"MADELEINE E. is a riveting examination of the self (or selves), spun from the yarn skein in Gabriel Blackwell's labyrinthine mind. Using Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo as a springboard for cultural and critical investigation and personal narrative, Blackwell has managed to write an impossibly entertaining book -- indeed, a philosophical page turner."- Amber Sparks


How does one describe a book that masquerades as a work of criticism about Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which becomes a book about writing a book about Vertigo—and is, at first blush, based in fact, reality, or at least memory—which becomes a novel about a man experiencing an ongoing series of waking nightmares eerily similar to those of the characters in the film Vertigo, all the while writing a book about Vertigo, a man who very much resembles and even shares a name with the name printed on the actual spine of the physical book, Madeline E? How to do this? I’m still not sure, and part of what troubles me is that my above description of the book actually oversimplifies the work itself. There is no satisfactory way to summarize Madeline E, no way to describe that won’t reduce the book to sounding like a work of insanity (which it is) or garbled, mangled confusion (which it sometimes is). The best I can come up with: it’s a resounding, powerful addition to the literature of bewilderment. “Everything that is is a record of its process,” writes Blackwell, about halfway through a book simultaneously obsessed with erasing that record.
Perhaps it’s best to simply call Madeline E a novel, even though the book resists that definition at every turn, a novel in the sense of that word’s widest, most all-encompassing and varied form, in the sense of the novel which eats all other prose forms, a Bakhtinian panoply of voices. Yet the book is a work of film criticism; a work of literary theory; a series of seemingly unrelated short stories; a work of philosophy; a philosophical meditation on disguises, doppelgangers, and the self; a David Markson-esque collage; it is all of these things and none of these things, a collection of sharp angles converged in book form, forming the dark, creviced, spike-filled object called Madeline E. Which, if absolutely nothing else, can be more or less accurately described as a book by Gabriel Blackwell, about Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo, starring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak.
Blackwell opens with a quote from Antigone: “We have only a short time to please the living, all eternity to please the dead.” From the start he aims for the dead. It’s a classical move, and one that signals Blackwell’s ambitions for something more. The first sentence in his own hand—and by in his own hand, I mean that which is written by him, for the book is filled with quotations, ranging from sources as widely varied as Slavoj Žižek, Phillip K. Dick, and Rebecca Solnit—is a description of the opening shot of the film: “We open already in pursuit of something ineffable,” he writes, wasting no time in making for that which defies description. “Even after watching Vertigo fifty-plus times, I have no mental picture of [the man Jimmy Stewart is chasing]. Why is Stewart chasing this man? We will never know.” And so Madeline E opens with an unanswerable question.
This proceeding from the unknowable deeper into the unknowable might seem untenable at first, and certainly makes for rough going at times, but it’s the play between the book’s various forms that makes its most engaging through-line. For instance, usually, unless we are reading a rather dry work of academic criticism that assumes expertise amongst its audience, most writers writing about a work of art will trouble themselves to locate the work of art in question in space and time. They will make an effort at orienting the reader to what’s being described. If the work of art in question is a film or book there generally will be some attention paid to the book or film’s plot, its narrative arc. Usually. And if there’s no discernible plot—or a very scanty one—the writer will at least attempt to orient the reader as to the narrative’s main characters, as Geoff Dyer does in Zona, his book-length meditation on Andrei Tarkovsky’s largely plotless Stalker.
Yet Blackwell doesn’t offer the reader a coherent description of the action of Hitchcock’s Vertigo until page 64. This might’ve been unimportant had I a working knowledge of the film. Or, perhaps if I had seen it, like Blackwell, 50-plus times. However, at the time of my reading I’d seen the film only once. There were times, as the book proceeded from fragmentary observation to fragmentary observation that I felt like I was moving from lostness to a deeper lostness. Blackwell follows his lone summary of the film, when he finally gets to it, with a quotation which amounts to the book’s only, singular, extremely deadpan joke: ‘Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive.’ He attributes this line to Sam Taylor, who claims that Laurent Binet claims that Roland Barthes originally said it. Thus, when we finally get our summary of the film, and feel somewhat oriented, and we’re greeted with a statement denying the legitimacy of summary, which is in fact a commandment against summation, a statement whose source is three-times removed. Blackwell quotes Hitchcock, a few pages later: “All that matters, all that exists for the audience, is what is on the screen. It doesn’t matter if the set extends no more than six inches beyond what the camera records—it could as well be six miles for all the effect it would have on the audience.” On the page, the effect is practically the inverse. The book is constantly operates around its own margins, folding in on itself.
Threads are picked up only to be dropped a few pages, fifty pages, a hundred pages later. The book’s plot as regards Blackwell himself—or, as it becomes clearer later in the book, the character described in the book as being Gabriel Blackwell, who is also a writer, also writing a book about Vertigo, titled Vertigo Vertigo Vertigo, which, incidentally, is the name of part two of Gabriel Blackwell’s book Madeline E—has become unemployed and has begun to fear his wife is cheating on him. Later on in the book, the character of his wife (who is never named) is replaced by the character of his girlfriend (also never named), who happens to share most of her characteristics with those of the now-disappeared character of his wife. The girlfriend is, for the most part, indistinguishable from the vanished wife. The discrepancy is never explained, a discrepancy those familiar with the film will recognize. The reader is left to wonder whether the girlfriend will later become the wife (that we have gone back in time), or, if the wife herself has simply turned into the girlfriend, as Judy, in the film, becomes Madeline, after the death of Madeline (before the death of the actual Madeline). Too, it is never entirely clear whether or not the book Madeline E is being narrated by Gabriel Blackwell, the character, or Gabriel Blackwell, the writer, who is writing the book Madeline E. Readerly bewilderment proceeds into readerly bewilderment. Yet this bewilderment is also the book’s greatest strength. The book’s intentional inconsistencies, its continual movement into deeper and blurrier opacity, mirrors the workings of the film, taking on the film’s architecture and themes without ever doing so explicitly.
Madeline E’s disorienting effects aren’t relegated only to its plot. Since the book occasionally functions as straight criticism, with sections of very clear and concise ruminations on the film, when the same “I” who is writing critically becomes an “I” who is seeing his own double walking directly towards him across a busy city square, the book’s tether to fiction or nonfiction is never clear. The character—and narrator—Gabriel Blackwell becomes worried that another writer, also named Gabriel Blackwell, has published two books under the name of, you guessed it, Gabriel Blackwell, and that the imposter Blackwell has assumed the real Blackwell’s author page on Amazon.com. The two books listed on Amazon by the imposter Blackwell are actual books published by the ‘real’ Gabriel Blackwell, the Gabriel Blackwell who is the author of Madeline E. Geoff Dyer, in an interview with TheParis Review, has claimed that the only real difference he recognizes between fiction and non-fiction is one of form, but Blackwell, in destroying the distinction between forms, in denying the reader the life preserver of knowing whether or not what she is reading is based in reality or not, treads boldly into the darkness of the unknowable.
I should here be clear that I once met Gabriel Blackwell, at a conference in Seattle. He does exist. I even published a short, very early excerpt of Madeline E in the literary magazine I edit. However, neither of these two facts helped me parse out all of this, as the excerpt of Madeline E that I published dealt almost exclusively with Vertigo (although it did not deal with the Blackwell character’s Vertigo Vertigo Vertigo project), which is, of course, a film about a man who tries to save a woman named Madeline who believes herself to be a woman named Carlotta Valdes who is actually being played by another woman named Judy who actually becomes, and befalls the same fate as, the original Madeline.
Underscoring all of this doubling and tripling lies a very interesting work of criticism. After steadily gaining ground for years, in 2012 Hitchcock’s film replaced Citizen Kane on the British Film Institute’s magazine Sight and Sound list of the greatest all time films. It was the first time a film other than Orson Welles’s classic placed first since polling for the list began in the 1950s. Vertigo’s final attainment of the top spot was symbolic of the steady shift in western notions about art, theory, criticism and politics that has been underway since the beginning of deconstructionism. The book functions as the film’s doppelganger; the plight of Jimmy Stewart becomes the plight of Blackwell. Much of the book’s in-scene moments take place in San Francisco, near or around places where the film was shot. The book’s transition from a series of critical notes to seemingly unrelated pieces of short fiction to, eventually, a novel, makes for jarring reading. But it’s meant to jar. The effect is claustrophobic, airless—and, ultimately, successful.
If it seems implausible for a book’s main character, who seems to be the writer himself, who is in the process of writing a book of nonfiction, to come across his own double—and to accuse that double of having written books bearing the author of the book’s name, that implausibility only serves to underscore the work’s artifice. It’s a tricky line, a line most writers of fiction avoid, because it risks so befuddling or irritating the reader that the work’s inner authority is lost. Blackwell quotes Deleuze: “[M]odern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities.” Madeline E is about just this failure of representation, just as Vertigo is about the loss of identities. Blackwell layers over his own artifice: “Why do we find things disguised as other things (even when those disguises actually expose their wearers),” he asks, “more appealing than things left undisguised?” The question points to his own disguising of himself in the work, layering over his own face as the author. Opacity over and through opacity, with a wry nudge.
What Madeline E ultimately serves as, whatever it is—novel or not, study of Vertigo or not—is a work of creative criticism of the highest order. It is a brilliantly flawed book not about Hitchcock’s film, nor of the film, but rather is a true response to it, containing all the madness and torque that Dyer, in Out of Sheer Rage, claims marked the best works of criticism, wishing for the “lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably.” As George Steiner said: “The best readings of art are art.” The book breathes fresh life into both the task of the novelist and critic, resisting interpretation even more fiercely than the uninterpretable film on which it ruminates; its utter refusal to develop the mysterious plotlines it brings forth—and intentional confusion of same—heralds a step forward in the contemporary novel. Yet while every truly new development in a form at first seems like a destruction of that form, at the same time every truly new formal development is borne from the past—even if the unlikely past. The only novel I know of to blur its own lines so thoroughly is Kenneth Patchen’s far too-little read Journal of Albion Moonlight.
A work of meticulous, creeping dread, Madeline E flies in the face of the idea that anyone can be who they say they are, that any claim ultimately leads towards a stable truth. Yet it is no polemic, and Madeline E is far too slippery about its own intentions to be used for anything—which is a comfort in and of itself.
“Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult,” wrote Donald Barthelme, “but because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.” In Madeline E, Gabriel Blackwell aims for the unspeakable. He strikes the mark dead-center. - Nathan Knapp

