Deeply Enmurking
The History of Luminous Motion by Scott Bradfield
Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey by Daniel Mueller
Both of these books might be considered grotesque, dark, disturbing, weird, whatever. Both work on sort of Lynchian levels of nightmare-dark aspects stuffed into the middle of otherwise banal daily life. Both books are excellent, yet I want to be clear: I am by temperament a softie, and I like nice things, happy things: I grew up on the Beach Boys, and much as I love Wallace his darkest stuff makes me anxious and sad and mildly scared, and one of the big reasons I so love Richard Powers is because his stuff’s almost always so ultimately uplifting, so let’s-keep-going. There are plenty more examples, but I want to bring all of that stuff up simply to say that in the two days I read both of these books, reading 50 pages of one, then 50 pages of another, I felt…gross. Dark. I found myself in a weird, flummoxed mood. I haven’t smoked in years now, but both of these books made me feel like I’d been smoking for days.
Maybe History first: re-issued by the everfantastic Calamari Press, Scott Bradfield’s debut novel was released in 1989 and the two reviews easiest to find online, from the LA Times and the NYTimes, are interestingly divided on the book—read both. They’re good fun. Also, read both for the basic plot stuff in the book—which is interesting enough but is not, ultimately, what History feels *about* in any real way, at least to this reader.
Phillip, History’s central character and narrator, is, sure, maybe a stretch for an 8 year-old—too articulate, whatever. But the thing about the book that made it so compelling to me, and why it was something powerful enough to interrupt and fuck with my emotional life over the days I read it, is that, like the best books, it strips away the cultural experiences which we ultimately use as condiments on our own lives. There’s some infinitely large number of books which try to (or are hyped because they) examine and lay bare the harrowing nature of childhood or some such. You’ve read examples of such books, no doubt.
But Bradfield’s History makes the experience of childhood—which includes the experience of literally bulilding a model or context by and through which to understand the world—as terrifying as it really is. Is Phillip a troubled, troubling kid—moreso than you or most folks you know/knew? Certainly. But the specifics of his experience don’t change the fact that the book’s examination of light/energy vs. matter/mass is, for all of us, something we’ve got to work through, in some way or another. Maybe you don’t think about this stuff. Maybe you shouldn’t. But Phillip does: his mom’s all light and energy, his dad’s all mass and inertia, and he’s trying to literally figure out the world between those two polarities directly, overtly—like, guy’s literally trying to understand how to slot the experience of each, how to value and evaluate each.
Maybe that’s why, ultimately, the book’s so devastating. The books/music/movies that end up destabilizing me, in good and bad ways, are those which ask/invite me to consider that the things I’ve worked through to a satisfiable level of certainty may in fact be wrong: maybe I’m wrong in how I have constructed a framework to understand reality. Even if History doesn’t change such notions, it forces you to contend again with those forces, forces you to recall the hugely significant stuff that helped you build your own awareness of How Life Works. Let me put it this way: it’s not remotely coincidental that religions rely on patterns for prayer: there’s mass, or synagogue, or whatever. There are these things, these agreed-upon, structured acts through which we operate our faith. I’d argue that the big reason for such structural stuff’s that contending with the infinite, with the deepest issues of spirituality, is destabilizing, and if we had to do it anew, each week, we’d barely be up for the task. Most of the big things are like this—love, death, etc. Childhood’s a darker realm, murkier, harder. Bradfield’s mapping it here. It’s a hard read—hard in what it asks the reader to deal with and do—but compelling as hell. You probably should be trying it.
Mueller’s Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey (by the badass Outpost19) is not quite as dark or bracing or demanding as Bradfield’s History (thankfully: one can only read so many rethink-everything books before just flipping on House Hunters), but it’s sneaky in ways History is not. This sneakiness manifests as follows: most of the stories in Nights are, roughly enough, about people (largely boys and men) trying to find their place in the world, trying to find where they fit. One may fairly/safely expect, therefore, for the stories to be animated by notions of desire, but a trick of desire is that articulating desire depends to a degree on awareness, specifically self-awareness. Mueller’s characters are folks of various clenchings, seemingly unable to be clear regarding what’s in them, at any depth. The murk of the thing’s tidal, or at least it was to me.
And yet such confusion is generative, in dark ways. There’s got to be a better word for what these characters are—they’re not really confused, nor are they ignorant; it’s more overwhelming: it’s that they’ve got things in them they won’t or can’t look at, and those things they won’t/can’t look at are [of course] massively important aspects regarding how crucial decisions are made. Think of it like this: if you’re somehow confronted by two very angry people, one of whom loves Lik-M-Aid and Coke Zero, the other of whom seems to have no clear weather pattern regarding desires, most of us would choose to be confronted by the angry person who also has some clarity regarding desires and wants. That’s life. But in these stories, such lack of clarity’s hugely generative: we read to the end of each of these stories, basically discovering if life is satisfying to these characters while they’re processing the same. It’s a heady way to read—again, it murked me, and left me feeling deeply weird—but there’s zero argument against the power of these stories.
