Customer Reviews

Artificial Light (Little House on the Bowery)

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One of the ostensible subjects of this book is the friend-assisted-suicide of a certain Kurt C-, who bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain more famous Kurt C-, but pop culture should be so lucky to get this kind of intense, probing treatment. Greer doesn't sink into conspiratorial reconstruction of the killing of the real Kurt C-, but instead gives him - and us - a mythological life in Dayton, Ohio. Greer recognizes that lives consist not of plot points but of the perception and reconstruction of times between plot points, and most of what's perceived is detritus, passing notions of desire -- and yet all our emotions and our philosophical motivations reside there. This is an existential condition that informs his book and makes it rich. In the construction of this grand cathedral of connected desire, his intentions are hardly as spare as his writing; it's all included, a rewarding excavation of flickering images and metaphysical wonderings (many called up from their original languages: German, Egyptian, Latin, etc.), descending layer by layer, spoonful by spoonful, in the notebooks of a girl with a sci-fi name: Fiat Lux. Unlike much of what passes for novels in the non-fiction era, this is writing at its fullest power, using language itself as both investigation and proof of big questions. We can only hope that in-between screenplays, Greer gives us more of this intelligent and fascinating voice.

Fiat Lux: librarian, barfly, writer, mystery. She lives and works and drinks in Dayton, O___, but less literally dwells in something playfully conjured out of gambits kindly bequeathed to us by the likes of Borges, Nabokov and Barth.

Yes, a world of language and its limits (see Peter Andrews' review). But also a world inhabited by characters. Some have professional perogatives and personae (the Editor in her introduction) or less formal agenda (the barmates of Dayton), or seek a summing up, a confession (Orville Wright). But rounding a corner, beating hearts may surprise us.

One of my favorite parts of Artificial Light is Notebook Five, Mary Valentine's bath after work. The author tenderly observes as Mary observes herself, observing and thinking and remembering:

. . Mary moved the razor over the smooth curve of her calf, using the soapy foam as lubricant. When she reached the kneecap area, she was careful to navigate around a narrowly-striped pattern of scar tissue, the result of having tried to hop on Joe Smallman's back two weeks ago outside the Hive. She smiled at the memory of tumbling from Joe's thin shoulders, taking him down,too, both falling to the sidewalk in a tangle of flapping limbs . . .

[Artificial Light, pg. 75]

James Greer has written an excellent book that covers the unidentified, unsung heroes and antiheroes that haunt Dayton, Ohio, but this book, like his previous book, contains no mentions of Tim Tobias.