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Reviews
Reviews for Charlie P.
Electronic Book Review
Of the Cliché
and the Everyday, March 2006
Reviewed by Christopher
Leise
RAIN TAXI
Spring 2006
Reviewed by Scott
Bryan Wilson
REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY
FICTION
Spring Issue, March
2006
Reviewed by Echard
Gerdes
BOOKFORUM
February/March 2006
Volume 12, Issue 5
Reviewed by Brian
Evenson
American Book Review / Stacey Levine
Reviewed by Stacey
Levine
Electronic Book Review
Of the Cliché
and the Everyday, March 2006
Reviewed by Christopher
Leise
In the October 2005 issue of Harper’s Magazine,
the up-and-coming Ben Marcus set the (“experimental”)
fiction world atwitter with his ferocious and funny rejoinder
to Jonathan Franzen’s 2002 article, “Mr. Difficult.”
Marcus’s examination of the earlier Franzen piece
is intriguing for many of its qualities, not the least
of which is that it speaks to what was something of a
theme for the issue: return. An equally fascinating piece,
right at the front of the issue, also reflects upon an
earlier essay. In “On Message,” Lewis H. Lapham
invokes Umberto Eco’s 1995 “Ur-Fascism”
to warn us against the potential danger of reducing certain
facets of language to idiom. “[I]t’s a mistake
to translate fascism into literary speech,” Lapham,
citing Eco, warns. “By retrieving from our historical
memory only the vivid and familiar images of fascist tyranny
(Gestapo firing squads, Soviet labor camps, the chimneys
at Treblinka), we lose sight of the faith-based initiatives
that sustained the tyrant’s rise to glory.”
(Lapham 7)
Certain skeptics, and maybe Lapham himself, would be unsurprised
that “On Message” garnered far less attention
than the more dramatically titled “How experimental
fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen,
and life as we know it: A Correction;” after all,
Lapham himself notes that, presently “[t]he author
on the platform or on the beach towel can be relied upon
to direct his angriest invective at the other members
of the academy who failed to drape around the title of
his latest book the garland of a rave review” (Lapham
9) rather than protest what he sees as the decline of
American democracy into a fascist regime.
Indeed, Lapham strikes the mark with his broader point,
borrowed from Eco: language can, and often does, serve
a pointed, historical purpose. To resurface that language
with the patina of the cliché can imperil the astuteness
with which we view our present. By relying on caricatures
that are absolutely, clearly “not us,” Americans
can easily overlook some disturbing similarities that
the American government shares with the actual, rather
than an idiomatic hyperbole of the fascist praxis of government.
But we ought not overlook the debates being played out
in the literary sphere as mere disagreements on beach
towels over the relative superiority of vintages –
to do so would countermand the very exercise Lapham’s
article enjoins the public to undertake. As “On
Message” suggests, we must continue to interrogate
the manner in which our language is employed, to question
the very nature of the way our world is represented or
dangerously mis represented. Lapham reminds us that cliché
is more than a shorthand within communities: it essentializes,
it “universalizes,” and very often it fails
us at moments of greatest urgency. Such a concern strikes
at the very heart of Richard Kalich’s Charlie P.
Rather than tackle the clichéd task of writing
a Magnum Opus or a Masterpiece, Kalich’s second
novel makes of itself something not lesser, but other.
Charlie P is an effort at a Subject-piece, as much interested
in the idea of the novel as it is a novel of ideas, exposing
how a man is made of stories and only self-made inasmuch
as he is able to control the process of narrating his
own existence; it is the story of postmodern megalomania.
Aware that there is not one, but there are infinite contemporary
worlds, the title character – or, more accurately,
caricature – sequesters himself to a rocking-chair
in an apartment, content to control the language that
produces his own world(s) by excluding the destabilizing
force of voices beyond his own. Hence, to Charlie P, contradiction
is not a challenge to understanding but the rule; the
ultimate activity is a refusal to participate; denial
is the most creative act.
