Ronald Sukenick (1932–2004)

review of
Ronald Sukenick's Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues
- by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 30, 2016

I'd read mention of Sukenick on Goodreads by at least 1 reviewer I respect & he was mentioned in the company of other writers I respect so it was bound to happen that I'd read something by him sooner or later. It was worth it. It was also published by the Fiction Collective, another thing I pay attn to as promisingly vigorous & independent.

This starts off lower case as if it might be in the middle of a sentence &, in a sense, it is b/c the whole bk's one long run-on sentence, stream-of-consciousness "in the newspaper or at best human interest while City Hall's official version of life compiled by some bored clerk or statistician roughly on the basis of crude figures highly modified by political necessity and mostly conditioned by the remnants of Victorian novels floating through his underdeveloped imagination like surprising things at the bottom of yesterday's chicken soup steals the headlines which say nothing of the actual smoke of the actual stacks of the factory where his friend Tony works"* w/o any punctuation for pauses. However, instead of punctuation pauses, there're lay-out changes & spatial breaks between list elements & the like wch make the reading experience change enuf so that it's not monotonous. *(p 7)

Some of the spatial breaks can be hypothetically justified w/in the plot as "verbal holes", wch are, in themselves, one of a variety of holes that're significant to the story:

"Victor said verbal holes were the consequence of intelligence withheld by super financial powers power being really a question of information and without information one could simply not think" - p 18

"and yet the possibilities an island so rich despite the starving slums Charleen their own fault typical of her class yet the possibilities here with planning with technology the mystifications of technology" - p 25

Fortunately, for lovers of narrative, Sukenick isn't only experimenting w/ form, his characters are compelling. The setting is an island on wch the form of currency is called "balls". This environment is presented w/ plenty of interesting details. The feel of the cast's interactions reminds me of Cortazar's Hopscotch & A Manual for Manuel, 2 excellent bks about Argentinian expatriates in Paris, for them an island of sorts too. I took an immediate liking to the character Victor:

"culling inflictions sometimes from the passersby sometimes from himself for example he might wear some outlandish article of clothing that would draw hoots and whistles from the pedestrians a boot on his arm say" Vermin Supreme for President! "or a glove on his foot or feathers in elaborate and spectacular compositions on his head or hanging around his neck and would then attempt to engage his hecklers in reasoned discourse on the subject usually beginning with I'm from California the promised land and quickly launching from there into abstractions well beyond the ken of the man in the street with whom in fact he happened of necessity to be talking who not only misunderstood but was genuinely confused and embarrassed and tried his best to be polite" (p 4)

"according to Victor the proposed leftist coalition between the PPS and the PTE was only a repetition of the politics of the popular front and was by its very nature ineffectual in fact there was also a proposed coalition between the PPS and the CRU on the right which would be just as plausible according to Victor's ongoing analysis Victor was of the opinion that only the hopelessly naive considered the current maneuvering anything more than a tactic to disguise the manipulations of international super financial intelligence powers" - p 18

Whose perspective the story's told from changes from time-to-time. After reading about Victor, we read from him:

"at the same time I'd do things like a girlfriend demanded a present she gave me a choice so I bought a stuffed goat and had it reupholstered with fur when I gave it to her she said what's that I said you asked for a mink goat no coat she screamed that little joke cost five thousand" - p 20

Despite the shortness of Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues Sukenick manages to get in a richness of detail:

"the mountain was full of unemployed doctors of philosophy living in the woods and getting into witchcraft and astrology who were responsible for the growth of the new cult of achronicianity an astrology based religion which rejected the notion of time for that of distance" - pp 46-47

2 things I was less enthusiastic about were the title, wch seems like it cd've been an attempt to capitalize off of the popularity of Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls get the Blues wch'd only been released 3 yrs before in 1976, & the ending. I was worried that the ending wd use the meandering of the stream-of-consciousness as a justification for just petering out. I started pacing, gnawing on my fingers & my nails, jittering uncontrollably, bugging out, jitter-bugging at all hrs of the day or nite, writing notes to myself like this: "The question is: Will this go anywhere?" If this were an OuLiPo novel by Perec the structure wd lead to a strong ending. But it's not. Instead we get:

"wishing they hadn't demolished the old public toilets because he had to piss a fact more fundamental than a fund of ephemeral epiphanies but reflecting that all things come to an end at the same time recognizing there was no point imposing a sense of tragedy on old public toilets and that things didn't have beginnings and endings in that sense they just start and then they stop" - p 114

& b/c I was disappointed by this I've quoted it in the middle of my review rather than at the end so that it's no longer an ending but just a philosophical interpolation. &, besides, look at who's on the radio: "Drecker turned the radio on and got Mingus doing Eat That Chicken" (p 48) If I'd written "smell who's on the radio" you wd've noticed, if I'd written "taste who's on the radio" you wd've noticed, but I wrote "look at who's on the radio", wch is similarly absurd, & you hardly batted an eye (or at least so my surveillance satellite data cruncher claims). &, yes, Mingus did have a song w/ that title on his "Oh Yeah" album.

Amongst the island's dysfunctionalities are its inability to process the glut of post-cards the tourists send out:

"Drecker was driving too fast they were down out of the snow now he was in a hurry to get down to the Reiser before sunset so he could see the quote postcard run by the post office once a week during tourist season at ebb tide just before sunset the post office would truck all the postcards mailed by the tourists down to The Reiser and dump them in the ocean and Drecker always took a childish pleasure in watching the dry but colorful cascade pour out of the trucks into the water this was officially called the postcard run which the post office justified by saying maybe some of them will get there" - pp 61-62

I like the technique of having the character Drecker turn on the radio to connect one part of the island or the world to another part of the island: "Drecker turned on the radio and got a bulletin that achronician terrorists had stuffed a bank with cotton" (p 67) What an action! & the characters learn of it in a mediated way.

