Kaleidoscopic Narrative

If there is any justice in the literary universe, Andy Valentine’s debut novella, The Apoptotic Era, will become the sort of slender, dog-eared volume that ends up being passed knowingly from friend to friend, with a wink and a nod, and should the recipient dare to ask, “But what’s it about?” the answer will always be: “Just read it.” It’s that good.

I’ll confess, I’ve known Andy for quite a while — we worked together on this newspaper, and founded a writers group together — and he’s one of the best writers I know, but even his considerable talents could not have prepared me for this book. The Apoptotic Era somehow transcends its own minimalism, achieving a vibrancy, a significance, that is at once sublime and grotesque, heady and mystical, and entirely mesmerizing.

So, yes, what is it about? Outwardly, the book details the dark, subterranean history of an obscure academic text about auto-cannibalization — you know, like eating your own hand — from its complicated publication to its immediate reception in the world and beyond.

Upon its release, the book is mostly reviled and repudiated, though it does find life as a cultish object burrowing its way into a series of bizarre and interwoven plot lines that span the globe.

Moving forward and back in time, Valentine deftly constructs his kaleidoscopic narrative, shuffling personal histories and political undercurrents in such a manner that the overall effect feels vaguely apocalyptic, uncomfortably futuristic, damningly now. The results are mesmerizing, confounding, hilarious and often deeply moving — a kind of giddy Swiftian satire blending magical realism with a gritty, vulgar naturalism to produce a literary artifact that cuts to the heart of our modern malaise, in which it appears that we are determined to, you’ll pardon the pun, eat ourselves alive.

Comparisons abound — Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia comes to mind, as do the literary works of J.G. Ballard, Pynchon, Kafka and certainly the surreal genius of Borges — but these only tangentially capture the totality of what Valentine accomplishes in The Apoptotic Era.

It’s as though he’s invented a genre unto itself, and it works beautifully. The writing is exquisite, and the vernacular he conjures for this strange speculative history — a mash-up of high and low, analytic and slapstick, thriller and dystopian shout — is perfectly calibrated to the madness of our times. It all goes down so easily, a cocktail of funny-not-funny and not-funny funny, with a dose of bemused absurdity on top.

The Apoptotic Era, Thirty West, $14.99 find it locally at Hodgepodge Books and Taproom and Black Sun Books. Rick Levin is Eugene Weekly’s books columnist, reach him at Books@EugeneWeekly.com.

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