Far from an endorsement of this type of removal, the story
of Charlie P is the story of our quotidian, unthinking
relationship to language. In the unfolding of this active
disengagement, Kalich attempts to write an essay on cliché
itself. Constantly employing the idiomatic – often
in lists that recall the work of Gilbert Sorrentino –
the novel highlights the vitality of language by assaulting
us with atrophied conventions:
Charlie P. has spent many long years pursuing the woman
of his dreams. Indefatigably he’s traversed the
globe, caught a slow boat to China, sailed the seven seas;
even built his own space capsule and journeyed to the
outer reaches. Still, despite his considerable efforts,
the perfect woman continues to elude him. (32)
Familiar to the point of vacuity, the reflexive language
in Charlie P illustrates the emptying out of experience
through our own inability to narrate the new. Charlie
P is himself no exception. Though his world does accommodate
the possibility for creating new (if logically untenable)
truths, these truths are only ever the product of recycled
accounts of ‘experiences,’ couched in the
brittle diction of stale platitudes. The fact that these
events are the product of fantasy only serves as further
evidence toward the indictment of conventional language
and conventional narrative forms as the greatest contributors
to the homogeneity both of meaning and, ultimately, American
life. After all, Charlie P’s fantasy life is played
out, by and large, in the fields of stereotype and egotistical
projection.
In a way, Kalich’s project functions as a development
of early twentieth-century novels such as Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio or Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts.
Like his modernist predecessors, Kalich shirks the florid
for concision, and builds a space that is, in large part,
aesthetically consistent. As in Winesburg, Charlie P is
a novel in a series of more or less discrete narratives
that compose its whole. While Anderson attempts to extricate
the universal from particulars - linking swollen knuckles
to twisted apples that bear a unique sweetness to those
able to look beyond the superficial, for instance - and
creates a totality out of the fragmentary, Kalich takes
to task the kinds of maxims which presuppose that universals
can bind the particular into an essential human understanding.
Undoing the work of stories recently told, or simply retelling
the same events repeatedly, though differing in detail,
he constantly subverts the reader’s compulsion to
create narrative consistency by contradicting previously
given details. And unlike Anderson and West, Charlie P’s
language is not the medium through which he transcends
the self into a relationship with the larger community
- Charlie P feels subject to the tyranny of the communal
unless he is able to seal himself off from it and compose
his own subjectivity in his own (narrative) image. Because
of this self-styled representation, Charlie P is much
like his library of books never read, his own novel which
is never written; he is a fiction, even in the world of
the fictive.
By adding to and altering details within a single narrative
framework, Kalich in fact strips away the façade
of his story to expose the basic assumptions that make
what is generally agreed to be a novel. What Kalich shows
is that these assumptions, themselves, remain mostly unidentified.
Charlie P himself is barely a character, and the oft-appearing
Bulgarian Harpist even less: her very existence outside
Charlie’s imagination is questionable. Yet we are
told a great deal about them. There is little that resembles
a plot, nor is there the kinds of tensions elicited by
the more “conventional” novel. Yet there is
still a world, consistent in its inconsistency, and in
that world a life, however unlived. In effect, Charlie
P simultaneously asks how little is too little, and how
much is too much, to create a coherent, believable narrative.
Charlie P is a carefully wrought novel with a deft sense
of humor and a strong awareness of its place in literary
discourse. With each answer it prompts new questions;
with each added detail, it destabilizes certainty. For
all that, readers must have temerity, curiosity, and the
ability to build on constantly shifting ground –
or a willingness to subject themselves to the elements
of the indeterminate and the multiple.
Though it is widely agreed that Emerson was right when
claiming that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
of little minds,” the thoughtful and creative manipulation
of a sustained consistency can be a challenge to the vastest
and deepest of intellects. Richard Kalich is able to effect
this type of consistency throughout the whole of Charlie
P: an accomplishment to be admired.
