Journals From the Time of the Radar Dog

by Pat Lawrence

Fiction. These are the collected journals of my friend, Vincent Pantaglia, from a period late in his life. During this time he was furiously documenting his daily activities with the hope of using the material to someday write a novel. When he was unable to finish the journals or to realize his dream of re-working their stories and characters into a fiction, I took the notebooks into my possession for safekeeping after having received them from his family, and out of nostalgia, I suppose.

318 pages, Paperback

First published February 29, 2008

Reviews

[Kane Faucher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Epistolary or "lost journals" fiction can be the scene of mixed fortunes for both reader and writer, depending on how it is packaged. While some examples err too far on the side of being "postmodern" for mere postmodernity's sake, belching its stale jargon from behind the narrative, other examples become too readily lost in a wilderness of diary-esque indulgence with a relevance that falls flat. Not so in the most recent book by Pat Lawrence, Journals From the Time of the Radar Dog. While comfortably playful in constructing a kind of Borgesian metafiction, Lawrence succeeds in conjuring up a kind of textual sonata with its welcome host of footnotes and appendices that broker a peace between a work of fiction and a critical edition of a long lost collection of difficult to decipher works.
One of the features that Lawrence is cognizant of in his work is the inherent difficulty in amassing a coherent work of "lost journals" - to decrypt the scrawled and feverish writing of a now posthumous contemporary, and the struggle with presentation by means of proper collation. There is a double-edged ethical consideration in publishing the hitherto unpublished notes of a bygone author: to show the delicate care in withholding certain fragments that may result in maligning the author, and yet abiding by that demanding scholarly necessity of leaving no writing hidden in the event that it would further embroider upon our knowledge of an author's life and thought. To publish or not to publish becomes a question of responsibility, either to the author or to the audience's desire for all the minutiae of that author's life. It makes no difference that the journals were written by a fictional character by the name of Vincent, but rather that this question resonates in the real. One need only take a brief historical sojourn to the early 1900s when Friedrich Nietzsche's anti-Semitic sister presented a distorted view of her deceased brother's work according to her own ideological bias. So condemning was her control over her late brother's writing estate that at least two generations held to the flagrant misrepresentation of Nietzsche's thought that he was a proto-Nazi. Only in subsequent reprintings during the Nietzsche revival of the 1950s and 60s was his work unveiled by serious consideration rather than to purchase wholesale the reactive prejudices of those who refused to engage the work with critical attention.
Another problem Lawrence highlights is the order of significance, and to make those shrewd choices as to what writing has profound or hidden merit, and what is merely irrelevant rambling. In a long running footnote, Lawrence the fictional editor of the journals, considers the importance of a series of mostly blank pages in one of the journals spotted in places by a few snatches of illegible writing. It is here that the editor begins to truly seed the journals with his own narrative, effectively constructing another layer of narrative metatext. His involvement is already marked in the editorial note which grants the reader a backstory as to Lawrence's strained friendship with Vincent, all of which summons up the question of just how objective can the representation of Vincent actually be.
Vincent Pantaglia's journals are not aphoristic, but they have a cohesive narrative quality that occasionally lapses into that kind of journalistic meandering that redresses itself back into the linear demands for plot. Vincent's prose is characteristically journalistic in the sense that even the most private notes and diaries are secretly always written with an Other in mind as a possible audience.
Lawrence is no stranger to mixing experimental tendencies with straightforward and earnest prose. His debut novel, Bedford, seems to have enfolded within it the seeds of dynamic prose invention and bristling voice that manifests itself with more force in the Journals, and so readers of Lawrence are able to trace that palpable pulse of authorial development, although the Journals remains a significant departure. Vincent's frantic jotting is populated heavily with occasionally loquacious sentiments juxtaposed against intentionally ugly phrase pairings, and so Lawrence has us convinced that Vincent has one foot in a fictional realm and in the everydayness of frank exposition.

[Neil]

See, I already read this book. But that was ages ago, before Mr. Lawrence changed it up. So now I have to read it again. I feel this is dubious of Pat to have done.

[Ben Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great writing style, use of language and character development. The only downside is that the antagonists tend to be one-dimensional.

[Fernanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is how the world looks to a junkie. This is how he explains himself to himself. The language, the pace, the twist in Vincent's story are good.