10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beckett And the Guy From New Jersey, October 29, 2009
This review is from: A Heaven of Others (Paperback)
A Conversation about Joshua Cohen's A Heaven of Others
by Kyle Minor and Justin Taylor
(originally appeared in The Rumpus)
A few weeks ago, the literature blog HTMLGiant hosted a heated discussion about whether or not difficult modernist novels like James Joyce's Ulysses might find a publisher in today's literary marketplace. Of the hundreds of responses to the thread and its follow-ups, the one that interested me most was Justin Taylor's assertion that modernism's true heir was born in 1980 in southern New Jersey, lived in Brighton Beach, and was in the midst of a period of extraordinary productivity despite an absolute lack of any significant critical attention. His name was Joshua Cohen.
I was skeptical, but the next day I ordered a copy of A Heaven of Others, Joshua Cohen's fourth book, published by tiny Starcherone Books of Buffalo, New York. It arrived shrink-wrapped in a brown box, a slim volume with a monochromatic cover featuring a stylishly crude pencil and ink drawing of a boy hunched over himself and looking at his feet.
Neither the cover nor the size of the book signaled ambition. The frontispiece, however, did, announcing the book's full and expanded title--A Heaven of Others, Being the True Account of a Jewish Boy, Jonathan Schwarzstein of Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, and His Post-Mortem Adventures in, & Reflections on, the Muslim Heaven--and then: as Said to Me and Said through Me, by an Angel of the One True God, Revealed to Me at Night, as if in a Dream, thus revealing before reaching the epigraphs (one in Hebrew, one in German) or the dedication (which invokes Czechoslovakia, Nazism, Sovietism, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Israel, and the Czech Republic) a novel filtered through three points of view (a dead boy, an angel, and an author who communes with the Divine while sleeping), two competing cosmologies of the afterlife (or, for that matter, the present life), and the single most transgressive narrative position in literature with regard to religion since the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.
I devoured the book in a single sitting, and then I read it four more times in the weeks that followed. Each reading opened up new riches the previous reading had passed over. I pitched several magazines a review of the book or a feature article on Joshua Cohen, hoping to broadcast my enthusiasm, but there was little reciprocated enthusiasm for a book by an unknown young writer, already more than a year old, published by a house unfamiliar even to readers as catholic in their tastes as me. So I asked Justin Taylor, the only other person I knew to have read the book (and a person, mind you, I've never met in person), to join me in a public conversation meant to provoke you the reader to find the book and give it a couple of hours of your life, with the expectation that the book's pleasures will make you similarly evangelical on the subject of Joshua Cohen, and that with time the book will find the audience it deserves.
-- Kyle Minor
Minor: When you introduced me to the work of Joshua Cohen, you said, "It's like you go your whole life thinking that Beckett was the true Last Modernist, and then this guy from New Jersey shows up . . ."
Taylor: Yep. Though I probably should have said last true Modernist. But in either case.
It's a question of scope, I think. And something like a sense of the Imperative. You read Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Pound, etc.-- you get that sense.
Minor: Reading A Heaven of Others, I felt something similar-- there was that same kind of shock one gets when entering into certain works of Faulkner or Woolf or Joyce, where you simultaneously are thrilled and a little intimidated by the surface, but it doesn't take long to just fall into it, since the text is teaching you how to read the text. It's been so long since I've discovered a book like that, it feels new, but then one realizes that it's also old-fashioned, and mourns that it's old-fashioned.
Taylor: Yeah, Faulkner. That's probably a better example, since we're not talking about collage, quotation, or any of the other technical aspects of Modernism. Faulkner is a really solid touchstone, because his process isn't related to theirs, but he's still so clearly in the vein.
This idea of a text that teaches you how to read it, I think, is key.
Minor: Because we are, with Cohen, dealing with a special attention to a consciousness that requires a highish diction to take in all the wonders the character must take in. In Faulkner's case we're talking the lyricism provoked by Mississippi, but in the case of this book, we're talking a Jewish kid in a Muslim heaven.
