ON EDITING AND CRAFT

an essay in contrasts

ON EDITING AND CRAFT

an essay contrasting bibles’ The Better Face of Fascism and Jon Lindsey’s Body High

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I read two books back to back which have determined some of my critical thinking about current books in this limited sea of writers I’m floating in (as opposed to the Atlantic or Pacific where the “real major writers” swim). The two books were The Better Face of Fascism by bibles and Body High by Jon Lindsey. I liked both of them. I enjoyed the experience. But only one of those books seemed to really hit me with the force of reality that concerned and scared me. One of those books was raw, and the other was cooked, and without knowing much of the background I think this rawness or cookedness, the processes that the books went through in order to come to publication, had to do with editing. Editing is an invisible ritual, unseen by the reader yet which leaves traces that a reader can move their eyes over and feel the bumps or the smoothness as it were. Editing is not English composition but philosophy, metaphysics, even theology in a way.

I have at times been gripped with the urge to write a long essayistic piece about the man known pseudonymously as bibles and his theories. I’ve only read his novel Better Faces of Fascism and listened to episodes of the podcast Alt Write where he sometimes expounds on his ideas bordering on mysticism about composition and editing and what a writer “does.” A substantial work could be extracted from that, but am I willing or able to go out onto the oil-drilling platform for the amount of time it will take to get those resources out of the ground? I am far from decocting something theoretical from these sources, and the subject eludes me as does the writer himself who seems, at least to the idiotic staring eyes of the twitter masses, to have receded from public view.

I read bibles’ novel right before I read Lindsey’s and those two novels’ styles and subjects, the performance of them, clashed in my head and signaled a qualitative difference I want to explore. I did not read bibles’ novel right when it came out; I was a late-comer to ExPat Press’ output. I had a lot to learn (still do) about the editorial vision of ExPat Press and Manuel Marrero. There’s so much extraneous to these books, so much that is “extra textual,” that we can’t know. Particularly in the case of a mysterious, reclusive author like bibles. We probably don’t need to know, but interacting with an author’s persona is part of the experience. Somewhere on a ladder of fame these authors climb, mostly striving upwards but sometimes descending, sometimes clinging to the same rung for long stretches of time.

Body High was a well-oiled machine. Its plot was a developed concept far beyond The Better Face of Fascism’s was. The novel is told in a kind of sheen of waking nightmare-in-the-sun that LA fiction is often known for, and realism is sanded off at the edges. The gears of conspiratorial thinking among characters in the book turn speedily, lubricated by drugs and make believe. The behavior and mechanics of the ultimate plot are shocking, the grueling stuff of true crime podcasts designed to titillate you in fifty-minute intervals. I wanted the book to be a fast read, and it seemed to promise that, but the conundrum of Jolene’s failing kidney, and the plunge into the vile caper for winning its replacement, felt like it came on a little too rapidly, even for desperate crank-sniffing lowlifes. Nevertheless, one speeds to the conclusion: parts of the climax were like a sickening roller coaster ride of crime you want to get off.

The novel’s prose, in comparison with that of other recent novels, is clear and polished, and there is little in the way of snags and pitfalls among the sentences themselves. It is so easy to read. By contrast, The Better Face of Fascism was clearly edited in a different way than Body High was, and Body High is more of a deliberately careful “product” than bibles’ novel is. It’s slicker. Jon Lindsey, whose writing that I’ve read I’ve really liked, comes from a community and tradition of editing that seems to go back to Gordon Lish. He seems to rub elbows with people for whom editing is king. His book appears to have been run through a hopper of craft-consciousness in a way that bibles’ book wasn’t. The Better Face of Fascism is like an accumulation of rough entries of consciousness, unrelenting masses of writing fused together like metal sculpture.  It’s diaristic. I’m told through apocryphal channels that his composition technique was to write sections of the book on Telegram and add to it over time until there was enough to aggregate into a book. 

The most clear feature of his novel seems to also be its at times most opaque: it is written in a first person stream of consciousness prose that veers in and out of the boundary of the narrator’s personality. In the sentences recorded here, there is a disarming, teetering balance between the mundanity of describing every external detail of life and the fearless spelunking of every interior thought bibles could unearth, no matter how vividly frank or encoded with personal significance the reader is supposed to catch up with. bibles does not hold your hand and guide you through the phantasmagoria; he pays you the compliment of thinking you could put the puzzle pieces together.

Both novels deal with narrator-characters under pressure but the impending birth in The Better Face of Fascism is a ticking clock more ominous than the failing kidney in Body High—or at least that’s how it came across to me. There is the sense at times that, in addition to copious worries about the health of his unborn child, his own health, his wife’s health, bible’s (let’s face it) autobiographical narrator is fretting about his own dwindling time to write before the bassinet is put in place beside the bed where the new parents will sleep. bibles in the novel often positions himself as a great writer on the cusp of a mighty achievement, a literary reputation bordering on divinity. The struggles of a new father, lurching through the blasting wind tunnels of work and family and remaining heroically upright, are not solely his alone, billions of men have gone on this journey, but how many of those billions have put it into quite these harrowing terms for everyone to read and be both scandalized and blessed by? This pressure of real life, as it manifests in bibles’ novel, feels more real to me than Body High’s perhaps more comic pressure.

I’ve only read a handful of ExPat Press novels but the ones I’ve read seem to share this “rough gem with many facets” ethos. Ruthless Little Things by Elizabeth V. Aldrich, Characters by Derek Maine, and Sent to the Silkworm House by Gwen Hilton have these varying degrees of rawness (I beg the golden thesaurus above for another word) but there is this quality of rough and ready workmanship that I like; the varnish has been applied to wood whose unfinished joinery might still stick you with splinters.

Susan Sontag in her famous essay “Against Interpretation” warns against a mode of criticism where novels, art, etc, are “about things.” We don’t need to know what things mean. That is a crowded battlefield. “Content” is a reviled word these days, sixty years after she wrote that essay—artists in a digitally linked world describe themselves as “providing content” and we shudder, perhaps feeling the sting of a Sontagian whip. And in many ways it’s no good as critics to tip the scales in the other direction and just privilege form for form’s sake. But one area where form may be seen in the novel is in the haunting, the silent wandering of the ghost of editing or non-editing. The joinery still sensible to the reader’s gliding fingertips.

I don’t know anything for sure. I don’t know what prior writers to compare Better Face of Fascism to. There must be many writers who wrote fiction in the form of extremely intimate diaries deep from within the confessional, working-man’s mind. It is the sad effect of having read the wrong books over my life that I cannot trace the analogues and traditions that gave rise to these writers. Haven’t read much Henry Miller. Haven’t read Fante. Haven’t yet read Nathanael West. Have read zero Philip Roth. I got halfway through Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan before giving up (I’m told his other, more famous book is better). I’m on a ladder too, or better an escalator of unread books, going down, and I want to go up, but the pace of the escalator of books is plunging faster than I can climb.