RAIN TAXI
Spring 2006
Reviewed by Scott Bryan
Wilson
Sex addict, star athlete, scholar, lecturer, hopeless
romantic, world traveler, prolific novelist, dreamer,
lazy bum: the eponymous hero of Richard Kalich's high-octane
comic novel is an ageless perpetual optimist whose extreme
indecisiveness is the key to his immortality. As a boy,
saddened by his father's death, Charlie P decides that
by refusing to live his life he can grant himself eternal
life. Realistically, however, he does plenty of living.
He's cartoonishly hyperbolic in the most extraordinary
sense: his superman feats and a semi-lack of chapter-to-chapter
continuity make him an everyman more Bugs Bunny than Mr.
Pickwick, as he doggedly pursues the love of a Bulgarian
harpist much younger than he, searches frantically for
his lost penis, chops down forests with one blow of his
axe, and concocts increasingly mammoth excuses to avoid
the pain of rejection.
Kalich's fine prose is the perfect mirror for Charlie
P's varying mindsets: it swells with atmosphere and romance
when Charlie goes on a first date; reduces to a clipped
monotone when Charlie desperately searches his home for
himself; and employs "big words" when the narrator
attempts to explain Charlie's unreal actions and state
of mind. Appropriately, many of Charlie P's thoughts,
attitudes, and opinions can be reduced to bumper-sticker
zingers or phrases seen on ironic t-shirts, as this often
seems to be the depth of his thoughts. Hyperactive lists
detail his accomplishments and actions, as when he woos
the Bulgarian harpist in colossally wallet-busting form;
or when Charlie decides to learn everything there is to
know about women; or when he swears off women and tries
to barricade his home so that "not the faintest scent
of female flesh could seep in, nor, just as importantly,
his own very masculine scent out."
Unlike those of the infamous doofus Svejk, Charlie's utterances
of brilliance and astute insight are not the product of
accident, but rather of acute self-awareness, as when
he realizes that his only regret is that he "had
to live his entire life not by himself, but with himself."
At times like these, when the hyperactivity hits a trough,
we realize that Charlie's cartoonish adventures have all
been a prelude to his moments of shattering clarity. That
many of us attain these same insights without having to
undergo epic trials makes them all the more naked and
cutting.
Like most good comic novelists, Kalich is adept at teetering
on the precipice wherein he might decide to dilute the
fun with the grim, creating that suspense where things
might get really bad at any moment. In CHARLIE
P he has crafted
an extraordinary novel and a memorable hero--a
leader and kin to those afflicted with loneliness and
the inability to get anything done.
REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION
Spring Issue, March 2006
Charlie P by Richard
Kalich
Los Angeles, Green Integer 250 pages #13
One critic recently condemned a novel for being familiar,
as if somehow novels could be unfamiliar. No paragraphs,
no language, Heck no paper or ink or binding. Duchamp's
Urinal, now that's a novel. However, life is familiar.
If only allowed to produce a work that was not familiar,
we would have no literature at all. I would rather that
the familiar be embraced and the novel resonate beyond
itself and intone the spheres of Plato and Beckett. CHARLIE
P by Richard Kalich resonates
with allusions to other works about losers, including
D.H. Lawrences's "Rocking Horse Winner," Gogol's
"The Nose," and Heinrich Mann's "Blue Angel."
The anti-hero of the title is actually a non-hero, for
he does absolutely nothing and is an Everyman who, like
all of us, is afraid to take risks. Charlie P, by taking
none, lives no life at all. He achieves nothing. He thinks
himself a great lover, yet never makes loves. He fancies
himself a great host, yet never invites a guest. He imagines
himself to be a great novelist, yet claims the novel is
dead, which explains why he is merely "a dabbler
in writing fiction." Charlie P is the Everyman ...
a modern day Gordon Comstock, Orwell's famous antihero
from "Keeping Aspidistra Flying." A poet who
never finds the time to write. Under the care of physicians,
doctors he fervently believes in are as incompetent at
medicine as he is at fiction: they attribute a case of
lockjaw to ptomaine poisoning, for example. They are Everylosers,
too. Richard Kalich succeeds in making the story of Everyloser.
