WIND TUNNELS OF WORK AND FAMILY
The Better Face of Fascism. bibles. Expat Press, 2018. 192 pages.
Fatherhood is a test. The strain of being a good husband and father has undone many men, and the proof of the undoing is sometimes obvious, sometimes not. People unravel under domestic and work pressures for everyone else to see—but sometimes the unraveling is an inner one, known only to the hidden counsel locked away in the mind of the man. I don’t know enough about any place other than America to say that this maintenance of surfaces isn’t solely an American phenomenon. But the narrator of the apparently autobiographical novel The Better Face of Fascism, by the pseudonymous writer named bibles (the lowercase form is kept throughout the book and external to it too), definitely comes across as an American creation, very relatable to his countrymen in certain ways, and very alien in other ways which still manage to retain their nationhood.
The novel is about a man named bibles, living in Salt Lake City, Utah, whose wife Musette is expecting a baby. The course of the story follows the roughly nine month gestation of the fetus and the lives of the expectant couple. bibles works at a used bookstore, ferries Musette to and from doctor’s appointments, feeds her, manages family obligations with his parents and in-laws, and in all ways seems to do his duty as a family man soon to be plunged into parenthood. bibles also experiences fear. The fear he experiences has an apparent warping effect on him which is registered in the texture of the writing in the 192-page novel.
The most clear feature of the 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 meal bibles and Musette ate, every wrinkle of office politics at his job at the bookstore, and the fearless spelunking of every interior thought he 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. Comparisons with other writers are the critic’s lazy shorthand, but if I were pressed I would say that, among other writers, bibles resembles James Joyce and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Joyce because he plays with language and bits of fragmented consciousness, Céline because he does so too, with an uncomfortable frankness and disregard for polite society.
bibles indeed writes with a acerbic honesty about his inward life that might scorch the retinas of the reader unprepared for it. If you are easily shocked and put off by writers confessing unpleasant truths about themselves—telling on themselves—this book is not for you. It has a zest for frank sexual revelations and churning, full-on fantasies that might rival or surpass Philip Roth’s. It’s a very funny book in places, but more present than the humor is the stark realization that you are reading the unguarded thoughts of a horny, dissatisfied young man staring down the barrel of family life as he has never known it before. Objects of his lust, including other family members, come in and out of his view like ducks at a shooting range. The protagonist describes the tightrope act of the husband’s masturbation sessions—sifting through a voluminous spank-bank as well as opening numerous screens of camgirls, pornography, sex scenes from TV shows, hilariously trying to time his orgasms so they don’t occur while leading men are on the screen—so well that he deserves a literary award.
He deserves a lot of awards. In fact, one of the major motivations of the narrator bibles is his writing. There is the sense at times that, in addition to copious worries about the health of his unborn child, his own health, Musette’s health, he 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?
Hard to put into words is the effect of this blend of minute, diaristic notation of the external moment (Musette’s weights, ultrasounds, meals, fixations on people’s moles, phone calls) and vast expanses of the otherworldly internal life of the mind scaring itself, comforting itself, making itself laugh, grossing itself out, all with the awareness that it will all come out in the wash and be the gut-wrenching raw material for an as-yet unknown audience of future readers.
I was reading bibles a lot back when he was emailing that writing out in a newsletter. I admire the way / the style he wrote them in, too -- it reads like he would just sit down, start improvising / being honest, write from beginning to end (listening from one word to the next, as sounds and words accumulated), then hit send