| Reviews
Reviews for Charlie P.
Electronic Book Review
Of the Cliché and
the Everyday, March 2006
Reviewed by Christopher
Leise
RAIN TAXI
Spring 2006
Reviewed by Scott Bryan
Wilson
REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION
Spring Issue, March 2006
Reviewed by Echard Gerdes
BOOKFORUM
February/March 2006 Volume
12, Issue 5
Reviewed by Brian Evenson
American Book Review / Stacey Levine
Reviewed by Stacey Levine
Electronic
Book Review
Of the Cliché and the
Everyday, March 2006
Reviewed by Christopher Leise
In the October 2005 issue of Harper’s Magazine, the up-and-coming
Ben Marcus set the (“experimental”) fiction world
atwitter with his ferocious and funny rejoinder to Jonathan
Franzen’s 2002 article, “Mr. Difficult.” Marcus’s
examination of the earlier Franzen piece is intriguing for many
of its qualities, not the least of which is that it speaks to
what was something of a theme for the issue: return. An equally
fascinating piece, right at the front of the issue, also reflects
upon an earlier essay. In “On Message,” Lewis H.
Lapham invokes Umberto Eco’s 1995 “Ur-Fascism”
to warn us against the potential danger of reducing certain
facets of language to idiom. “[I]t’s a mistake to
translate fascism into literary speech,” Lapham, citing
Eco, warns. “By retrieving from our historical memory
only the vivid and familiar images of fascist tyranny (Gestapo
firing squads, Soviet labor camps, the chimneys at Treblinka),
we lose sight of the faith-based initiatives that sustained
the tyrant’s rise to glory.” (Lapham 7)
Certain skeptics, and maybe Lapham himself, would be unsurprised
that “On Message” garnered far less attention than
the more dramatically titled “How experimental fiction
threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life
as we know it: A Correction;” after all, Lapham himself
notes that, presently “[t]he author on the platform or
on the beach towel can be relied upon to direct his angriest
invective at the other members of the academy who failed to
drape around the title of his latest book the garland of a rave
review” (Lapham 9) rather than protest what he sees as
the decline of American democracy into a fascist regime.
Indeed, Lapham strikes the mark with his broader point, borrowed
from Eco: language can, and often does, serve a pointed, historical
purpose. To resurface that language with the patina of the cliché
can imperil the astuteness with which we view our present. By
relying on caricatures that are absolutely, clearly “not
us,” Americans can easily overlook some disturbing similarities
that the American government shares with the actual, rather
than an idiomatic hyperbole of the fascist praxis of government.
But we ought not overlook the debates being played out in the
literary sphere as mere disagreements on beach towels over the
relative superiority of vintages – to do so would countermand
the very exercise Lapham’s article enjoins the public
to undertake. As “On Message” suggests, we must
continue to interrogate the manner in which our language is
employed, to question the very nature of the way our world is
represented or dangerously mis represented. Lapham reminds us
that cliché is more than a shorthand within communities:
it essentializes, it “universalizes,” and very often
it fails us at moments of greatest urgency. Such a concern strikes
at the very heart of Richard Kalich’s Charlie P.
Rather than tackle the clichéd task of writing a Magnum
Opus or a Masterpiece, Kalich’s second novel makes of
itself something not lesser, but other. Charlie P is an effort
at a Subject-piece, as much interested in the idea of the novel
as it is a novel of ideas, exposing how a man is made of stories
and only self-made inasmuch as he is able to control the process
of narrating his own existence; it is the story of postmodern
megalomania. Aware that there is not one, but there are infinite
contemporary worlds, the title character – or, more accurately,
caricature – sequesters himself to a rocking-chair in
an apartment, content to control the language that produces
his own world(s) by excluding the destabilizing force of voices
beyond his own. Hence, to Charlie P, contradiction is not a
challenge to understanding but the rule; the ultimate activity
is a refusal to participate; denial is the most creative act.