That Alfred Hitchcock’s films have a deep literary component is undeniable. Some of his best-known works were adapted from novels and short stories by a host of acclaimed writers: Psycho and Strangers on a Train were adapted from novels of the same name by Robert Bloch and Patricia Highsmith, respectively; The Birds was adapted from Daphne Du Maurier’s short story, and Vertigo is an adaptation of the novel D’entre les morts by the writing team known as Boileau-Narcejac. It’s an impressive array of writers and one which—given the enduring place of Hitchcock in popular culture—helps keep the name of certain essential writers in the public consciousness.
Hitchcock’s work with talented writers didn’t always pan out—in Francois Truffault’s book of interviews with the filmmaker, Hitchcock, he has less-than-warm feelings about his time working with Raymond Chandler. (“[O]ur association didn’t work out at all.”) But when it did, it led to films that remain classics, and which have heightened the profiles of the authors associated with them. And for all that Hitchcock’s films have had an enduring cinematic legacy, many of those same films have also had a lasting influence on literature.
Sometimes, this can take the form of sly allusions to iconic cinematic moments. Eric Kraft’s Flying collects a trio of short novels about a man named Peter Leroy, who looks back on his time crossing the country in an unorthodox flying vehicle in the 1950s. At one point, Peter finds himself in the Midwest, fixated on bizarre goings-on in the distance involving a man being chased through a field by a crop-duster. In other words, the action pauses for a moment while the story’s narrator can lurk in the background of a famous scene from North by Northwest. The Birds has also worked its way into various novels, with the “seemingly normal beings suddenly overwhelmed by murderous urges” plotline used by in books by writers like Emily Schultz (The Blondes) and Nick Antosca (The Obese) to satirize contemporary American society.
A more subtle structural nod to an iconic Hitchcock film can be found in a recent novel by the French writer Marie NDiaye. Ladivine begins with a woman with a secret: Clarisse, who periodically leaves her family behind to travel by train to visit her mother. Clarisse, the reader soon learns, has kept the truth of her background from her family, and changed her name from Malinka when she became an adult. Her relationship with her mother is a complex one, sometimes guilt-ridden and sometimes contemptuous, but it’s clearly left its mark on her. Eventually, the strain of this fractures her family—but before the full scope of this deeply personal drama can play out, Clarisse is abruptly murdered.
The suddenness of this, and the way in which it sends a carefully-balanced narrative into unexpected places has prompted multiplecritics to make comparisons between it and the murder of Marion Crane in Psycho. In said film, what began as the story of a woman on the run shifts into something progressively more unsettling, and while NDiaye’s narrative concerns are very different, that initial act of violence hangs over the rest of the proceedings, and establishes a mood where anything is possible.
Vertigo is considered by many to be Hitchcock’s best film, as well as one of the greatest films ever made. It, too, has had a substantial literary influence; in recent years, its effect has been felt in works as diverse as Bennett Sims’s unconventional zombie novel A Questionable Shape and Gabriel Blackwell’s disorientingly metafictional Madeline E. Vertigo offers a host of narratively compelling components: obsession, control, disguise, doubles, and possession; a protagonist whose sanity is called into question; a multi-layered narrative that easily takes on a metaphorical aspect.
A Questionable Shape is a haunting book, an intellectually-told story about intellectually-minded people in a world where the dead have begun to walk again. Footnotes abound in Sims’s narrative, including textual observations on how the footnote is a kind of zombie relative to the rest of a book. In interviews, the author has cited Vertigo as a zombie movie of a kind, and, in one with The Iowa Review, he explained its relevance to his own work. “One of the properties of the novel is that it takes place in a world where zombie movies don’t exist,” he explained. “So what they end up having to do is read undeath into movies we don’t normally think of as zombie movies, like Vertigo or Solaris.”
In a conversation with his publisher at this year’s Mission Creek Festival, Sims also spoke of how the novel’s cover design evokes Saul Bass’s iconic artwork for Hitchcock’s film. A different riff on Bass’s design encloses Gabriel Blackwell’s Madeleine E. Blackwell’s fiction often echoes well-known literary sources, from Raymond Chandler’s detective fiction to H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror. Madeleine E. is organized as a book-length essay, interpolating quotes from other books (some directly about Hitchcock, some not) with observations on Vertigo and scenes from its author’s life. But it’s here that Blackwell pulls an interesting narrative trick and one which evokes the instances of doubling found in Vertigo. The author of the book within the book is Gabriel Blackwell, but he’s one of two writers sharing that name, each of whom is about to begin work on a book inspired by Vertigo.
Things advance even more when Blackwell ventures from Portland to San Francisco and begins to search for his doppelgänger. The narrative is occasionally punctuated by proposals for Blackwell’s book on Vertigo, none of which quite line up with the work we’re actually reading. Identities blur even further as the novel progresses, and the ways in which Blackwell uses the techniques of sober nonfiction to encircle a narrative which is quickly becoming a delirious meditation on a film that’s far from lucid is memorable and, at times, ingenious.
Among the reasons Alfred Hitchcock’s films have endured over time is their simultaneous understanding of the form and their willingness to subvert it. One can learn a myriad of lessons from studying these films, and their narrative implications can be put into practice in any number of different mediums. And the stories that can be told as a result have an almost limitless number of permutations available to them, from satirical thrillers to existential meditations on identity. It’s an almost limitless cultural legacy. - Tobias Carroll


A man watches Vertigo more than 50 times. A man with a fear of heights watches another man, Jimmy Stewart as Scottie Ferguson, develop a fear of heights in Vertigo. A man watches Vertigo, a film about obsession and identity, more than 50 times and writes a book about Vertigo (and obsession and identity).
So goes the premise of the complex, melancholy Madeleine E. by Gabriel Blackwell. Billed as a commonplace book—a collection of quotations from other sources—Madeleine E. is a layered patchwork of such quotes and the author’s cinematic analysis, memoir, and fiction. Blackwell minutely annotates the famous Alfred Hitchcock film, arranging his passages around each scene—from the first to the last.
Insights ebb and flow throughout Madeleine E., named for the woman that Kim Novak’s character pretends to be in the film, as the author considers themes like identity, artificial intelligence, Freud’s theory of the uncanny, and the slipperiness of truth. This happens through not only his critical analysis and chosen excerpts (from such authors as Robin Wood, Rebecca Solnit, and W.G. Sebald—fans of the latter will be at home here) but also his nonfictional and fictional passages, in which he often demonstrates obsessive qualities similar to Stewart’s character. In one section, Blackwell sees his doppelgänger in San Francisco (not for nothing, Vertigo’s setting); in another, he considers following his wife after seeing her far from work in the middle of the day.
What’s most interesting about the fictional sections is that they at first disguise themselves as nonfiction, so similar are they to what the author has presented as fact, throwing into question the memoir that came before. This might frustrate readers who want a clear delineation between fact and fiction, but one argument the book offers, like Vertigo, is the near impossibility of determining what is and is not true, what is and is not artifice, persona, or acting. The answer is that it is all both true and false, as one’s perception frequently holds the most weight.
Some of the fictional sections feel extraneous, however, as the book runs long. The momentum slows halfway through, as Blackwell adds more and more examples of doubles and mistaken identity. Occasionally he seems to ignore the most logical explanations for things, as that would deflate their potential for intrigue. This imbues Madeleine E. with a layered logic similar to that of an M.C. Escher drawing or Synecdoche, New York, growing larger and more complex as it circles back on itself.

The book shares two of its strengths with the movie it’s based on: its tone and its theme of obsessive looking. Despite the book’s multiple voices, Blackwell maintains a melancholy and ruminative mood throughout. More important is his perspicacious eye. Like Scottie’s obsession over “Madeleine,” Blackwell has a keen perception, yet, unlike Scottie, he is aware of his male gaze and obsession. (Those who’ve seen the film at least a few times will get the most out of this book.) In a beautiful passage near the end, Blackwell describes one of the most self-aware ideas at the heart of his observations: “[W]hen we see something seemingly everywhere, it doesn’t mean that the thing we think we are seeing again and again has multiplied somehow or that the world is a code or a conspiracy, but that, in finally taking notice of that thing, we are creating for ourselves a new way of seeing...” This doesn’t result in a lean, driven book, but it does present an intelligent, personal meditation on one of the greatest films of all time. - Laura Adamczyk

Similarly, a mutating collage of fragments is at work in Gabriel Blackwell's Madeleine E., the body of which takes for its subject Hitchcock's notorious memory-bending epic Vertigo. But where other works might make an essay out of dissecting the film's intentions and themes, Blackwell uses his exploration of the film as a backdrop to his own strange mystery. There's an uncanny line at work here exploring the relationship between a work of art and its audience, revealing how obsessive rumination on a subject founded on mystery can infect the psyche, blur fact and fiction, throwing open mirrors onto the world around you.
What makes Madeleine E. such compelling reading is that very intersection of fact and myth. As the book breaks the film down scene by scene, it compiles anecdotes about the production of Hitchcock's work with quotes from philosophers and artists from Baudrillard to Gertrude Stein and intermixes them with the author's daily life. He tries to write, to connect to his continuously distant wife, to stay employed, and his paranoid experiences become increasingly more paranoid—he sees doubles of himself and his wife in various public places, much like in Vertigo itself.
The book very quickly takes on a mysterious, drug-like momentum of its own. Like a great mystery film, it makes you want to poke holes in all the storylines around you. It's a refreshing, haunted take on the essay and the memoir, one that complicates both by refusing to let you say for sure where either ends. - Blake Butler


