Nettie Jones, _Fish Tales_

THIS 1983 NOVEL was recently re-published, which is how I heard of it. It's a crazy ride. 

The narrator is a woman named Lewis, and as that detail suggests, fluidity prevails. The novel is set in Detroit and New York City, but we seem to be not so much moving between the two settings as to be now in one and now the other, without any explicit indication that Lewis has relocated. Similarly, although the novel seems set in the mid-to-late 1970s and occasionally the early 1980s, the narrative does not seem to be in strict chronological order, as mercurial in time as it is in space.. Sometimes we learn this our that character's eye color or skin tone, but their ethnicities generally go unspecified, and we rarely get anyone's last name. The characters' genders and sexualities likewise wander where they will, and the erotic is never far away.

In other words, for a forty-year-old novel, it feels very congruent with contemporary sensibilities. To me, it seemed comparable to Michelle Tea or Dodie Bellamy, but wilder, more operatic, with a sort of 1970s anarchic streak reminiscent of writers like Robert Coover, John Barth or Donald Barthelme. 

Part Two ("Connect"), about Lewis's relationship with a brilliant and well-connected quadriplegic named Brook, feels somewhat more linear than Part One ("Disconnect'), but it's still wild, an emotional roller coaster if you can imagine a roller coaster that operates in five or six dimensions rather than the usual three.