Far from an endorsement of this type of removal, the story of
Charlie P is the story of our quotidian, unthinking relationship
to language. In the unfolding of this active disengagement,
Kalich attempts to write an essay on cliché itself. Constantly
employing the idiomatic – often in lists that recall the
work of Gilbert Sorrentino – the novel highlights the
vitality of language by assaulting us with atrophied conventions:
Charlie P. has spent many long years pursuing the woman of his
dreams. Indefatigably he’s traversed the globe, caught
a slow boat to China, sailed the seven seas; even built his
own space capsule and journeyed to the outer reaches. Still,
despite his considerable efforts, the perfect woman continues
to elude him. (32)
Familiar to the point of vacuity, the reflexive language in
Charlie P illustrates the emptying out of experience through
our own inability to narrate the new. Charlie P is himself no
exception. Though his world does accommodate the possibility
for creating new (if logically untenable) truths, these truths
are only ever the product of recycled accounts of ‘experiences,’
couched in the brittle diction of stale platitudes. The fact
that these events are the product of fantasy only serves as
further evidence toward the indictment of conventional language
and conventional narrative forms as the greatest contributors
to the homogeneity both of meaning and, ultimately, American
life. After all, Charlie P’s fantasy life is played out,
by and large, in the fields of stereotype and egotistical projection.
In a way, Kalich’s project functions as a development
of early twentieth-century novels such as Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio or Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts.
Like his modernist predecessors, Kalich shirks the florid for
concision, and builds a space that is, in large part, aesthetically
consistent. As in Winesburg, Charlie P is a novel in a series
of more or less discrete narratives that compose its whole.
While Anderson attempts to extricate the universal from particulars
- linking swollen knuckles to twisted apples that bear a unique
sweetness to those able to look beyond the superficial, for
instance - and creates a totality out of the fragmentary, Kalich
takes to task the kinds of maxims which presuppose that universals
can bind the particular into an essential human understanding.
Undoing the work of stories recently told, or simply retelling
the same events repeatedly, though differing in detail, he constantly
subverts the reader’s compulsion to create narrative consistency
by contradicting previously given details. And unlike Anderson
and West, Charlie P’s language is not the medium through
which he transcends the self into a relationship with the larger
community - Charlie P feels subject to the tyranny of the communal
unless he is able to seal himself off from it and compose his
own subjectivity in his own (narrative) image. Because of this
self-styled representation, Charlie P is much like his library
of books never read, his own novel which is never written; he
is a fiction, even in the world of the fictive.
By adding to and altering details within a single narrative
framework, Kalich in fact strips away the façade of his
story to expose the basic assumptions that make what is generally
agreed to be a novel. What Kalich shows is that these assumptions,
themselves, remain mostly unidentified. Charlie P himself is
barely a character, and the oft-appearing Bulgarian Harpist
even less: her very existence outside Charlie’s imagination
is questionable. Yet we are told a great deal about them. There
is little that resembles a plot, nor is there the kinds of tensions
elicited by the more “conventional” novel. Yet there
is still a world, consistent in its inconsistency, and in that
world a life, however unlived. In effect, Charlie P simultaneously
asks how little is too little, and how much is too much, to
create a coherent, believable narrative.
Charlie P is a carefully wrought novel with a deft sense of
humor and a strong awareness of its place in literary discourse.
With each answer it prompts new questions; with each added detail,
it destabilizes certainty. For all that, readers must have temerity,
curiosity, and the ability to build on constantly shifting ground
– or a willingness to subject themselves to the elements
of the indeterminate and the multiple.
Though it is widely agreed that Emerson was right when claiming
that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds,” the thoughtful and creative manipulation of a
sustained consistency can be a challenge to the vastest and
deepest of intellects. Richard Kalich is able to effect this
type of consistency throughout the whole of Charlie P: an accomplishment
to be admired.