And when Charlie P smiles at the end, buried in his coffin
face down, we smile with him because we're fellow losers.
Echard Gerdes,
is the editor of The Journal
of Experimental Fiction and the author of the novel, Cistern
Tawdry
BOOKFORUM
February/March 2006 Volume
12, Issue 5
Reviewed by Brian Evenson
The title character of Richard Kalich’s third novel,
CHARLIE P,
simultaneously has it all and has nothing: "Peckerhead
and Prophet, Pariah and Prodigal son. Charlie P is all
things to all people and nothing to himself." His
personal and public identities sit on opposite ends of
the same seesaw; when one's on the rise, the other's on
its way down.
Kalich's hero seems like a particularly protean version
of John Bunyan's Christian everyman (had he been an atheist).
In the course of just 250 pages, Kalich offers dozens
of picaresque moments: Charlie P plays baseball, decides
to live forever, finds his life empty, feels his life
is full, masters many professions but practices none,
walks around the world in eighty days, strikes out with
women, and throws a party that nobody (including himself)
attends. He also passes away at the page of 218, loses
his penis, dies again but continues living in his apartment
as if nothing had happened, thinks of each fruit or vegetable
he eats as a new woman to be seduced, sleeps in the morgue
because he knows he won’t be disturbed there, and
is mutilated and dismembered.
The story is, obviously, not realistic by any stretch
of the imagination, but it isn't an exercise in absurdity
simply for absurdity's sake. Kalich is engaged throughout
the novel in the difficult task of balancing the realistic
against the fantastic in such a way that the reader is
able to pass back and forth between the two realms with
each maintaining its particular charms. As a result, Charlie
P remains sympathetic and genuine despite the nonsensicality
he swims in. The project meshes well with contemporary
new wave fabulist fiction, such as the work of Shelley
Jackson, Matthew Derby, and Salvador Plascencia (or even
the not-so-new fabulist David Ohle). But while those writers
use the creation of a fantastic milieu to slyly unveil
the idiosyncrasies of our contemporary culture, Kalich
goes for larger prey. He's after what it means to be profoundly
out of step with one’s culture yet still unwilling
to let go of the American dream. And this tension between
dream and reality makes Charlie P a deliciously painful
book.
For Kalich, it's the unimagined life rather than the unexamined
one that isn't worth living. His novel explores the overlap
between an impoverished real life and richly imagined
experience. Charlie P's experiences are nothing if not
vividly and contradictorily concocted. Which is to say
they're really nothing. But at the same time, what's imagination
if not everything?
American Book Review / Stacey Levine
Reviewed by Stacey
Levine
It has been said for millennia that our exterior lives
are mere shadows of what is truly real. Novelist Richard
Kalich explores this idea very originally in his second
novel, CHARLIE P,
published this year by the highly productive Green Integer
Press. Kalich documents the life of an indefatigable everyman
who struggles blithely to find contentment and leave his
mark on the world. Without giving particulars as to geography,
age, relatives, childhood background, education, or the
like, Kalich constructs Charlie P using chapters--or bursts--of
exaggerations and absurd constructions in which Charlie
P either proves himself a man quite hyperbolically, or
experiences defeat in some drastic form.
The character is an iconographic blank, described as “all
things to all people and nothing to himself.” (7)
He is also described as a man who (perhaps toward some
purported existential rebellion) is quite unable to complete
a task, because that appears to him to be some kind of
submission or defeat. In this way, Kalich conveys a painful
sadness: Charlie P suffers from an inability to engage
with life or complete his goals because, in the character’s
perversion, he sees that act as “giving in.”
Not that this narrative isn’t crazily hilarious.
At the book’s beginning, Kalich conjures Charlie
P in the imagery of a 1970s-era swingin’ bachelor
man: a misogynist due to his fear of women, yet equipped,
perhaps, with a swank apartment and blacklights, mirrors,
and a wet bar to impress the babes. As the tale progresses,
Charlie P’s thousandfold sexual conquests are stacked
up alongside his trepidation and inaction, his impossible
professional accomplishments - among them solving all
global economic problems and becoming a religious messiah.