Gabriel Blackwell describes Madeleine E, a project he began as a personal rumination on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, as “a kind of critic’s notebook, an assemblage, a commonplace book, but also an homage and an acknowledgement.” This is a very apt description of this strange and eclectic book, which contains critical commentary on the film, passages of fiction, sections of what might be memoir, and an assortment of quotes from writers as diverse as Jose Saramago and Slavoj Žižek.
I begin with Blackwell’s own words because the book is loaded with these obsessive acts of self-description. In the multiple chapters self-referentially titled “Madeleine E.,” he provides several possible versions of the a book he is supposedly writing. For example, he says, “This is a book about a man and his girlfriend, who live together . . . She is going to have an abortion.” But later the narrator (if it is the same narrator) says, “In this book, a man goes through a painful divorce. He believes his wife cheated on him, and she maintains her innocence.” And, by contrast, he asserts that “This is a book about a woman who has a terrible accident. She goes into a coma, and it is two months before she comes out of it.” Like Vertigo, each retelling or reframing of Madeleine E. leads always to deeper mystery rather than to clarity and resolution. It is a book that does not develop in any traditional sense but estranges. It is a work that seems to be in the midst of revision, as if it isn’t quite finished, as if it can never be finished. Sometimes revision is an act of cutting and compression; sometimes it is an act of expansion or rearranging, but then there are those works of art that grow only as you become increasingly estranged from them. The more Blackwell doubles and trebles his themes, his narratives, his allusions, the farther he gets from the narrative voice(s), the more we enjoy the experience. It’s as if he wanted to recreate the vertigo of Vertigo (in himself, in the reader) rather than simply explain it, describe it, or critique it.
Though the book relishes its dizzying array of postmodern techniques, there are two major elements that drive the book and keep it connected to the movie: doubling (and doubles) and obsession. While working on a book about Hitchcock’s classic, the narrator spots his double on the street. He predictably becomes obsessed with this double and has several more run-ins with him until they eventually meet. However, this is where the narrative ends. Blackwell says, “All the stories of doubles and doppelgangers I’ve read involve a confrontation between the two doubles, and they all end with the death of one of those doubles.” He then goes on to say that this is not one of those stories. On the one hand, this is a novel variation on the doppelganger device; on the other hand, it seems less than satisfying. I certainly don’t require narrative satisfaction from a book of this kind; in fact, I expect to be thwarted at every turn, and yet there was something more I wanted if not from the doppelganger narrative at least from the book as a whole. Infinite regresses can be tedious if there isn’t something more to be gained from their use. Thankfully, Blackwell has had another trick up his sleeve.
For all of Vertigo’s ambiguous strangeness, at heart it is a movie about the failure of love. Scottie (Jimmy Stewart’s character) falls in love with Madeleine (Kim Novak’s character). What he doesn’t know is that she is a fake who has been hired to pretend to be Madeleine as a part of a convoluted murder plot. Predictably, Scottie falls for her and is devastated when she appears to jump to her death. However, a year or so later, he runs into Judy Barton (also played by Kim Novak) and becomes obsessed with her just as quickly. Of course, Judy is the same woman who had been hired to play Madeleine previously. Scottie embarks on a disturbing mission to transform Judy into Madeleine, making her change her appearance so that she more closely resembles the “original.” To make matters worse, Judy has now inexplicably fallen in love with Scottie, which is why she allows him to change her. She asks several times if he couldn’t just love her for herself, which, of course, he can’t do. More to the point, he doesn’t even try. He’s in love with a person who never existed, and she is in love with a man she cruelly duped and nearly drove to madness. What’s far more disturbing is the fact that no one seems to take any responsibility for anything in the movie. Scottie never accepts responsibility for Judy’s death; Judy never accepts responsibility culpability for Madeleine’s death, and Elster appears to have gotten away with murdering his wife.
This notion of blame seems to be on Blackwell’s mind. At the very end, he gives us one last description of the book he is writing. He says,
This is a book about a man writing a book about Vertigo. In his book, he thinks, he will trace his thoughts about the film as they relate to the guilt he has about how he has lived his life, about the lives he hasn’t led, and about the lives of others he believes he has ruined.
Clearly someone named Gabriel Blackwell is trying to take responsibility for his actions, but which Gabriel Blackwell and which actions? If we can’t even agree on the basics of the story, then we really can’t assign guilt, which means no responsibility can be taken. This is a clever and well-thought-out ending, which sustains the ambiguity of the movie and yet creates a deep sense of yearning for closure, luring us towards and then thwarting our desire for the kind of simple, coherent narrative we often confuse for “the real.” - Carlo Matos

As someone who has written about Gabriel Blackwell’s work before, I feel oddly unqualified to discuss his latest, and perhaps most accomplished, book, Madeleine E. (Outpost 19). Few writers are as ingenious or as incisive on the subject of contemporary America’s relationship to its own industries of the imagination. Madeleine E. demonstrates as much, but it also does considerably more, and by simultaneously widening and narrowing its scope. The very idea of a novel, as both an entertainment and a social enterprise, disappears into the decidedly noir-ish back alleys of a different kind of storytelling in Madeleine E. Philosophy, the natural sciences and film studies are but a few of the discourses expositing and arguing away between the book’s bindings. Zizek only wishes he were as Benjaminian, that he could erect such graceful arcades out of culture’s fracture and babble, as Gabriel Blackwell is here. The result is a work which reminds us that the Singularity happened millennia ago, and that we call it by another name: “narrative.”
One last act of prelude: special mention should also be made of Gabriel Blackwell’s incredible work curating The Collagist. If this isn’t a journal you follow regularly, please update your preferences at your earliest opportunity. (Full disclosure: I’ve been fortunate enough to contribute to The Collagist, and have benefited greatly from having worked under Gabriel Blackwell’s generous and expert editorial direction.)
The following questions and answers were exchanged between June and July of 2016.
— Joe Milazzo read the interview


“…the forger… [produces] what the archaeologist or historian is already looking for, artifacts or documents quite familiar and a little strange. The familiarity makes the work meaningful, and the strangeness makes it valuable.”–Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy, quoted in Gabriel Blackwell, Madeleine E.
…
“It’s clear that Vertigo isn’t really about what it appears to be about. But, what it really is about isn’t entirely clear.”–G. Smalley
…
Madeleine E.
This is a book about a writer named Gabriel Blackwell who is writing a book about Vertigo. Just as he begins, he learns that his contract as an associate professor of creative writing will not be not renewed. He finds himself distracted and anxious, suddenly dependent on his wife’s income to survive. After he has already started working on the book, the 2012 Sight and Sound poll unexpectedly naming Vertigo the critics’ favorite film of all time comes out. His agent insists that he needs to take advantage of the fact that he has a head start on the flood of books about to come out on the film, which makes him even more nervous about the project.
But the writer still does not have a handle on what he wants to do with the material. While doing his research he has collected a tremendous amount of quotes about the movie, direct quotes from Alfred Hitchcock and Kim Novak, interpretations from critics, and indirectly related thoughts from writers discussing themes that also appear in Vertigo. He intersperses these quotations with his own reflections about the film, but the result still does not seem right. In a stroke of inspiration, he invents (or does he?) a story about a double; about seeing another Gabriel Blackwell’s name pop up on the Internet, a man who is also a writer but who has written books our Gabriel Blackwell did not write. He travels to San Francisco and is shaken when he sees a man there who looks exactly like him. He talks about the stress his marriage is under, and admits to following his wife and spying on her from a distance when she leaves for work. Sometimes, the autobiographical parts of the book appear to contradict each other. At times he has a wife, at times a girlfriend, and we are not entirely sure if these sets of memories come from two different times in his life, or if they are written by two different Gabriel Blackwells, each of whom is working on a book about Vertigo. He includes several synopses of a book called Madeleine E. (sometimes titled Vertigo Vertigo Vertigo), sketches of novels that were never written, mysterious stories about detectives and screenwriters and mistaken identities and deception, tales that read like magical realist parables. In the end, Blackwell abandons writing and becomes a paralegal.
Or so he tells us. The whole thing could be made up. Or true.
…
Gabriel Blackwell’s Madeleine E. is a bravely experimental work; a piece of creative film criticism written by a non-critic, offered from the perspective of a working writer rather than a reviewer. It’s like looking into a novelist’s notebook, filled with quotations, notes, musings and incomplete sketches, only Blackwell has taken the time to polish each piece, while leaving the whole skillfully fragmented. The meditations wanders around, but follow the plotline of the movie; scene headings (i.e. [INT. Scottie’s Apartment (NIGHT)]) replace chapter headings. For much of the book, Blackwell serves as something like the host of a colloquium, collecting quotes from critics and other thinkers (everyone from philosopher George Santayana to Hitchcock expert Robin Wood, from Kim Novak to Philip K. Dick^[1] ) and arranging them into a spiral of ruminatons on Vertigo and its various themes: falling, doubling, identity, memory, obsession, love, guilt, dreams, anxiety, creation, impersonation…  It’s hard to believe that a work of which almost half consists of quotations from other sources could come across as so original—but curation, too, is a form of creativity. No one complains the florist lacks skill because the flowers she arranges in a bouquet already existed before she chose them.
But where Madeleine E. breaks the mold is in its inclusion of Vertigo-inspired fiction, integrated right along with the film criticism. Other than the fake book synopses, it’s not clear what parts might be Blackwell’s nonfictional confessions (he describes traumas both romantic and professional), and what is pure fiction (I would assume all, but who can say?) The one slight complaint with the book as a whole is that these narrative diversions, which appear to be converging into a climax, don’t actually resolve their mystery in a classically satisfying way—but then, we are directly comparing Blackwell’s stories to one of Hitchcock’s most accomplished tales, and perhaps the writer does better to strike out on his own path than to try to copy the Master.
…
“There’s a great confusion between the words mystery and suspense, and the two things are absolutely miles apart. You see, mystery is an intellectual process, like in a whodunit. But suspense is essentially an emotional process… Mystery has no particular appeal to me.”–Alfred Hitchcock
…
“How can one claim that Vertigo isn’t a mystery when there are so many things we will never understand in it?”–Gabriel Blackwell, Madeleine E.
…
“I leave holes in my films deliberately.”–Alfred Hitchcock, quoted in Gabriel Blackwell, Madeleine E.
…
Vertigo is a film in need of re-mystification. Too many people fail to see beneath its surface, seeing it as a mere whodunit that gets solved two-thirds of the way through. But the more you think about both the plot and the themes, the hazier Vertigo gets, the more layers it reveals. Hitchcock uses plot holes like a master artist uses negative space; both to draw the eye to what he wants you to see, and to suggest new possibilities for seeing it differently. What if Scottie actually dies in the opening sequence, and the whole movie is his deathdream as he falls off the rooftop? What if the letter Judy writes to Scottie is a fantasy sequence that never happens? What if Joe Esterhas’ Basic Instinct is just a commentary on Vertigo? Blackwell’s greatest service in Madeliene E. is to enlarge Vertigo‘s scope, to increase the number of questions we have about it, rather than to follow the usual critical path and try to shrink it to a single theory that can be easily contained and filed away.
We leave Madeleine E. with an increased appreciation of Hitchcock’s skill as a storyteller: his ability to create a narrative seemingly simple and complete, but with haunted connotations that draw us back again and again. Blackwell stands before Vertigo in obvious awe. The work inspires him, yet he comes across as appropriately humble; even, perhaps, a bit afraid to tackle the subject. Ultimately, he accepts the challenge of gazing into the story’s abyss, addressing the uncomfortable questions it raises about the fragility and duplicity of our own personas. Anyone who is seriously interested in Vertigo as a work of art will want to track down this curious, invigorating book. Formally experimental, Madeleine E. is also tremendously rich, capturing the vertiginous flavor of Hitchcock’s masterpiece. It answers the question “is criticism an art form?” with a resounding “yes!,” challenging critics to take more rooftop leaps and reach for true artistry, heights be damned. - G. Smalley







“It’s difficult to know if Blackwell is a sharp editor, a stone-faced ventriloquist, someone possessed by the ghost of Lovecraft, or all three. The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Man is a startling investigation of the evanescence of the self. It’s not so much that it will leave you changed as that it will leave you nameless and wandering.”- Brian Evenson