RAIN TAXI
Spring 2006
Reviewed by Scott Bryan Wilson
Sex addict, star athlete, scholar, lecturer, hopeless romantic,
world traveler, prolific novelist, dreamer, lazy bum: the eponymous
hero of Richard Kalich's high-octane comic novel is an ageless
perpetual optimist whose extreme indecisiveness is the key to
his immortality. As a boy, saddened by his father's death, Charlie
P decides that by refusing to live his life he can grant himself
eternal life. Realistically, however, he does plenty of living.
He's cartoonishly hyperbolic in the most extraordinary sense:
his superman feats and a semi-lack of chapter-to-chapter continuity
make him an everyman more Bugs Bunny than Mr. Pickwick, as he
doggedly pursues the love of a Bulgarian harpist much younger
than he, searches frantically for his lost penis, chops down
forests with one blow of his axe, and concocts increasingly
mammoth excuses to avoid the pain of rejection.
Kalich's fine prose is the perfect mirror for Charlie P's varying
mindsets: it swells with atmosphere and romance when Charlie
goes on a first date; reduces to a clipped monotone when Charlie
desperately searches his home for himself; and employs "big
words" when the narrator attempts to explain Charlie's
unreal actions and state of mind. Appropriately, many of Charlie
P's thoughts, attitudes, and opinions can be reduced to bumper-sticker
zingers or phrases seen on ironic t-shirts, as this often seems
to be the depth of his thoughts. Hyperactive lists detail his
accomplishments and actions, as when he woos the Bulgarian harpist
in colossally wallet-busting form; or when Charlie decides to
learn everything there is to know about women; or when he swears
off women and tries to barricade his home so that "not
the faintest scent of female flesh could seep in, nor, just
as importantly, his own very masculine scent out."
Unlike those of the infamous doofus Svejk, Charlie's utterances
of brilliance and astute insight are not the product of accident,
but rather of acute self-awareness, as when he realizes that
his only regret is that he "had to live his entire life
not by himself, but with himself." At times like these,
when the hyperactivity hits a trough, we realize that Charlie's
cartoonish adventures have all been a prelude to his moments
of shattering clarity. That many of us attain these same insights
without having to undergo epic trials makes them all the more
naked and cutting.
Like most good comic novelists, Kalich is adept at teetering
on the precipice wherein he might decide to dilute the fun with
the grim, creating that suspense where things might get really
bad at any moment. In CHARLIE
P he has crafted an
extraordinary novel and a memorable hero--a leader
and kin to those afflicted with loneliness and the inability
to get anything done.
REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION
Spring Issue, March 2006
Charlie P by Richard Kalich
Los Angeles, Green Integer 250 pages #13
One critic recently condemned a novel for being familiar, as
if somehow novels could be unfamiliar. No paragraphs, no language,
Heck no paper or ink or binding. Duchamp's Urinal, now that's
a novel. However, life is familiar. If only allowed to produce
a work that was not familiar, we would have no literature at
all. I would rather that the familiar be embraced and the novel
resonate beyond itself and intone the spheres of Plato and Beckett.
CHARLIE P
by Richard Kalich resonates with allusions to other works about
losers, including D.H. Lawrences's "Rocking Horse Winner,"
Gogol's "The Nose," and Heinrich Mann's "Blue
Angel." The anti-hero of the title is actually a non-hero,
for he does absolutely nothing and is an Everyman who, like
all of us, is afraid to take risks. Charlie P, by taking none,
lives no life at all. He achieves nothing. He thinks himself
a great lover, yet never makes loves. He fancies himself a great
host, yet never invites a guest. He imagines himself to be a
great novelist, yet claims the novel is dead, which explains
why he is merely "a dabbler in writing fiction." Charlie
P is the Everyman ... a modern day Gordon Comstock, Orwell's
famous antihero from "Keeping Aspidistra Flying."
A poet who never finds the time to write. Under the care of
physicians, doctors he fervently believes in are as incompetent
at medicine as he is at fiction: they attribute a case of lockjaw
to ptomaine poisoning, for example. They are Everylosers, too.
