{"id":59,"date":"2003-09-10T09:59:50","date_gmt":"2003-09-10T13:59:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vmalt\/?p=59"},"modified":"2005-12-04T10:10:24","modified_gmt":"2005-12-04T15:10:24","slug":"first-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/first-review","title":{"rendered":"First Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forever Bummer
Paul West’s Novel Blends 9-11, Philosophy, and Nigella
by Ed Park
Village Voice<\/em>
September 10 – 16, 2003<\/p>\n

The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9.11<\/em>
By Paul West
Voyant, 231 pp., $23 <\/p>\n

What would a proper novelistic response be to the attacks of 9-11? If everyone knows the central story, what stories can be told? A writer I know said that 9-11 shut down her capacity for fiction. Months later, she drafted a dozen pages in pursuit of what seemed to be both a narratively compelling and brokenhearted take on the tragedy, before realizing she was rewriting Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair<\/em>. <\/p>\n

Most novelists are still tuning out the 9-11 frequency, with some exceptions: The father of the protagonist in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition<\/em> went missing on 9-11; the murderer in Lawrence Block’s Small Town<\/em> loses his daughter in the attacks, and his wife commits suicide in grief. In Paul West’s 23rd book of fiction, The Immensity of the Here and Now<\/em>, the aftereffects of that day gradually come into view, then withdraw into a jungle of memory and hallucination\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u0153the tragedy perpetually accessible and elusive, too easy and too impossible to imagine. West’s complex narrative voice relates the story of friends Shrop and Quent, amnesiac patient and paraplegic shrink, former Cambridge philosopher and ex-military man\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u0153a Beckettian dyad that splits the ravages of mind and body. With nods to cultural figures from Plato to Nigella Lawson (perhaps her first fictional immortalization), and sentences that interrogate their own structure, Immensity’s generous helping of culture and language also exposes their inadequacy. <\/p>\n

If the pair’s minutely rendered mental lives don’t always fascinate, at least West realizes failure as a theme. Shrop circles about his “lost philosophy,” throws (or imagines) a party for long-lost pals with names like “Lomar Antecedent,” and comes to recognize Oulipian Raymond Queneau’s formulation as his new and necessary creed: “How does one live in an absurd world? Absurdly<\/em>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forever BummerPaul West’s Novel Blends 9-11, Philosophy, and Nigellaby Ed ParkVillage VoiceSeptember 10 – 16, 2003 The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9.11By Paul West Voyant, 231 pp., $23 What would a proper novelistic response be to the attacks of 9-11? If everyone knows the central story, what stories can be … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “First Review”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-X","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/id-order-the-fish","url_meta":{"origin":59,"position":0},"title":"I’d Order the Fish","author":"Gil","date":"February 15, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Feb 10: Traveling to Phoenix for a pharmaceutical conference (day job). Off my head right now, mainly from not getting enough sleep (the result of a double-OT finish to the NBA All-Star Game last night, and my compulsion to finish reading Gould's Book of Fish before this trip. It bears\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 1 comment","block_context":{"text":"With 1 comment","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/id-order-the-fish#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":141,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/thanks","url_meta":{"origin":59,"position":1},"title":"Thanks!","author":"Gil","date":"February 24, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Record traffic for Virtual Memories this month (and there's still a few days left, plus it's a short month)!Now if only more of you would buy The Immensity of the Here and Now, that novel about 9.11 by Paul West that I published last fall.Last week, I mentioned that I\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":514,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/to-the-editor","url_meta":{"origin":59,"position":2},"title":"To the editor","author":"Gil","date":"March 7, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"On March 7, the New York Times published an article entitled, \"Literary Novelists Address 9\/11, Finally\", on the occasion of several new novels about the attacks and their aftermath.Unfortunately, your writer seems not to have researched this matter well enough. In September 2003, I published Paul West's novel, \"The Immensity\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":363,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/you-too","url_meta":{"origin":59,"position":3},"title":"You, Too","author":"Gil","date":"September 11, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"I spent the first anniversary of Sept. 11 walking around NYC with my girlfriend at the time, taking pictures, listening to the wind, and helping her get an \"I Love NYC\" tattoo on the back of her neck. Here's a link to the editorials I wrote for my magazine on\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3884,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/primate-rage","url_meta":{"origin":59,"position":4},"title":"Primate Rage","author":"Gil","date":"May 1, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Chimp attacks = page views. (But what about robot attacks?)","rel":"","context":"In "Apes"","block_context":{"text":"Apes","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/apes"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3558,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/david-0-fer-wallace","url_meta":{"origin":59,"position":5},"title":"David 0-fer Wallace?","author":"Gil","date":"March 4, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"It's time for this week's literary 0-fer! After laughing hysterically at the trailer for his biopic a week or so back, I realized that I've never read anything by . . . Truman Capote! (Why did I find the trailer so funny? 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