WORDS LILY NÍ DHOMHNAILL
“The Wire written by Voltaire”… “Crime and Punishment as reimagined by the Coen Brothers”… “as if William Blake had rewritten his poems while listening to hip-hop”… “a cross between Moby-Dick and Police Academy… Descartes and Disneyland”. These are just some of the labels critics have given Sergio De La Pava’s debut novel A Naked Singularity. As with any exhilarating new voice, there is a temptation to pin down and classify what we are reading to more easily interpret it. But these comparisons are always made with a certain amount of skepticism because, like these artists before him, De La Pava resists easy definition.
Even the category “new voice” is disputable. De La Pava hasn’t so much exploded onto the writing scene as painstakingly carved his place there, his long publication history a testament to the radical nature of his writing. He finished A Naked Singularity in 2008 only to be rejected by a reputed 88 literary agents. He then published it himself using Xlibris, and began circulating it with the help of his wife and publicist Susanna. Progress was slow until, after four years and a handful of rhapsodic reviews, it was noticed and brought out by Chicago University Press. A year later it was awarded the PEN/Bingham award for Best Fiction 2013. De La Pava’s second novel Personae — also initially self-published — was released by CUP in October. Speaking to tn2 last week, the author spoke about switching to a more conventional editorial process. “It feels like my privacy is being invaded but the benefits easily outweigh the aggravations.
Not having a publisher made for a roundabout route to success, but he got there, and without having to it conventionalise his novel to fit specific marketing criteria. Personae deals directly with this problematic relationship between author and publisher. The body of an old man is found in his apartment, along with various pieces of fiction written on scraps of brown paper, an old notebook and a TV guide. Always conscious that what they are reading is a draft, the reader is forced into using their own critical faculty to decide whether or not it is “good literature”. “A writer is someone who writes,” says one character in response to the assertion that “no agent, no prizes, no editor, no book deal, meant no writer.” But would we too dismiss De La Pava’s work as chaos if it came to us in manuscript form from an unknown author without the visible credentials of a publisher? Would we have disregarded the brilliant works now being compared to those of Melville and Dostoevsky? The answer is probably yes — which makes one wonder what other gems have slipped under the radar — but in this case, thankfully, we don’t have to consider this possibility.
One of the most intoxicating aspects of De La Pava’s writing is the fluidity of his tone. His narrative shifts from profound existential contemplation to amusing social comedy, via moments of absolute farce and dramatic declarations of intense emotion. Characters speak with such flippancy about the nature of existence that it is hard to know what to take seriously. Asked about the delicate balancing act of comic and cosmic, De La Pava replied: “Restricting yourself to one at the complete expense of the other would feel like, at a minimum, bad reporting. What interests me is the interplay between the two, but not its mechanics, rather its significance.”
De La Pava’s writing never strays far from metaphysical speculations, and he has said that his earliest memories are of philosophical problems. “Maybe I see philosophy everywhere the way some people view everything as political in some way. Certainly I’ve found it useful to imbue the work with those elements but I can’t stress enough that, from where I’m sitting, it feels as if they just arise organically.” In Personae, as we slip from one writing space to another from chapter to chapter, each seeming no less real than the last, there is a sense that there is no outer reality from which the texts spring, just fiction after fiction after fiction. Silence — discussed in the narrative and brought about literally with narrative gaps and missing pieces of manuscript — leads the reader to wonder what, if anything, is beyond the words of all these fictions. “Silence can be terrifying of course. Given the right circumstances, it can be as substantive as any utterance.”
The novel is written, in true postmodern style, roughly within the frame of a typical whodunit story. This is, of course, another unreliable definition: our detective informs us from the outset that she is interested in more than the mere prosaic facts of the case. What intrigues her is “Truth in its multifarious instantiations, ranging from simple if inviolable mathematical truths to other less evident yet persistently attractive ones”. Again, we slip easily into the realm of philosophical contemplation. “Seems to me,” said De La Pava, “a truly great detective would fairly soon become fascinated, to their professional detriment, by those mysteries that seem eternal or insoluble.”
Like its predecessor, Personae is difficult to pigeonhole. It is a chaotic and brilliant medley of forms, voices and registers. As well as the detective narrative it includes an absurdist-style play, a novella (or two novellas? An unfinished novel?) a short story, two obituaries, extracts from a musicology essay, a critique of a translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and more besides. How does De La Pava respond to critical reluctance to call the book a novel? “Well, I certainly intended to write a novel. Admittedly, I favor an expansive definition of that term. On the other hand, I don’t see much arrayed in favor of any countervailingly restrictive or simplistic view of the damn thing; it seems to me that such a view can only lead to a certain dispiriting sameness in an arena where the possible shock of novelty is one of the promises that keeps calling us back to it to create and consume.”