Richard Kalich succeeds in making the story of Everyloser. And
when Charlie P smiles at the end, buried in his coffin face
down, we smile with him because we're fellow losers.
Echard Gerdes,
is the editor of The Journal of Experimental Fiction and the
author of the novel, Cistern Tawdry
BOOKFORUM
February/March 2006 Volume
12, Issue 5
Reviewed by Brian Evenson
The title character of Richard Kalich’s third novel, CHARLIE
P, simultaneously has it all and
has nothing: "Peckerhead and Prophet, Pariah and Prodigal
son. Charlie P is all things to all people and nothing to himself."
His personal and public identities sit on opposite ends of the
same seesaw; when one's on the rise, the other's on its way
down.
Kalich's hero seems like a particularly protean version of John
Bunyan's Christian everyman (had he been an atheist). In the
course of just 250 pages, Kalich offers dozens of picaresque
moments: Charlie P plays baseball, decides to live forever,
finds his life empty, feels his life is full, masters many professions
but practices none, walks around the world in eighty days, strikes
out with women, and throws a party that nobody (including himself)
attends. He also passes away at the page of 218, loses his penis,
dies again but continues living in his apartment as if nothing
had happened, thinks of each fruit or vegetable he eats as a
new woman to be seduced, sleeps in the morgue because he knows
he won’t be disturbed there, and is mutilated and dismembered.
The story is, obviously, not realistic by any stretch of the
imagination, but it isn't an exercise in absurdity simply for
absurdity's sake. Kalich is engaged throughout the novel in
the difficult task of balancing the realistic against the fantastic
in such a way that the reader is able to pass back and forth
between the two realms with each maintaining its particular
charms. As a result, Charlie P remains sympathetic and genuine
despite the nonsensicality he swims in. The project meshes well
with contemporary new wave fabulist fiction, such as the work
of Shelley Jackson, Matthew Derby, and Salvador Plascencia (or
even the not-so-new fabulist David Ohle). But while those writers
use the creation of a fantastic milieu to slyly unveil the idiosyncrasies
of our contemporary culture, Kalich goes for larger prey. He's
after what it means to be profoundly out of step with one’s
culture yet still unwilling to let go of the American dream.
And this tension between dream and reality makes Charlie P a
deliciously painful book.
For Kalich, it's the unimagined life rather than the unexamined
one that isn't worth living. His novel explores the overlap
between an impoverished real life and richly imagined experience.
Charlie P's experiences are nothing if not vividly and contradictorily
concocted. Which is to say they're really nothing. But at the
same time, what's imagination if not everything?
American Book Review / Stacey Levine
Reviewed by Stacey Levine
It has been said for millennia that our exterior lives are mere
shadows of what is truly real. Novelist Richard Kalich explores
this idea very originally in his second novel, CHARLIE
P, published this year by the highly
productive Green Integer Press. Kalich documents the life of
an indefatigable everyman who struggles blithely to find contentment
and leave his mark on the world. Without giving particulars
as to geography, age, relatives, childhood background, education,
or the like, Kalich constructs Charlie P using chapters--or
bursts--of exaggerations and absurd constructions in which Charlie
P either proves himself a man quite hyperbolically, or experiences
defeat in some drastic form.
The character is an iconographic blank, described as “all
things to all people and nothing to himself.” (7) He is
also described as a man who (perhaps toward some purported existential
rebellion) is quite unable to complete a task, because that
appears to him to be some kind of submission or defeat. In this
way, Kalich conveys a painful sadness: Charlie P suffers from
an inability to engage with life or complete his goals because,
in the character’s perversion, he sees that act as “giving
in.”
Not that this narrative isn’t crazily hilarious. At the
book’s beginning, Kalich conjures Charlie P in the imagery
of a 1970s-era swingin’ bachelor man: a misogynist due
to his fear of women, yet equipped, perhaps, with a swank apartment
and blacklights, mirrors, and a wet bar to impress the babes.