Gabriel Blackwell channels H.P. Lovecraft in The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised Men, an epistolary metafiction that serves as part of a trilogy of works connected by his earlier Shadow Man and Critique of Pure Reason. In the introduction, Blackwell reveals that he has set out to Providence, Rhode Island, to find his girlfriend, Jessica, who disappeared while he was finishing the writing of Shadow Man. During that trek to Providence, he discovers the final letter of H.P. Lovecraft and that last message comprises most of the book in a footnoted poioumena intertwining his own desperate search with Lovecraft’s pestilential descent into madness. This isn’t just a pastiche of Lovecraft though, who died of intestinal cancer and whose last years were the most painfully productive. The mystery takes on a bizarre twist when he discovers the letter is addressed to another Gabriel Blackwell. Horror gets deconstructed and Lovecraft is retrofitted in a work that is less concerned with categorization than the ‘dissolution’ of existence. Experience itself becomes suspect as does the scholarship of pain. Blackwell, the meta character in the book versus the actual author, is typing out Lovecraft’s final letter. But as he does so, he is faced with a troubling revelation:
“That is, coming to the end of the particular sentence I was typing, I would look back over its analogue in the letter and would be unable to find even a third of what I had typed… This was undoubtedly made worse by the thicket of Lovecraft’s characters, by their lack of line breaks and paragraph breaks and even space between words, but it was also a quality of the prose. The events I was transcribing had not only not happened in life but not happened in the letter, either.”
It’s a setup for a mystery, a noir doused in elements of phantasmagoria with a magical lantern projecting Blackwell’s prose. The events described within are as gruesome and macabre as a Lovecraft story and in fact could be mistaken for one of his short stories. Horrible things are happening to the people in Lovecraft’s vicinity as in “this disgusting pile” that “was the remains of a man after he had been devoured and regurgitated by some horrid fungus or slime mold!” The grippe in his belly is devouring him from within and his mental state is corrupted into a decay and darkness that overwhelms his vision as much as his being:
“This thing in the basement was some sort of central node, a convergence of nerves. It was dowered with dark properties and obedient to dark laws; darkness was its element as air is the cloud’s, as water is the sea’s- the clashing, gnashing plates of its existence, in all of their horrifying splendor, were not so much dark as in aspect as of the dark…”
What adds a twist and requires a philological scalpel are the footnotes Blackwell uses to annotate his transcription of the letter. Much of the notes involves further elaboration of the plot details he outlines in his introduction. But there are disturbing intimations that require deciphering, a linguistic sonar to extrapolate from the echoes of meta-Blackwell’s journey. As his pursuit of Jessica becomes more desperate, his physical plight degenerates in a downward progression similar to Lovecraft’s. He is starving, cold, and suffering anemia. His body gets soaked with ink to the point where he does not recognize himself. With his impoverishment, things only get worse:
“I had a chronic inflammation around my anus- it itched all of the time and stung like a cut doused with hydrogen peroxide when wetted. I worried that I had soiled myself because of the wetness there, but always it was only blood.”
This is the hermeneutics of insanity with parallel tracks siphoning off one another. Two stories seem to be running concurrently between the letter and the footnotes. Together, the strands result in a mutation, a third form monstrously baring its fetid belly. Lovecraft dissolves into Blackwell, much like the fungus mysteriously consuming those around him. A 5th dimension is sucking both of them into an agonizing symbiosis that is as much about writing as it is a search for Jessica. Only the search never actually began and the writerly muses are discombobulated, decapitated, then vaporized into “fleeting-improvised men.” The craft of writing takes on a sinister epidemiology as the memory that Lovecraft wrote his best work under the threat of imminent death and intestinal cancer throbs uncomfortably. Meta-Blackwell quotes from Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness:
“I cannot say with certainty who does the writing down. As I cannot imagine God’s omnipotence lacks all intelligence, I presume that the writing-down is done by creatures given human shape on distant celestial bodies after the manner of the fleeting-improvised men…”
Who is the real Blackwell? Who is the real Lovecraft? Both questions are rendered moot when the definition of ‘real’ becomes suspect and the boundaries of fiction and metafiction dissolve. The dissolution only appears natural, when in fact, it has a more ominous etiology lodged somewhere within the maddening brilliance of Gabriel Blackwell’s mind.
“Is it possible to be in a fugue state within a fugue state? Is it possible to forget forgetting something without calling that thing to mind? My past “I”s have been erased from myself, replaced as 1s and 0s on a hard drive are, overlaid with new 1s and 0s that both supplant and destroy.” - Peter Tieryas Liu


Part of the appeal of H. P. Lovecraft’s work is the sensed worlds (of teeming monstrous biology, creeping paranoia, undeniable nihilism) that lurk not so much within the text itself (famously verbose and weighted with archaisms as it is) but in the spaces between the flowery words and behind the formal lines. Lovecraft’s fiction is all about the suggestion, the hint, and that which we speak of when we speak of the unspeakable. To read Lovecraft is, in a lot of ways, to get what the man was about, under his surface veneer of genteel literary gentleman and scion of a decaying New England family. Under all that, well… horrors abound. Potent fears. Crippling anxieties.
All of which goes a long way to explain his continuing popularity well into the 21^st Century, while the other, more successful pulp writers of his own time are all but lost to obscurity. Lovecraft somehow speaks to the current human condition.This is the Age of Crippling Anxiety, and Lovecraft is fast becoming its patron saint.
Gabriel Blackwell’s The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) taps into that pervasive feeling of alienation and helplessness that bleeds out crimson between HPL’s purple prose and infects the reader. And the manner in which Blackwell does it!
Here are the bare bones of the plot: Lovecraft did not die of a combination of bowel cancer and Bright’s Disease. Or rather, he did, but the illness was merely a symptom (and not the only one) of a foul existential contagion transmitted to him through a textual artefact, a letter from a deranged fan resident in an asylum. And the name of this secret priest of the Great Old Ones? Gabriel Blackwell.
Natural Dissolution… is the record of the author (the present-day Gabriel Blackwell) travelling to Providence to search for his vanished girlfriend (who may or may not actually exist), where he finds temporary work shredding old hospital documents. Among these he finds HPL’s file, and within that, he finds Lovecraft’s final hand-written letter to his fan/persecutor/killer, which details the effects of that Blackwell’s (no relation? Maybe. Maybe not…) letter to him, and the rapid slide into hallucination, madness, and disease it triggered in him. Effects which, as the author Blackwell soon learns during his own descent into madness, continue to transmit through Lovecraft’s own letter.
There are some marvelously descriptive passages in Natural Dissolution…, passages that deliver on the fevered promise of both Lovecraft’s fiction and psychedelic use: if we could only look deep enough into things, then all would be revealed. It’s William Blake’s doors of perception getting busted wide-open, only to reveal, not a spacious and infinite universe of light and reason, but a claustrophobic infinite regression of fractal foulness, mutating forms, and crushing psychological darkness. Lovecraft, who only thought he saw the truth at the bottom of things, finally sees it, and it kills him. Blackwell, who only wants to find his girlfriend, instead finds a twisted passage (through the transcription and translation of the letter) into the emptiness of his own existence. The final chapters, with his return to the West Coast (divested of the letter by a thoroughly Lovecraftian trope: the jostle/mugging by a dark stranger in an alleyway near the piers) and the half-life he left there, give the reader a final maddening coda: Gabriel Blackwell the Author is perhaps host to the personality of Gabriel Blackwell the Lovecraft correspondent, and evidence of another person or entity living in the apartment he rents (and has filled with hoarded material to become a maze-like mirror of his psyche) hints that doors through time and mind have been opened and will never shut.
That being said, Natural Dissolution is also funny as hell. There’s a real David Foster-Wallace feel to the narrative, a dry humour in the sorting of awful phenomena and altered perceptions. Much of the story is pieced together through footnotes, and footnotes to footnotes, reminding me of House of Leaves, but in a good way. And Blackwell hits the perfect tone for Lovecraft’s voice: plummy and self-assured at points, devolving into “my god, that hand! The window! The window!” fevered hysteria at others, but sympathetic at all times. It’s Lovecraft’s last letter, and it feels just so, which is an amazing accomplishment.
The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Menis far and away one of the better literary horror novels I’ve read. Witty, urbane, deranged and ultimately very unsettling. Highly recommended. - Scott R Jones


While reading The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised Men, Gabriel Blackwell's third novel out from Civil Coping Mechanisms, I have to admit that I lost track of time. This review, in that case, is perhaps unreliable.
I was stretched on a couch in a low-lighted room, frequently pausing the further I read. Not just because the book is good, which demands that the reader go ever more slowly, but also because it is hugely complex.
With its looping, funhouse architecture and infinite layers of shaky narration, The Natural Dissolution takes the meta-fictional premise that a person who may or may not be the author -- Blackwell himself is listed at the novel's "editor" -- has hopped a bus from Portland, OR to Providence, RI in search of his fiancée, Jessica Blackwell, who has recently left him. After taking a job at an old hospital where he's charged with the shredding of medical records, Blackwell discovers what would seem to be the last letter of H.P. Lovecraft, a notoriously un-cuddly horror writer who lived most of his life in the same city that Blackwell now wanders in search of his darling. As it happens, the letter itself is addressed to yet another third party named Gabriel Blackwell -- the actual Blackwell assumes, his ancestor, in response to a letter he's written. And it doesn't get any less trippy from there.
As Blackwell privileges us with a transcription of the letter, he annotates Lovecraft's last days on this earth, dwindling away from intestinal cancer, with his own de-familiarized rambles through Providence (he soon becomes a sort of bum). By the end of the novel this parallelism, achieved through footnotes that cut forward and back, creates a kind of two-way glass into which Blackwell and Lovecraft both stare, beholding each other's uncanny reflections.
But back to that time that I lost. Now where was I? I was lying, I think, in that low-lighted room. I was reading a part of the Lovecraft transcription where the fictional author begins to perceive what he describes as an "odd, husky, buzzing whisper" at inopportune times (an allusion to the sound that the farmer Ackerly hears in Lovecraft's story, "The Whisperer in the Darkness"). Pausing to wonder what that sounded like -- Blackwell, like Lovecraft himself, is a gorgeous abuser of imprecise language -- I gazed into the middle distance, absently stroking the top of the book. I came back to myself maybe five minutes later, or what I perceived at the time was five minutes. But on checking the clock a full hour had gone past, and I was still sitting there, stroking the book.
To read the book, in any way, is to experience its dread, its bottomless narrative dislocation. Like Brian Evenson or Thomas Bernhard, The Natural Dissolution is phenomenological, inviting the reader inside of its headspace. Its effect on the mind is to bend and unmoor it, to "leave [the reader]...wandering," as Evenson says in his blurb on the back. The sum-game of this -- in accordance with Lovecraft -- provokes a sort of cosmic terror, not from turning to gaze on the reaches of space but rather deep into the self. The fictional Lovecraft himself, too, succumbs to the chiaroscuro of being alive. "Darkness," he writes, "was everywhere... It was the thing that hid inside all of us, the shade that we carried with us to the well-lit space, the shadow we inevitably cast in the presence of brilliance. I could never escape this thing." While we hear from Blackwell, whose own experiences in Providence begin to eerily parallel Lovecraft's: "I was afraid of myself because I could not escape it, and so I blocked it, blacked it out." As in the works of Bernhard and Kafka and Lydia Davis, the book spirals inward, consuming its subjects.
The gist of the confluent plot lines is thus: Gabriel Blackwell, transcribing the letter, in which, he admits, he has "made some mistakes," saves its contents to an online file service. Lucky that he does, because soon he gets mugged and his laptop is stolen, along with the text of the letter itself. Blackwell informs us that the backed-up "version of the completed letter" is all that he has "access to" -- "...the physical letter was gone," Blackwell writes, "and, with it, all of my hope of corroboration." Meanwhile, the letter by Lovecraft describes the author's final days in Providence, living in a garret in the house of his aunt, and increasingly privy to dark entities whose provenance I'll not disclose.
Suffice to say, though, that the horrors that come are not unlike those found in Lovecraft's own fiction, itself obsessed with books and letters, especially found forbidden ones. Lovecraft himself confesses to us in a moment of shrill and Lovecraftian horror, describing the dark entities that he sees, "the plates and planes of the thing gradually became tentacles...a thing from my nightmares, a thing from my fiction."
Neither one of the narrators, Lovecraft or Blackwell, is ever lacking self-awareness. Nor are the two ever the least bit reliable: both of them equivocate, abandon themselves to full-blown paranoia, lose track of time that they never recover, see things that cannot -- that must not -- be real, and the layers of truth and untruth coincide with the narrators' worsening mental conditions. As Gabriel Blackwell lets us know at the beginning, but really the end of the book: "...though I spent a month in Providence mostly on foot, I could not draw you a map or even pick out where I had been. I might as well have been in any city at all." If you're thinking that this must get old, then you're right. But not in quite the way you think.
Granted, the branches of plot propagate through limitless empty and half-destroyed rooms, and the narrators ceaselessly question themselves at nearly every observation, playing gritty flaneurs to the city around them in a way that begins to belabor effect; and sometimes the writing becomes so abstract that we scarcely discern what it means anymore. And yet to indulge any one of these judgments would be to lose sight of the book's chief achievement: humanizing the racist and misanthrope, Lovecraft; elevating the tedious business of dying. The novel's mazes and abstractions, its layers and dissolutions, are reflective at last of the rote ceaselessness of Lovecraft dying in his bed, in whose mind intellect, fantasy, contemplation are all of them, painfully, draining away.
The Natural Dissolution is a puzzle-box, yeah. It's also elegiac and indelibly human. But I can't verify my impressions hereto. It's a masterpiece, sure, but don't take it from me.
This review of the book, after all, has meant nothing. - Adrian Van Young