Added to these items are Charlie P’s numerous physical
mutilations, such as being disemboweled or losing his
penis or, one day, having every bone in his body shattered.
From all these episodes Charlie P routinely returns to
the narrative apparently unabashed, ready to move ahead
in the next chapter of life, where he is alternately “popular
with the ladies” and alone and enfeebled. At one
point, when Charlie P wants to know which woman really
loves him, sex aside, and would break down barriers to
reach him, he “corked his bathroom walls. Insulated
his entire apartment with three-inch fiberglass. Then
he got serious, building towering turrets and spires,
moats and drawbridges, ramparts and walls. He even laid
down landmines, barbed wire fences, set up machine gun
towers; a nuclear missile site. Having made his home into
a fortress, if not a castle, he began working on himself.
First, opening the windows to air the rooms out, then
hermetically sealing them shut so that not the faintest
scent of female flesh could seep in, or, just as importantly,
his own very masculine scent out. Next, after plugging
his nose and stuffing his ears with wads of cotton, he
turned down the Venetian blinds and blindfolded himself.
He even had a doctor friend anaesthetize him.” (79)
In addition to being funny, nutty, and playful, the book
is a complex narrative about human self-esteem and the
human sense of self in general. Kalich’s kooky,
contradictory biographical map of Charlie P’s elaborate
machinations in the world, his bizarre, colossal failures
(which are described as inevitable), and his conviction
he must never even begin his life are correlates to the
natural narcissistic struggles that most of us feel at
a low level nearly every day. Human life’s endless
ups and downs of loneliness, sensations of threat, violations,
and pleasures are described in Charlie P’s eyes
in an incredibly jumbled way, almost suggesting a developmental
point of view. Charlie P’s journey is like an index
of adult experience encoded via a childlike/confused prelinguistic
stance. He accomplishes everything; he accomplishes nothing;
his sexual addiction causes him to bed hundreds of women
daily; he consequently is intimate with no one. Like a
clueless tuning fork attracting the world’s chaos,
Charlie P’s experiences are too intense:
“Before calling it a day Charlie P goes out for
his evening jog. In the midst of his run, he stops to
intervene in what appears to be a friendly argument between
two old friends. Instead of thank you’s, a night
cap or coffee and cake, he gets mugged, robbed, pummeled
and beaten; face bloody, reeling, comatose and in a stupor,
he returns home for a quiet evening by himself watching
TV... just went he’s comfortably snug under the
covers, and picks up his TV Guide to see what’s
on, his glasses have disappeared. By the time he finds
them his movie has ended, and he’s on his way to
the bathroom, this time taking especial care not to stub
his toe or hit his head on the sink. But - and there’s
always a but - he trips over his feet, slips on a bar
of soap, and falling down in the bathtub, he breaks his
left hip and right arm. ‘Should have known better,’
says Charlie P.” (170)
With his continuous comic exaggeration, Kalich is able
to describe, highly uniquely, the overwhelming, vertiginous,
risky sensation of being alive - the very thing we seek
and fear.
The outcome of this primordial scenario is decidedly uncheery.
Charlie P, in the end, is self-hating, regretful that
he “has to live his entire life not by himself,
but with himself.” He is, somehow, a horrendous
nothing - despite being a world famous writer, a stunning
politician, a collector of women, an English Channel swimmer,
and a serious mountain climber. He is alone and the picture
of self-hatred: ...“it is just those women who have
scaled the heights who will never stoop low enough to
be with him.” (71)
This is a really intriguing and familiar psychic landscape.
Kalich successfully reproduces the sensation of existential
indecision and doubt in all its intensity. He also creates
a sweeping, near-mythic description of the self-dislike
that many people, unfortunately, absorb during childhood.
Most of all, he employs Charlie P to illustrate the exhausting
and often cruel experience of consciousness that lies
behind the façade of exterior, everyday life.
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