Taylor: Right. And of course the inflections and dialect and manifest content are derived from the character--Jonathan being a little Jewish boy who lives (lived) in Jerusalem.
But the style of delivery, the form of the book, is something else again. The vastness--the sense of limitless possibility, that every thought gets thunk through every possible vicissitude--that's the form of Infinity, which is to say: Heaven, where the book is set.
Minor: One way the reader is reminded of Beckett at the level of language is in the way that Cohen turns abstractions over and over in order to get at ever more complicated abstract responses to what surrounds him. So at story's beginning, we get sentences like: "How did I get here, if I am still an I? If how and where is here? can still be asked and why?" And once the reader wraps his head around what the character is trying to wrap his head around, which is that a suicide bomber wandered into his parents' shoe store and blew a hole in his gut, and now he's the subject of an unexplainable cosmic mix-up that calls into question not only his own previous understanding of the world, but also the opposing understanding of the world that prompted the shoe store bombing in the first place, the reader feels there may be no other way into understanding than such questions layered upon questions.
Taylor: That beginning seems highly reminiscent of The Unnameable. But there's a weird tension between that and what he tells you in the frontispiece. " . . . As Said to Me and Said through Me . . . Revealed to Me at Night as if in a Dream." It's a very retro move to stick that on the front of your book. I think even when Poe did it for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym it was kind of old-school. And there's a shade of satire in that, but not as much as you might at first suspect. Cohen's alluding to The Pilgrim's Progress, I think. Which is actually blackly funny, when you think about it, that a classic Puritan quest-narrative should be the proper "form" for the relation of a story about a mixup between Jewish and Muslim spiritual realms. Questions on questions, like you said.
Minor: Pilgrim's Progress isn't all. Even a reader as slow to allusion as me notices right away the play with sources including the Qur'an, the Book of Isaiah, Swedenborg, Milton, Dante, various Jewish mysticisms, etc. Even as the Islamic and the Jewish are foregrounded, it's the bigger questions of gods and heavens and human traffic with goodness and badness and the divine that are being called into question, and the reader wonders if what we have here might in some sense be a repudiation of childhood impositions of surety, or at least a path toward a possible repudiation.
Taylor: But that's the great thing about this book--about great books in general, right? They just keep Giving.
Minor: And here--more great books stuff--we have the particularities of the character's (and dare we say the writer's) preoccupations standing in for the broader preoccupations common to readers drawn to literature
Taylor: There's something much bigger than any one God's little red book at stake here. All those would-be master texts are drawn into the sphere of this book's universe, rather than the book's being-drawn towards them--like in the Progress, say. I like that idea of the repudiation of certainty. Because religious conflict is always, at heart, a question of competing and incompatible certainties. And this book isn't sure of Anything. Every notion seems to contain its own inverse, practically. The world of Heaven is in total flux. Even the narrative voice is dynamic and shifting. Who is speaking? Jonathan? Cohen-the-narrator? the Angel talking to/through Cohen?
Minor: Given these ends, one isn't surprised that Cohen is bold in his appropriations, and a writer as smart as the one that made this book would certainly have to know that what he has waded out into is the vast boggy quagmire of identity politics and the questions about which writers from which groups have the right to which voices and which narrative positions. One thing I love about this book is that Cohen assumes human beings are human beings, and that--this old Greek idea--I am human, and therefore whatever is human is not foreign to me (including, here, the heaven humans will or won't populate).
Taylor: Yes, and it's weird how revolutionary such an assumption is--that human beings are human beings. We need to be reminded of that, it seems, time and again, because so much of religion is devoted to convincing us otherwise. You have to be a real nihilist to become a suicide bomber--even if you are a True Believer in your version of Heaven, you are going to hope that that place is ethereal, non-physical, etc. That's what Cohen denies most vehemently in this book. It's one of the few certainties in the text, I think. That despite its morphic and hallucinatory nature, Heaven is textural, physical, real.
Minor: It's something I have especially appreciated in the work of American writers who are Jewish, notably Philip...
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