You have to understand, I’ve been a Lovecraft fanatic since I randomly decided to read a collection of mythos fiction I happened to find in my high school’s library back in 1991 (I don’t remember which collection specifically, though I do remember it was hardcover and had a hand with a mouth on it prominently displayed on the cover). After reading that collection, I devoured everything I could find: Lovecraft’s actual works, biographies about Lovecraft, fake versions of the Necronomicon, works by other authors in the mythos (though I came to despise anyone like August Derleth who screwed up the basic framework, changing the Old Ones into an old hat good and evil fight between Elder Gods and Outer Gods), anything. I even played the Call of Cthulhu role playing game and wrote my own (extremely bad) Lovecraftian stories when I ran out of more material to devour. My obsession has died down a bit in more recent years, but when I saw that  the subtitle of The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men is “The Last Letter of H.P. Lovecraft,” it flared right back up again. I dug right in.
What I found was strange. I didn’t expect yet another mythos tale, but I wasn’t expecting a disintegrating quest novel. Inside there are multiple narrative threads intertwined with a meta narrative. A writer, purporting to be the actual Gabriel Blackwell, introduces what he believes to be a letter he found from Lovecraft. Though it starts out as an actual (though fictional) introduction, it quickly becomes an account of how he supposedly found the letter while searching for his girlfriend, who disappeared from Portland, in her hometown of Providence.
While searching, he takes a day labor job shredding old records in the basement of a hospital and comes across a file for a long dead patient coincidentally also named Gabriel Blackwell. In that file is supposedly a letter from Lovecraft, purportedly written to the unknown Gabriel Blackwell in response to a letter the unknown Blackwell had written to Lovecraft. Apparently, the unknown Blackwell’s letter had malevolent effects upon Lovecraft:

Dear Mr. Blackwell,
Given a last spur of energy by the bile the memory of your accursed letter has set off, I am writing to return the awful blight that it has visited upon me. I knew not whom you were when that mad thing appeared on my desk a month ago, but if I had known what was enclosed, I would have destroyed it without even unsealing the envelope. You end your inquiry with a wish for my continued health; I wish in this reply my haunted oblivion returned to sender. My horror and disgust at the thought of the dimming of the lights, my fierce loathing of the things the nurses innocently bring into our ward–these I wish upon you also, for you are the reason that I am here.
The narrator Blackwell presents a purportedly imperfectly transcribed version of Lovecraft’s letter, the transcription of which apparently had malevolent effects upon narrator Blackwell. Footnotes to the letter describe the narrator Blackwell’s disintegration during the transcription:
¹⁶ The subject matter of Lovecraft’s letter did not aid in reassuring me of my own sanity, obviously. Often, I had to read the passage in front of me five or six times and then transcribe it three or four times just to be sure that I was seeing what I was seeing. At least, that is what I remember about the process. That, and the stifling heat of the library, the hot-and-cold of the basement, the sweat that seemed to pour in black streams from my every pore, dripping onto the table, onto the keyboard, which had been white to begin with but had now become black, the keys almost indistinguishable from each other, the screen obscured in places by ink. My head swam almost constantly, and the letters, difficult enough to discern at rest, on the page, seemed to hover like heat-shimmer on the screen.
***
I must have eaten during this time, at least something, some time. I must have slept. I had vague memories like the last moments of dreams of waking alongside doors, out of the way of foot-traffic at the mouth of alleys, in the shade of benches and dumpsters, but I could not recall how I had come to lay myself down in those spaces, nor could I remember not being awake…I might indeed have been at a pole, might have been anywhere, but I was instead in Providence. Nothing was real.

Endnotes after the letter then detail further disintegrations of the narrator Blackwell, both before the trip to Providence and after.
The various narratives intertwined with the meta narrative exerted quite a pull on me, something akin to undertow–powerful and sinister. I felt drawn in similarly to how the narrator Blackwell is drawn into the purported Lovecraft letter and how Lovecraft was supposedly drawn into the unknown Blackwell’s letter. I had no more ability to choose to stop reading than they did, though I had no desire to do that anyway.
Looking at The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men as a whole, I have to admit that I adored it. Given the Lovecraft connection, the surreality of its claimed reality, the various levels of storyline, and so on, what’s not to love? The story is engaging and the form is intriguing. Let’s just hope that my curiosity in reading this book doesn’t result in the same fate that so many Lovecraftian heroes met when they encountered an eldritch tome. - David Atkinson

Where Public Enemy, H.P. Lovecraft, and Sid Vicious Converge: A Between Books Interview With Gabriel Blackwell

By Tobias Carroll On May 28, 2013·

Gabriel Blackwell, Critique of Pure Reason, Noemi Press, 2013.

"Unique and compelling as the very souls they depict—from the unknown to the famous to the infamous—these stories are wildly inventive, sly, astute. There's a bit of Sir Thomas Browne (Borges, too) for the twenty-first century in these wizardly, magical narratives. The notion of 'pure reason' has rarely had a more subtle, comical, yet deeply humane alchemist at work in the great lab of fiction than Gabriel Blackwell."—Bradford Morrow

"In CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, Gabriel Blackwell bends found forms to story, repurposes history, sets mathematics and a programmer's logic to generating emotion and wonder. This is the work of a talented storyteller slyly taking the stance of a documentary filmmaker, or else of a first-rate bureaucrat, perhaps rising quickly through our Ministry of Imagination—and with each new diagram and footnote and well-made sentence the philosopher in Blackwell provides us another piece of that most illusive of proofs, a verification of our shared humanity, captured here in all its absurdity and horror and glory."—Matt Bell

"Critique of Pure Reason is an ark captained by a mad genius who has summoned—from the depths of his wild imagination—a vast and stunning species of fictional forms and set them adrift upon a relentless flood. Cerebral, lyrical, mischievous, and hypnotic, these stories pulse with the focused urgency of creatures who, having survived an event of apocalyptic proportions, are now determined to thrive."-Matthew Vollmer



Gabriel Blackwell, Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2012.

According to Dashiell Hammett, a shadow man is “meant to blend in, to disappear by being always there.” Hammett knew something about disappearing. Behind the shadows thrown by “Miles Archer,” his fictional detective, was a very real detective—his partner in San Francisco, Lewis Miles Archer, a private detective so private that, when he went missing in February of 1929, no one even thought to look for him. Shadow Man is the biography of the silhouette Hammett, as well as Raymond Chandler and even Ross Macdonald, eventually filled in, a man who was always there. Until he wasn’t.


“Shadow Man is a stylish, metaphysical romp through a noir labyrinth. It manages to do for the hardboiled classics what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead did for Hamlet.” —Jedediah Berry

“Shadow Man’s project is to unnerve biography’s careless assumptions about selfhood and historical knowledge. The real detective work involved in in this bright, complex, comic, melancholy critifiction about the epistemological static at the nexus of art and the rest reveals itself in the intriguing chess game the reader is asked to play on every page with the puckish meta-author.”—Lance Olsen

“Borges warns us of ‘the contamination of reality by dream,’ and with that in mind, Gabriel Blackwell’s infectious book drives us out of our minds, defying quarantine, plum crazy on Plum Island. The narrative genetics of this nonfiction fiction is masterfully mosaic. Rules are all busted and bested. Shadow Man is sicker than sick but in a good way, in the best way.” - Michael Martone

“In Shadow Man, Gabriel Blackwell stakes his claim as conductor and curator extraordinaire of shadows textual, characterological, and historical. Raising the language of noir to the nth power, and serving up a plot that might lead Ray Chandler to hang a white flag on his carriage return, Shadow Man rewards its reader richly in style, substance, and insubstance. Brace yourself to shadow Blackwell as he charts the fraught, frayed boundaries between fact and fiction, but also to lose yourself delightedly in the murky, twisting alleyways of this book.”  —Tim Horvath

Part sophisticated pastiche: a hardboiled egg painted a pulpy purple; part metafictional play employing the supposed objectivities of historiography; Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer is both a generous homage to classic detective fiction and an incisive critique of same, employing the genre’s detached and cynical narratological tone and style to, yes, evoke tension and apprehension, but to also displace those affects and effects. Blackwell is an artful ventriloquist, demonstrating in this fake-biography a sharp and muscular command of the hip argot of the so-called golden age of Hollywood noir films and American pulp fiction, a lingo as invented as it was inventive, a hyper-mediated discourse of various African- and Jewish-American discourses. True to the genres it circumvents, the text explodes with rapid-fire repartee, double-entendres, and incredibly elastic metaphorizing. A tangled tale of moral ambiguity, of the muddle that is human agency, it questions and complicates the dialectic of good and evil, presents historicizing as an overdetermined act, an act vitiated by various ethical, political, philosophical, and psychological subjectivities.
I also read Shadow Man as a post-genre intervention in conversation with texts like Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy and Robert Coover’s Noir, as well as various texts by Brian Evenson and Alain Robbe-Grillet, which all engage with the tropes of crime and detective fiction in manners which foreground not only the artifice of the genre’s narrative architectonics but also deep investigations of epistemological and ontological dilemmas.
Actually, Shadow Man might be thought of as a post-post-genre text, that is, an open text that quietly takes textual fusion and indeterminate structures not for granted, but as a part of the history of literary discourse offering further opportunities for provocative, productive disruption. - John Madera


