernhardian effects, á la Correction). 

Best of all, the novel, even given its swirly four-in-the-morning surrealist streaks, persuasively presents the world of contemporary poetry. The (unnamed) narrator is a poet, or former poet, who edits a literary quarterly and whose duties have  taken him to the Literature Zone of the Festival of Culture taking place at the Royal Festival Hall. All of which suggests that poetry is a matter of crucial, even central cultural significance and is lavishly supported...which it is, in a way. At the Festival, everyone is gossiping about the disgrace of poet Solomon Wiese, who has been caught plagiarizing and has also been bad boyfriend. All of which suggests that poetry is just a tiny, spiteful coterie of people relentlessly undermining each other while pursuing an activity no one else in the world cares about...which is also true, in a way. Riviere convincingly portrays poetry's' paradoxical situation of somehow being quite important and not at all important at the very same time.

Soon the narrator finds Solomon Wiese himself, and we get his story--as well as some stories within his story, and stories within those stories, in a delightfully Bernhardian matryoshka doll of a novel.If I were a graduate student still, I would diagram them all out for you...but I'm not, so I won't.

Dead Souls reminded me of Douglas Kearney's Optic Subwoof, very different book though that is (not a novel, for one thing), in that it gives a sense of the contemporary Anglophone poetry world that is wickedly funny and irreverent while also being lucid and earnest.