As the tale progresses, Charlie P’s thousandfold sexual
conquests are stacked up alongside his trepidation and inaction,
his impossible professional accomplishments - among them solving
all global economic problems and becoming a religious messiah.
Added to these items are Charlie P’s numerous physical
mutilations, such as being disemboweled or losing his penis
or, one day, having every bone in his body shattered. From all
these episodes Charlie P routinely returns to the narrative
apparently unabashed, ready to move ahead in the next chapter
of life, where he is alternately “popular with the ladies”
and alone and enfeebled. At one point, when Charlie P wants
to know which woman really loves him, sex aside, and would break
down barriers to reach him, he “corked his bathroom walls.
Insulated his entire apartment with three-inch fiberglass. Then
he got serious, building towering turrets and spires, moats
and drawbridges, ramparts and walls. He even laid down landmines,
barbed wire fences, set up machine gun towers; a nuclear missile
site. Having made his home into a fortress, if not a castle,
he began working on himself. First, opening the windows to air
the rooms out, then hermetically sealing them shut so that not
the faintest scent of female flesh could seep in, or, just as
importantly, his own very masculine scent out. Next, after plugging
his nose and stuffing his ears with wads of cotton, he turned
down the Venetian blinds and blindfolded himself. He even had
a doctor friend anaesthetize him.” (79)
In addition to being funny, nutty, and playful, the book is
a complex narrative about human self-esteem and the human sense
of self in general. Kalich’s kooky, contradictory biographical
map of Charlie P’s elaborate machinations in the world,
his bizarre, colossal failures (which are described as inevitable),
and his conviction he must never even begin his life are correlates
to the natural narcissistic struggles that most of us feel at
a low level nearly every day. Human life’s endless ups
and downs of loneliness, sensations of threat, violations, and
pleasures are described in Charlie P’s eyes in an incredibly
jumbled way, almost suggesting a developmental point of view.
Charlie P’s journey is like an index of adult experience
encoded via a childlike/confused prelinguistic stance. He accomplishes
everything; he accomplishes nothing; his sexual addiction causes
him to bed hundreds of women daily; he consequently is intimate
with no one. Like a clueless tuning fork attracting the world’s
chaos, Charlie P’s experiences are too intense:
“Before calling it a day Charlie P goes out for his evening
jog. In the midst of his run, he stops to intervene in what
appears to be a friendly argument between two old friends. Instead
of thank you’s, a night cap or coffee and cake, he gets
mugged, robbed, pummeled and beaten; face bloody, reeling, comatose
and in a stupor, he returns home for a quiet evening by himself
watching TV... just went he’s comfortably snug under the
covers, and picks up his TV Guide to see what’s on, his
glasses have disappeared. By the time he finds them his movie
has ended, and he’s on his way to the bathroom, this time
taking especial care not to stub his toe or hit his head on
the sink. But - and there’s always a but - he trips over
his feet, slips on a bar of soap, and falling down in the bathtub,
he breaks his left hip and right arm. ‘Should have known
better,’ says Charlie P.” (170)
With his continuous comic exaggeration, Kalich is able to describe,
highly uniquely, the overwhelming, vertiginous, risky sensation
of being alive - the very thing we seek and fear.
The outcome of this primordial scenario is decidedly uncheery.
Charlie P, in the end, is self-hating, regretful that he “has
to live his entire life not by himself, but with himself.”
He is, somehow, a horrendous nothing - despite being a world
famous writer, a stunning politician, a collector of women,
an English Channel swimmer, and a serious mountain climber.
He is alone and the picture of self-hatred: ...“it is
just those women who have scaled the heights who will never
stoop low enough to be with him.” (71)
This is a really intriguing and familiar psychic landscape.
Kalich successfully reproduces the sensation of existential
indecision and doubt in all its intensity. He also creates a
sweeping, near-mythic description of the self-dislike that many
people, unfortunately, absorb during childhood. Most of all,
he employs Charlie P to illustrate the exhausting and often
cruel experience of consciousness that lies behind the façade
of exterior, everyday life.
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