The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men is subtitled “The Last Letter of H.P. Lovecraft,” and is offered to us as a letter putatively written by Lovecraft a few days before his death, along with an introduction by the man who claims to have found it (“Gabriel Blackwell”), a series of annotations, and a few extended endnotes. Although readers could certainly find this “novel” successful and satisfying on its own, reading it in tandem with Blackwell’s previous novel, Shadow Man (2012) may help clarify the aesthetic assumptions behind both. Considering the two books together confirms that what otherwise seems in each a kind of clever mimicry of genre conventions or of a particular writer’s prose style is really just the most visible manifestation of a more deliberate and comprehensive literary strategy. This strategy could loosely be described as one of “appropriation,” but in Blackwell’s fiction the simple act of appropriating other writers and their work is not finally the ultimate aim. Instead, these writers provide the material with which Blackwell creates new work using recognizable elements of fiction, even if what results still begins with what others have already written.
The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men’s most impressive achievement is its persuasive impersonation of Lovecraft’s style, complete with Lovecraft’s signature stylistic effects: the breathless cadences, melodramatic descriptions, and often stilted diction. Here “Lovecraft” describes a man he encounters in a hospital waiting room:
My neighbor turned to me as I sat, looking at me full in the face, though rather more at my forehead than at my eyes. I would have ventured some conversation were it not at that moment his mouth dropped open, and, expecting something to come out, I stayed silent. When nothing did and I had realized that nothing was likely to, enough of an interval had passed that it seemed wrong somehow to speak, and so I did not, trying to turn away but feeling his glare. Shortly, a kind of low, whining ululation began to emanate from the man’s throat, neither building nor lessening in volume. Nervous, I scrabbled about in my pockets, to no purpose at all. The second nurse suddenly appeared on my right side and gently pulled my arm, signaling that I ought to go with her. I was only too glad to do so . . .
Likewise, in Shadow Man, Blackwell channels the hard-bitten, wised-up prose style of classic detective fiction in authoring a “biography” of Lewis Miles Archer, purportedly the real-life detective on which Dashiell Hammett’s “Miles Archer” was based (himself a character to whom Ross McDonald’s “Lew Archer” was subsequently a clear homage). Both Hammett and Raymond Chandler make appearances in this account, and much of the plot concerns people and events that readers of Chandler’s The Big Sleep will immediately recognize. (Ultimately we are to believe that Archer is the prototype of Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe.)
If a common complaint about “experimental fiction” is that it too readily turns its back on the traditional readerly pleasures provided by narrative, voice, and character, both of these novels parry this objection by providing plenty of each. Shadow Man features the same sort of labyrinthine plot found in Chandler’s fiction, which appeals through its very complications and sudden twists, while Natural Dissolution adds to the horror narrative embedded in the Lovecraft letter another narrative strand relating the circumstances by which the letter came into Gabriel Blackwell’s possession. This narrative emerges through the annotations to the letter, and eventually the two stories almost merge, each of them a story of “dissolution”—Lovecraft’s into the hallucinations preceding his death (induced no doubt by the undiagnosed cancer that killed him), Blackwell’s into ennui and debilitation after his girlfriend leaves him. Thus not only does The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men highlight story, but reinforces its centrality by drawing the reader’s attention to the parallels between its twin narratives.
Clearly, however, Blackwell’s storytelling is still not an ordinary kind of storytelling, concerned as it seems to be with reiterating existing styles, narrative practices, and even characters. This approach involves an inherent risk: Although Blackwell’s simulations of a Chandler novel and a Lovecraft tale are very skillfully realized, and part of the enjoyment of reading is in appreciating his rendering of Lovecraft’s prose style and his reproduction of the typical features of a Lovecraft story, readers who have not read much, if any, of Lovecraft’s fiction will necessarily be less able to experience the full effect of Blackwell’s performance. The fictional narrative taking up most of the Lovecraft letter has enough of the menacing, metaphysical horror and quasi-psychedelic imagery characteristic of Lovecraft’s better stories that even these uninitiated readers can still find the story of H.P. Lovecraft’s disintegration compelling, especially in its increasing resonance with Gabriel Blackwell’s descent into his own hellish circumstances, both of them becoming the story of “fleeting-improvised-men.” Nevertheless, the risk that readers who are familiar with Lovecraft’s work will inevitably be more aware both of Blackwell’s strategy and his accomplishment in creatively appropriating that work is one Blackwell is venturesome enough to take.
Both Shadow Man and Natural Dissolution are appropriations of genre fiction, and one might say that Blackwell has taken the tendency among some contemporary writers to incorporate elements of genre to a literal and logical extreme, exhibiting a relationship to genre conventions that goes beyond homage or assimilation and might even be called parasitical. While surely Blackwell is an admirer of the genres (and authors) from which his novels borrow, neither work is really very far from parody or satire. This tongue-in-cheek tone is part of what makes these novels appealing, and the distance it creates between the invented narrative and its underlying source prevents them from becoming versions of “fan fiction.” Ultimately, neither book toys with the elements of genre per se, or with the specific conventions of detective and horror fiction, so much as they use these particular genres to create a fictional world, second-hand, out of fiction, to fashion alternative forms of storytelling from the shards of conventional storytelling.
In this way, The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men could certainly be called a work of “metafiction”; if anything, it is more radically “fiction about fiction” than the work of those first identified as writers of metafiction—Barth, Sorrentino, et al. Self-reflexivity as practiced by these writers was meant to disrupt the reader’s suspension of disbelief, reminding us we are reading fiction, with all of its artificial devices. Blackwell’s novel doesn’t ask us to be mindful of the distinction between fiction and reality. Instead it invites us into a fictional creation we already know to be blatantly artificial. However much “the last letter of H.P. Lovecraft” is framed through circumstances meant to vouch for its authenticity, and despite the quasi-scholarly tone of the introduction, no readers are likely to assume the letter is real and thus to accept the accompanying account of the hardships faced by “Gabriel Blackwell” as anything other than an invention. One could say that The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men asks the reader to suspend the inclination to believe—that what we are reading could at some fundamental level “really happen,” or that the experiences related must in some way reflect the author’s own.
In explaining his own turn to metafiction, John Barth invoked what he called “the literature of exhaustion,” a kind of fiction that proceeded on the assumption that the received conventions of fiction had been “used up” and that the task facing the adventurous writer was to find a way to create something new out of the very “exhaustion” of fiction’s traditional resources. Barth himself did this by always reminding the reader that the imperatives of storytelling are not the imperatives of life, that the former should not be constrained by the latter. Gabriel Blackwell accepts this task as well, perhaps even taking its potential a step farther, a step toward his own version of what John Barth also called the “literature of replenishment.” Shadow Man and TheNatural Dissolution of Fleeing-Improvised-Men pretend to give up on the possibility of telling new stories in fiction and instead recycle elements of “old” fiction—but in the process, paradoxically they produce something new, after all. - Daniel Green



Is there a form called smart noir? There should be. In Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer, published by Civil Coping Mechanisms, Gabriel Blackwell both conducts and writes the story. As the meta-writer and the meta-detective, he’s inside what happens, and outside, all at the same time. Blackwell claims, rather coyly, to be the “editor” of Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer, and he is listed as such on the cover. But like a savvy gumshoe, Blackwell is too humble—and too sneaky—to list his skills upfront. His project is to blur lines between fiction and nonfiction; genre and form; noir and innovation.
We should consider ourselves forewarned meta-readers because Blackwell, as editor of this book, as author and researcher, is the ultimate shadow man. Blackwell disappears into the story and lets us know that he will be seen—and not seen:
We read to name that “pink elephant” in the room and, in the manner of noir, to find that missing femme fatale in the bar. The reader’s suspicious impulse might be to sit with the book and with Google, to search what is fiction, nonfiction, or imagination. We are inside the story as it unravels and outside the story as it is revealed. The story becomes confounding, like “a maze”:
I soon gave up the inter-textual Google approach to reading Blackwell and let myself be drawn into the cheeky editor’s devilish and impish fun. Those who are unseen and unknown are often the characters of literature that might reveal the most, were we to bother to ask. Blackwell bothers. He uses this knowledge, his questions, to great effect, illuminating a man who existed and didn’t exist, someone who disappeared with nary a backward glance.
Shadow Man takes as its cue Dashiell Hammett’s fictional detective Miles Archer, and jazz riffs off of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, too. Nevertheless, before you think you must be familiar with works by those three, consider that I’m not all that familiar with noir, and I found myself thoroughly, willfully engaged. Submerged.
The reader’s project might be similar to investigators who uncover eyewitnesses. The reader uncovers characters and characterizations. The book shadows (that word again!) the character Archer through different appearances. If we are all dicks (detectives, I mean), then our tracking is perpetual: Our reading goes on, detective-like, tracking femme fatales, missing falcons, and Archer.
Dashiell Hammett used a fictional detective, “Miles Archer,” but Blackwell illuminates the fictional with the real dick behind the story, Lewis Miles Archer, who was Hammett’s partner and a real detective. I’m a fan of union history, so the references to Pinkertons thrilled me (and seemed prescient to our times with the recent union-busting laws in Wisconsin and Michigan). Archer writes in his detective’s notebook, which is included in Shadow Man, and thus gives us more reading clues: “It’s all up front. Everything’s a front.”
Blackwell’s exhaustive noir knowledge of “no-name Joes, guys with names that mean bunk” means that we are in the hands of a gleeful guy. Blackwell is our leading private eye:
Again, one feels the impulse to fit the pieces together to follow this detective author, but even that impulse—to make sense of literature or to make literature make sense—is rightly questioned in Blackwell’s astute hands. To create Lewis Miles Archer, Blackwell borrows from Hammett. The momentum behind The Maltese Falcon forms the genesis of Shadow Man. Then Blackwell creates. He conflates. Blackwell borrows from Raymond Chandler, from Ross Macdonald.
Blackwell challenges our desire to build character through illumination, filling in the animus not by erasing the past but by including the past and adding to it. Recall one of the Latin quotes at the start of Shadow Man that tells us that “although changed, [he] shall arise again.” The story here, although changed, rises again. Built on narrative history, it’s also built on its own beginnings:
While creation arises from imagination, the source of imagination might be uncannily familiar. We are literary cannibals, all. The mystery forms the wicked fun of this meta-critical project—but Shadow Man stands on its own, aside from its meta-critical inquiry. After all, as Blackwell writes:
It’s noir, it’s your shadow, it’s Borges’s interweaving maze-like blindness. Let narrative loose under klieg lights and watch narrative lose its mystery. Keep narrative shrouded in a dusky haze, and let narrative reclaim its mystery—of form, of story, of meaning. - Renée E. D’Aoust