Once upon a time, I had a friend whose job was to be a shill, an 'attractive' woman who worked at a casino where she was to move to gambling tables where there weren't any customers so that she cd attract people to her & to, in turn, spending money:

"Veronica had a new job she was now working at The Same Thing her job was sitting at a table during slack hours and pretending she was having a good time to lure customers in off the street it was easy work but she didn't enjoy it" - p 68

Sukenick is thorough, his details even get into expressions used by the natives:

"a phrase often used by the islanders on the other side of the wind it was usually accompanied by a broad sweep of the arm he was fascinated by it because he couldn't understand what it meant and the islanders were completely unable to explain it to him when they tried they usually ended up by shrugging their shoulders and repeating on the other side of the wind with a broad sweep of the arm" - pp 80-81

&, of course, he has a sense of humor:

"at this point the government would take notice before revolutions on the island were invariably preceded by wet dog attacks and you could be sure the president would be on television later that same evening shaking himself like a wet dog and giving a fireside chat foreigners found this manner of conducting politics outrageous" - p 85

"actually she knew that Bennett was currently working on a report about how the wet dog effect could be rationalized and handled by computers and why not after all feelings were information too she also knew that Bennett by the way was very angry at Carl because of the way his maternity report was turning out the report was turning out to be against maternity but for paternity a point of view obviously difficult to justify" - p 86

"Charleen was in The Smiling Lemming eating the island speciality sweet and sad shrimp it made her feel sweet and sad because of the spices among them hash" - p 98

Perhaps Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues is sweet and sad & seasoned w/ hash. I have at least one chef friend who actually does use hash as a secret ingredient.. but he's not a character in a Sukenick bk..… (mais)

Ronald Sookanith was probs the hippenest, happenest kid in the Fiction Collective back in ’68, thereabouts, a club of New York innovators taking advantage of the postmodern, self-reflective revolution they were simultaneously witnessing and instigating in literature. An embracement of verbal tricks, of cut-and-paste visual collages in place of story progression, accompanied by a self-awareness of their own limits and possible stylistic pretentions. Does it add to literature? Does such a question matter, when the novel itself is Ronald Sackernack unloading his soul and dumping all his relationship issues out on the reader in as humorous and creative a way he can cough up, no boundaries considered?

[N.B. This review includes images, and was revised and formatted for my site, dendrobibliography -- located here.]

A revolutionary of the literary form, he sits today known only among the nichest of niches: English professors (wasting their lives?) and a couple pomo-hungry fiction dorks like myself(-ish). Evidently a niche so small it gives his most famous and important novel, UP, few enough readers he may as well be already forgotten minus occasional historical acknowledgement.

UP is a masterpiece both good and bad, in some ways a slow-jerk of self-satisfied, self-obsessed snark, and a misogynistic representation of the male-dominated New York publishing industry. (Like so many of his FC/early post-modernist peers, women are nothing more than sexual jokes and attractions for the male reader, only reaching that faint trace of genuine humanity when tugging at the author’s past regrets and failures. While I would have enjoyed this a few years ago, it only upsets me now and hurts my impression of the book.) It lacks a trace of linearity, or even a border between fantasy and reality; flowing back and forth, sometimes mid-paragraph, in time, fantasy, sexual misadventures real and un-, perspectives, focuses (but Sootchanitch always the locus!). Sometimes a failing professor of English pushing himself towards employment; other times a slumming New Yorker writing his own novel as the pages go by, rats infesting the framework; then and before a teenage dreamer reaching for a degree in God-knows-what; simultaneously his alter-ego: a hyper-misogynist Mary Sue interacting with, fucking with, the real Suchanitch; oftentimes a sack of lost chances dealing in broken dreams with a partially fictionalized love interest; holding steady the framework, the real Subefitch discussing his upcoming novel with associates, asking them what they think of the parts yet to happen--given anything but praise.

Another angle: Take Godard’s ‘60s output and subtract the overbearing eyebrows of seriousness; slap on the novel form.

Sasserwrackle, falcon hunter, cloth worker, ends his book with a literal literary classroom revolution; segue to a party celebrating his book, a book he seems to know is a weak imitation with nothing to say however hard he tries to innovate and say something: Every character, lost romances, defeated alter-ego Strop Banally, invited(—fellow FC author Steve Katz makes a cameo!). A finale and celebration well-deserved—the trip’s a lot of fun while it lasts, but its of-its-time ‘60s romantic qualities make the forever-underground status understandable. I.e., unless you’re this book’s core audience—that small gosh dang audience—unless you’re a frustrated academic (English preferred) or a fan of the self-aware post-modernist movement this book helped launch, there’s no reason to ever get UP: Either stay away or continue the dig.

”Our generation is a sacrifice to history. When a creative writing student asks me what to write about I answer: Amuse yourself. There’s nothing to write about….I see what you’re going for. Writing as self-expression and all that. The Romantic gambit. But you can’t go back. Between crisis and catastrophe who cares about your ego? Your complaint, your indignation, your outrage—your boils, your hangnails, your stomach aches. It turns to self-pity. This just bores us, we have the same problems. You ought to stick to comedy….Now don’t go and blame yourself. This is just the trouble. You’re helpless. It’s history. It’s politics. It’s capitalism. It’s the literary situation. We’re all paralyzed."

[14]… (mais)