* * *: A Novel

by Michael Brodsky

At its most basic level, *** is a detective story. Stu Pott, the naive and sentimental hero, ends up (thanks to the collusion of a jealous wife, a rapacious mistress and a horde of snakily ambitious hangers-on) unjustly accused of the murder of his master, towering captain of industry and maker of ***.
But the book reveals itself to be much more than a detective story, and much more than a sly critique of capitalist society - although it is those things as well. This novel is "after far bigger game than the identity of some culprit," as Brodsky says. A triumph of post-modern literature, *** is both baroque and machine-like in its precise use of language, an intricate dissection of the nature and process of the story, and storytelling, itself.
By turns witty, despairing, and profound in a way no other living writer can match - "one of the most important writers working today" (Library Journal) - Michael Brodsky, with an ever-expanding body of work, is justly referred to as shouldering fully in his turn the burden of fearless exploration assumed by Kafka, by Joyce, and by Beckett.

350 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1994

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

Insistent comparisons to Beckett alas will not elevate this violently logorrhoeic, stylishly vacuous postmodernist-from-hell in his frenzied leap towards quasi-coherence. Dreadful.

[Nate D · Rating 1 out of 5]

This, unfortunately, is pretty terrible. I spent about a week and 120 pages grappling with it out of sheer refusal to be defeated, to the point where the sludgily cumbersome sentence structure, abstractly coded themes, and absurdly arcane vocabulary started to make some kind of sense, yet they never began to feel at all rewarding or purposeful. I get, from one of the explanatory sections interpolated into the "plot", that Brodsky is primarily interested in delivering "Thought Packets", and that the greater the dissonance between packet and placement in plot, the more strongly the reader will be enlisted to grapple with and interpret the concepts there-in. From this I may infer that awkward form and hopelessly obscure vocab (used over and over -- three appearances of "handsel" in the first 50 pages?!) are actually designed to create this dissonance and meaning as well.

But what kind of meaning? Mostly confused philosophic discourse modeled by a never-explained industrial process which seems to entail different things each time it's brought up, and occasionally to self contradict. Brodsky seems to be muttering to himself in circles, about the relationship of abstractions to abstractions with very little for the unacquainted reader to gain purchase on. Sophomoric intercuts seemingly designed to to deintellectualize don't really accomplish much of anything.

Here, let's look at a random annoying sentence:

But she had no choice but to stick to her guns, for what was his mumbling and grumbling but an overwhelming demand that she stick to his, come over to his roaring camp, even if he was never in any one camp for very long, even if he had made it perfectly clear that he was not in the proselytizing way and never would be, wished merely to fart his wad over the burning breakfast eggs for whatever time still remained to his allotted carcass before being once more obliged to mount the subway charger, and taking the usual cursory note of legless cripples posted breathless against the peeling crumbling stanchions, storm the office precincts even if not so strictly speaking not an office, not in the least an office, at least as that acceptation could favorably be applied to the plaster in the exalted Hinkle-Winkle-variant's work abode.

Honestly, all I'm really getting out of this are a few great words (reading with a dictionary, which I never do). Not that I think Brodsky's word choice is at all justifiable or elegant, but dissociated from the text, some of these seem worth knowing. And "searching ambries and orlops" is a pretty wonderful turn of phrase. If only it wasn't one of the only worthwhile bits in the full 120 pages.