                               EXCERPT:
Lewis Miles Archer, or anyhow the man known to creditors and clients as Lewis Miles Archer for just long enough to build up a respectable sheet of both, was born sometime between 1879 and 1888, somewhere in the shadow of Lake Michigan. That’s a hole wide enough for a boxcar full of babies to fall through, sure, but then the first time that that name, “Lewis Miles Archer,” rears its salt-and- pepper head in the public record isn’t until 1928, a full forty years later, and on the West Coast. Like a tramp holding two pieces of bread and praying for cheese, it would be nice to have something to put there in between, but the man’s history before 1928 is like wet tissue paper—try to pick it up and watch it disappear.
In those forty-odd years, this great nation was dragged into the Great War and then managed to drag itself into the Great Mistake, Prohibition. It’s hard to know which was worse; at least we could blame someone else for the war. We elected a Roosevelt twice, a Coolidge once, and a Debs not at all, which didn’t stop the man from trying four times. The Chicago White Sox dyed their footwear black for a season, the Bums from Brooklyn couldn’t buy a World Series, and the Red Sox sold the greatest player in the game for a box of cigars and a play called My Lady Friends. The boardwalks of America went from sawdust and nickelodeons to Al Jolson and Lights of New York, while the airstrips went from Wilbur and Orville to Charles and Amelia. Things changed from day to day, and people learned to keep up, or else they didn’t. The ones that didn’t were called “suckers.”
Lewis Miles Archer’s birth doesn’t feature in any of the history books, but sometimes the suckers write books, too. In 1879, a boy named John Macdonald Millar was born in Kitchener, Ontario to a family of Scots. Another boy, Raymond Thornton Chandler, was born just a few hours away, in Chicago, Illinois, in 1888. Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born a few years later still, in 1894, in Maryland. Somewhere in between, our boy, Archer, breathed his first; at least, that’s the best guess anybody’s come up with so far. All four men, Hammett, Millar, Chandler and Archer, would be in San Francisco by the time the lanterns got hung out on Market Street to celebrate the ringing in of 1928. Only Hammett would be left when those lanterns went back up to herald 1929.
In that year, “Archer Investigations” is listed in the San Francisco directory at 111 Sutter Street, the Hunter-Dulin Building. It would be gone before the year was up, replaced by an insurance outfit, “L.D. Walgreen’s Family Insurance Company.” The tea leaves of public documents from that single year, 1928, are the only solid evidence that the man existed at all, and even there, there aren’t that many clues as to the man he was. There is no “Archer, Lewis Miles” listed in any of the city directories from that year or any other, and Archer’s name appears only twice in the public record: once on a marriage certificate, and once on the business lease of the office space on Sutter. Back then, all you needed was a signature and ready cash, and you were in business. Archer had a signature and ready cash, and Archer Investigations was in business.






Wonderfully, you have two books coming out back to back–Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer (CCM) and Critique of Pure Reason (Noemi)–what’s going on behind the scenes? Is it hectic managing the release of two books?
It’s maybe appropriate that these two books are both coming out at roughly the same time; I wrote them more or less in parallel. Still, that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with them now that they’re almost here. I really have no one but myself to blame. I make my own work—nothing that I’m doing now is “required,” and I could probably just be taking it easy and letting things play out the way they’re going to anyway. But I can’t bear leaving things entirely up to chance. I don’t know if there is an ideal reader for either book, but if there is, I want the book to find her, somehow. I only know how I find books to read, so I’m trying to do the kind of things that would get my own attention; presumably, I’ll find other readers like myself. You can see the problem—doing things in this myopic kind of way is very limiting. Fortunately, I’ve had a number of really kind, really generous people help me out and offer opportunities that I wouldn’t have thought to ask for, and maybe together we’ll get the books into people’s hands.
Did you find any similar obstacles while working on both of these books? Was one harder to write than the other? What were the differences or similarities in the experiences of working on one book compared to the other?
Critique of Pure Reason seems the easier of the two now because it was mostly done by the time that I realized that it was an it. At that point, I had been working on what it would be for four years, and all but three of the pieces had been published or accepted for publication. My work on it last spring leading up to me sending it to Mike Meginnis at Noemi was a matter of putting the various parts together in a way that made meaning out of the whole. But thinking about it in that way discounts the four years of work that went into its components. It’s deceptive, I mean, but when I think about Critique as a book, that’s usually what I think about—the process of ordering it, rather than the process of composing it.
Shadow Man was very different. It felt difficult throughout because of how complex it ended up being, and because of how concentrated my work on it had been by comparison with Critique. By the end of my revision process, I was reading through the entire book each time I changed a line, just to make sure what I was changing wouldn’t disturb something earlier on. I sat at my desk for ten, eleven hours at a stretch. I gave myself acid reflux. I had to sleep sitting up for weeks. It was not something I would do again, except that I probably would.
While writing, editing, and revising–what did you learn about the process? What stuck out to you that you hadn’t thought about before?
I learned as much in the two years I worked on Shadow Man as I did in the two years I spent in graduate school. Maybe more. There’s no substitute for creating and revising something so sustained. It is its own pedagogy. But, because I finished it very early in 2011, and because I’ve since finished another book (The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men), I’m not sure that I can remember specifically what I learned while writing Shadow Man. I learned how to write Shadow Man, and I would guess that all of what I learned is on its pages somehow. Very little of that learning carried over to NDFIM. Even the processes of composition were radically different—I wrote my first draft of Shadow Man in three weeks or so; it took me more than a year to complete a draft of NDFIM.
Just by reading the excerpts of your upcoming works, it looks like there was some heavy research being done (in particular, Shadow Man)–how did this play a role in your works?
I’m not a big fan of hermetic stories or novels, honestly. I prefer work that has something to say to the world around it, that acknowledges that it will never really get its readers’ undivided attentions. I try to create parasitic works, building on others’ creations—not just acknowledging the reader’s life outside of the book but (so I hope) pointing in fruitful directions for his or her distraction. Obviously, I have to know something of those other creations if that’s going to be successful, so I do research.
You have so much going on–your own writing, teaching, being the reviews editor for The Collagist, writing for Big Other, and you do so much more–how do you manage your time? What is your schedule like when you’re writing?
This isn’t a life that I would have wished on my younger self, but it seems fine for now. I learned late how dedicated I needed to be to be a writer I’d want to read, and I feel like I’ve been trying to catch up ever since. There is no substitute for working with language on a daily basis, even if it isn’t your own; honestly, it seems better to me that it isn’t my own, often. I don’t need to be more prolific (though there are plenty of writers who are, and who are fine writers), so, even though my work for The Collagist or Big Other takes away from my typing time, I don’t necessarily think of that as a bad thing. I think I’d prefer that I was different from story to story, and that seems to me to require that time passes. If I can spend that time working with language, all the better.
As for my schedule, it varies a little. When I’m typing something, I usually get up early and write before work so that I can spend the late afternoon/evening taking care of my other responsibilities. If I put those off for too long, they take over my schedule and it becomes difficult to find time to write. So I have to be very disciplined. I very rarely take a day off, but I don’t think that makes me different from most of the writers I know—like I said, it seems necessary to be working with language in some way every single day. The few times I’ve tried to “do nothing” for a day have been disasters.
What’s it like being a reviews editor?
There are substantial rewards—I get to work with some really smart writers, find out about books and publishers I never would have known about otherwise, and help get the word out about some really great books. I don’t know if it’s perfect for me or if I’ve perfectly adapted myself to it, but either way, it feels completely natural now, two years into it.
Do you have any book recommendations? What have you been reading lately? What are you looking forward to checking out?
I’ve been so pressed for time lately that I read while walking the dog—I read Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation, Amber Sparks’s May We Shed These Human Bodies, and Brian Carr’s Vampire Conditions walking around my neighborhood—and I’m doing research for a new book, so most of what I read at home isn’t exactly by choice. But I’m trying to make time for Michele Disler’s [Bond, James], Mike Kitchell’s Variations on the Sun, Kellie Wells’s Fat Girl, Terrestrial, Elena Passarello’s Let Me Clear My Throat, and Matthew Vollmer’s Inscriptions for Headstones.
Who are some authors you find yourself admiring? Why? What is it about them or their works that appeal to you?
This seems like a question whose answer would get out of hand in less than a sentence, so I’ll just say that I seem to have totems for each book I write, and for this latest one, those totems are David Markson and Christopher Priest. I’m not sure what that means or if it means anything at all.
What about journals? Which ones do you find yourself reading regularly?
I read Conjunctions cover to cover. I also look forward to new issues of DIAGRAM, [out of nothing], Puerto del Sol, Tin House, Black Clock,and Artifice. And I’m really looking forward to the second issues of two new magazines, Uncanny Valley and Unstuck. I’m sure I’m forgetting dozens of others. - Interview by Shome Dasgupta

Author Conversation: Gabriel Blackwell and Robert Kloss

In this new series, we’re going to pair authors together and have them discuss anything and everything that authors discuss. In this inaugural conversation, Gabriel Blackwell and Robert Kloss discuss the similarities between their books, historical nonfiction, blurbing, and more.

Gabriel Blackwell:“Historical fiction” seems naïve to me even as a concept, and I’m allergic to categorization. But if there is anything in Amazon’s sales algorithm to connect our books, it would have to be that, right? That we’re both exploring/appropriating history in our fictions? So, why bother with the historical? I mean, the Greely expedition happened. The Civil War happened. Lincoln’s assassination happened. Why write about them or around them? Why not just make something up out of whole cloth, set it in the present, set it in the future, Middle Earth?
Robert Kloss: I always liked books like Reed’s Flight into Canada and Coover’s The Public Burning—historical satires. But that’s not the kind of novel I set out to write. And, in most ways, it’s not the kind of book I did write, although I think that’s the most obvious part of my book. It kind of just happened. I set out to write about a man’s fear of mortality and his extreme grief and that led my to Lincoln’s morbid grief over his son’s death. The Civil War then seemed like a natural subject—it allowed me to dig into personal griefs in an epic way, while also letting me make a kind of broad comment about American past and present. But the historical side of the novel emerged very organically out of the more imaginative side of the story. I began with alligators.
And then it becomes a kind of game, doesn’t it? The process of inspiration, of blurring the lines between imagination and historical record, between fact and Truth?
So let me throw it back at you a little bit, because you’re maybe even playing with the form a little more than I do—you’re not just manipulating biography and historical record, but you’re also playing maybe the two most important and famous novels of their genre, The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. So the question then is: Why rework the texts? And also, where was your starting point? What was your process on this?
GB: It seems to me that Shadow Man is a book about creation or a book about the failure to create. Why rework the texts? Because Shadow Man’s a book about creation and the failure to create.
The men who wrote The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep were terribly confused men, men who made mysteries out of their lives while writing books about men whose jobs were to solve mysteries. It’s not their work I’ve appropriated—or not only their work I’ve appropriated—but their position, their predicament. But it is/was my position, too, where I found/find myself.
What I’m trying to say is that this wasn’t a book that could have been written from a zero point. I don’t believe that such books exist. But that’s another subject for another time—this was a book that needed a father or fathers, a heritage that was both obvious and mysterious. The book is a paternity suit.
Which brings us (back) to fatherhood, something I found particularly important to The Alligators of Abraham. The you of the novel is a son with a very strong father, but it’s a you, not a he, not an I. Why is that? Why the second person? David Ohle described your book as being “led along dark alleys of American history by an all-seeing voice-over narrative,” but, as “all-seeing” as it is, it is also, oddly, intimate, perhaps by virtue of that you.
RK: I would like to never again write about the feelings or thoughts of any of my characters, especially when writing about the bizarre. I would rather focus on physicality—defining through action. The second person allows for that kind of distance, while also creating the kind of intimacy that you mention. There is also something about the second person that lends to a voice and language driven narrative, while at the same time limiting the kinds of character-related concerns that a first person narrative may have. Finally, second person allows for a sort of sweeping vastness—Ohle’s all-seeing narrator—that I find necessary to writing the kind of book that interests me.
At different points in the writing of Alligators, I did toy with making the second person into a kind of first person. And then for a while I toyed with writing the book as a dialogue between Robert Lincoln and the “you” character. The structure of the first few drafts was much less straightforward. And I found those experiments very frustrating and limiting and dull. The more and more I moved away from characterizing the narrator in anyway, while also retaining the qualities of a narrated story, the more liberated I felt. There is just something very sweeping and from the clouds or burning bush about writing this way.
I think in many ways my goal is to show everything while telling nothing. I think mystery is a very important element in all great writing. I would rather not have things explained away. And, of course, you use multiple perspectives in Shadow to deepen the mystery, rather than solve it.
So, in my mind, our books may be more closely linked by our use of language and perspective than our use of history. Your book is maybe even more driven by language and voice than mine. And you certainly use more perspectives than I do. I’m hoping you’ll comment on your use of language—I find it impressive. In particular, I’m curious about how you constructed the voice—your influences, your method in writing it, and so on.
And then the other linked question I have, is about the use of Gabriel Blackwell as a character at the very end. What was your thinking in using what is essentially an aspect of meta-fiction to deepen the mystery? Usually the entrance of the author diminishes the mystery—at least in my experience.
GB: Maybe it’s a question of genre. I guess I’m okay with the publisher calling Shadow Man a novel (even though I did ask that it be called a biography on the cover, to be internally consistent; that doesn’t seem to have stuck), but only because I recognize the novel as novel, as being one of the most pliable literary forms. I’d feel just as comfortable talking about it as an essay (or even a memoir), though, as that’s how I see my role with regards to this material—as an essayist. I was as careful with facts as I was with fictions, and the material, after all, already existed. I just shaped it. Given that relationship, I don’t really see it as a metanarrative, though I will concede that it probably is, in a Schrödinger’s cat kind of way.
I love “something very sweeping and from the clouds or burning bush”; I think you’re better at describing your style than I am at mine. I can see your you effacing the narrator; that’s an interesting aspect of your use of the second person, maybe of the second person in general.
My natural inclination is to move in an opposite direction—to focus as intently as I’m capable on that entity, whatever/whoever it might be, to inhabit it. I’m always thinking in terms of how the teller should be telling the story, what story it is, what form it should take, and what that all means for the resulting language. It’s the only way I’ve found to get the language right. It’s slightly puritan, I think, or maybe just functional, but I tend to lose patience early with writing that doesn’t exercise some care and consideration there. Voice is all there is.
Voice is paramount to Alligators, too: weeks after finishing it, I can’t shake that drumming “And. . . . And. . . . And. . . . And.” There’s something seductive in it, as a reader, something pulling, even commanding at times. Coupled with that reticence to write internality you mention above, I felt close to the narrator as a storyteller, but not necessarily as a character. Seduction relies on mystery, right? The books that I took the most from for Shadow Man, too, play on that kind of mood—Hammett, in particular, was wholly action-focused, unwilling to grant access to his characters’ heads, something he’d stolen from Hemingway (who’d learned his drumming from Gertrude Stein). [And since I’ve mentioned Hemingway, I see a strain of In Our Time’s interchapters in Alligators—am I way off base?]
So, around the time that I was having to think about who to ask to blurb Shadow Man, Matt Bell posted something about blurbs on Facebook that made complete sense to me. It was something like: “Choose the company you want your book to keep.” Less aphoristic, probably. Maybe this was no part of your thinking, but can I ask why you chose Adam Braver and David Ohle for your blurbs? I’m a huge fan of Ohle’s work, but I don’t think I would have thought of him while reading Alligators. As for Braver, I have his latest novel, Misfit, and I’m eager to read it, but it will be my first Braver.
RK: Well, first, that’s an interesting comment about In Our Time. I hadn’t thought about that book—I read it years and years go, in college, I think—but I can see where the devices are slightly similar. Actually, I was watching a lot of Malick films when I was finishing the later stages of the manuscripts, and I think that’s where the idea of the italicized sections came from, like whispering over the gunfire and slaughter. On the page it becomes something else, of course.
As for blurbs: it’s funny you mention Matt, because I actually consulted him early on—and he gave me much the same advice as you mention. So I wanted to use authors who wrote about the Civil War or the post-apocalyptic. We actually toyed with getting Civil War historians to blurb the book or fake Civil War historians or even use Lincoln’s words, somehow.
Finally we settled on these two.
Ohle’s novels were early inspirations for Alligators—Ohle’s books taught me to free up my imagination and to be fearless, and I think those ideas, plus the dystopian elements—are apparent in Alligators. So it was natural to try for him. Adam Braver was actually Matt’s suggestion. I was aware of his JFK book, but not Mr. Lincoln’s Wars. I picked up that book and enjoyed it—the lyricism, the way he wrote history as literature. And I liked the idea of someone like Braver—who has a completely different approach to lyricism and historical fiction—taking a look at the book.
The blurbing process is kind of strange, I think. I’m uncomfortable with all of these parts of selling the book, because they boil the novel down into little understandable parts. Little nuggets of wisdom. I think it’s unfair to The Alligators of Abraham to call it a “post-apocalyptic Civil War novel” but that’s evidently what I tried to reduce it to when choosing those two authors to blurb the book.
I suppose that’s what we’re doing here, and probably each of us resisting in our own way, right? Reviews, jacket copy, blurbs, . . . and whatever else is out there, it’s all about finding a way of reducing something hopefully complex and, in a way, kind of inexplicable into something that will sell the public on our work. So, I think I coined “post-apocalyptic Civil War novel” just now, which is what I’m going to call Alligators whenever I’m approached about it, at parties or on the street (ha). So, now it’s your turn. What were you trying to boil your novel into when you chose your blurbers? How do you go about presenting your book in easy to swallow pills?
GB: I think the italicized sections of Alligators do come across as oral, as vocalized. And, again, I like the way you describe it: “whispering over . . . gunfire” captures it perfectly. (Though I thought of Herzog rather than Malick; hope you don’t take that as an insult. Herzog describing Even Dwarfs Started Small: “an attempt to make inner states transparent . . . realized in a kind of nightmarish horror vision.” ANYway.) I think I am, in general, much less successful in describing anything having to do with me or what I’ve done in a way that makes any kind of sense or seems at all appealing. It’s less a matter of resisting—though I’ve done plenty of that with this book—than of incompetence. I plead awkwardness. I plead stupidity.
The only way I could be of any help with Shadow Man’s jacket copy/description was to think of that piece of writing as part of the book, part of and consistent with one of its narrators. Instead of trying to compress everything into some sort of capsule, I tried to think of it as a knob or a handle. I still got totally frustrated and hated doing it, but I hated it much less than my earlier attempts to encompass the whole of the thing. It seems to me that any successful novel is at least a little shaggy and messy, necessarily. If it is something that could effectively be communicated in a paragraph, the natural question is, why hasn’t it been? I mean, why write more than that paragraph, right? Obviously, this kind of thinking explains why I will never write a bestseller.
With my exceptionally kind blurbers, I was attempting to make up for my own inadequacies. I tried to triangulate the thing I had written, to at least plot the craft and the spirit behind it, if not the subject. I did start out thinking in terms of subject(s), and I debated whether to ask someone like John T. Irwin, who has written a couple of great books about mystery and noir, or Richard Layman, whose work on Hammett was tremendously helpful to me. But I had trouble keeping up the pretense, maybe, or maybe I just couldn’t resist one good wink at the reader.
Speaking of readers, even though I tend to be shark-like in my reading, but I can’t see not rereading The Alligators of Abraham. The excesses of language, the indelible imagery, the cadences, the bizarre and intriguing characters—it was tremendously satisfying, a rare book. Aside from that rereading, though, when can I read more from you? What’s next? I think you said that you’d completed another novel, yes?
RK: The novel you mention is titled Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. It’s in the style of Alligators, but it shows a natural growth from Alligators. It takes it’s time a little more than Alligators—it lingers more. And it focuses more on their characters, their relationship and fears and atrocities, a little more. I am more proud of it than anything else I’ve to this point done. The novel does not yet have a publisher, so we’ll see what yet happens with it.
I do have a shorter work appearing in 2013—a chapbook co-written with Amber Sparks called The Desert Places. It’s a series of linked flash pieces that traces the evolution of a monster from the beginning of humanity through the end. Matt Kish will be illustrating and Curbside Splendor will be publishing, in October I believe.
And what about you? I know you have another book that is now available for pre-order. What’s that one about? Is there anything else on the horizon?
GB: I have a collection of fictions and essays that’s just come out, Critique of Pure Reason. And then I’ve “edited” another book called The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men: The Last Letter of H. P. Lovecraft, that will be out in October. It feels very strange to have three books come out in just under a year—strange, and a little tiring. I hope any readers I might have aren’t as sick of me as I’ve become.
I don’t think of myself as a particularly fast or productive writer, despite this anomalous year. I started work on the next book after finishing Natural Dissolution this summer and handing it over to the publisher, and I’ve been adding to it bit by tiny bit, but it still hasn’t achieved that point where its momentum determines my schedule—you know that point? It just feels like something one does right now, like a habit one isn’t very proud of. I’m probably not supposed to say that, huh? In all honesty, I don’t believe in anything I’ve written until it has a complete shape, until I can really get started on the revision. I think of myself as a reviser, not really a composer.

RK: I can relate to this idea. There are times when I’m holding out buckets to catch the words, to paraphrase Saul Bellow, but more often now I find it necessary to slowly throttle the thing to life. I think that’s very natural, for growth to come through an uncomfortable struggle.