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Neo Phobe

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The Unbearables Rock! With "neo Phobe" two of the group (Jim Feast and Ron Kolm) have established themselves as auteurs of post-modernist Bohemiana. Woven within the structure of a fast-paced missing-persons, serial rapist mystery are the threads of beating-down modern life, conspiring to turn us all into blathering robotic infidels. Here are tales of the neo Phobes, radicalist, do-gooders, in all of their garb, up against the world's ills. Here is Karen Polanski, erstwhile copy-editor in a new job previously occupied by the now-deceased rapees. Here is Misty Blum, temp extraordinaire, sniffing around for clues about the victims and wondering over the plight of women as victims. John Uranus and Frank Reynard balance out the neo Phobe's male section as they all, separately and together, fend off both local and global social catastrophes in this tour de force of New York's inimitable head-spinning politicocultural miasma. The writing is crisp, the characters oddly believable and it's a damn good romp on paper!

When writers write about writing there is a particular theme that always emerges: that the act of writing is singular. This is the theme in Hemingway's 1954 Nobel Prize speech when he says, "Writing, at its best, is a lonely life...For [the writer] does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day". This is what Graham Greene means when he calls writing "the most private of all the arts." Shortly after reading Jim Feast and Ron Kolm's Neo Phobe, I was reading Joan Didion's "Can't Get that Monster Out of My Mind" on the subway, and not being able to get Neo Phobe out of my mind myself, when I read Didion's claim, "I think we would all agree that a novel is nothing if it is not the expression of an individual voice, a single view of experience" I could only smile. You see, before Neo Phobe there might have been a nod of the head, or my eyes might have just casually moved along the words while my brain filed them in the mental cabinet I like to keep for writers writing about writing. But after Neo Phobe there is only a smile, like the smile of a person who knows a dirty little secret.
Neo Phobe is essentially writers writing about writing. The novel follows an underground collective of writers, the Neo Phobes, in an effort to solve the "Demon Lover Rapist" case in order to write a best-selling true crime book. Their investigation leads them through a complex network of Pro-Life evangelical Christians and technology corporations, all while trying to land a book contract, arrange readings, organize Le Bal Des Artistes, and discuss a rabbit's involvement in the Kennedy assassination, whether Poe's or Dickinson's case of necrophilia was worse, and the central problem of the modern era--temps. As a novel, Neo Phobe is singular in its plurality. In its very title, Neo Phobe resists the singular, oneness. This, after all, is not the single word neophobe, one who fears change, technology, and social transformation. What is this two-word Neo Phobe? I like to speculate that the anagram for "one" that The Matrix has already sent into our collective consciousness here coupled with phobe (phobia, fear, aversion) suggests the retraction, the pulling away from oneness that characterizes the novel.
In dealing with a collective of writers collaborating, Neo Phobe challenges this sense of the singular voice and the single view of experience. Just as the writers try to figure out how these disparate women became victims of the same crime, the reader throughout the novel is trying to figure out how this disparate group of people will ever solve the mystery and become authors of the same true crime book, surviving each one's claim to be doing most of the work, their different and fluctuating attitudes toward the project and toward their fellow Phobes. Dealing with the hot-button issue of abortion is difficult. The tendency is to reduce both or either side to simple caricature or to become too didactic. While Neo Phobe does not deny itself the fun of caricature, it paints a richer, more complex portrait of the debate and its many--not just two--sides, sustaining a number of views on the issue (Deacon Thistle struggling with his Pro-Life beliefs, haunted by the face of the dead girl he turned away from the abortion clinic, Marcus Riley struggling with his Pro-Choice position, thinking of abortion in connection with racial genocide and the history of sterilization, traditional Chinese views on infantile death and aborted fetuses).
Beyond the multiplicity of characters and views are the various issues of genre. Neo Phobe defies a single genre. It does not fit too snugly into the conventions of detective fiction. In fact, by S.S. Van Dine's 1928 outline of twenty rules for detective fiction, Neo Phobe is not detective fiction at all (cite that there is more than one detective and criminal, cite the giant talking animal at the end, cite anything in the book, really). It makes a nod to science fiction with sound retractors, memory implanters, Rayograph Bibles, and Astral Projector holograms invading the streets, `beheading' people. Interludes of erotica, episodes of the thriller, various genres come into the novel. And into what single genre can you put the conversations the Phobes get into at the Bull and Shamrock? About five different languages come into Neo Phobe, and the novel also breaks down its archetypical oneness in its very form. It seems the novel itself cannot bear the story and has to mine other literary forms to move it forward. Unwieldy conversations seem to call in the help of dramatic format, for example:
Riley: "Say what?"
"The medulla is the brain space[...]."
Uranus: "What's that got to do with what we're talking about?"
Poetry takes on the role of direct speech with a machine, and the novel ends with an interchange of prose and poem.
Having read Neo Phobe it is hard to look at the novel the same. All those accepted generalizations on the novel and writing are called into question, and Neo Phobe itself is called into question. Is Neo Phobe the anti-novel in its rejection of the singular voice and its sense of collaboration and crowdedness in what is supposed to be private and alone, or is it the ultra-novel in its maximizing on the dialogic and heteroglossic character that Bakhtin found peculiar and central to the novel? For those interested in the fate of the novel and where the novel is going, Neo Phobe is essential. Does the breaking down of the singular and the rampant plurality suggest a cancer and the imminent death of the novel? Or does it suggest the expansion of the novel into a new literary age? While we, indeed, must deal with the defining problems of literature in our times, leaving aside these more weighty questions for a better form--a conversation--I conclude that Neo Phobe is ultimately a strange, fun, and enthralling read. Jack Uranus towards the end of the novel half laments that books are collaborations, that there are no more "hermetic geniuses" producing literary masterpieces. "Whole groups must come together," he says, "to make one great authorial voice." The question remains after reading Neo Phobe, would you have it any other way? --AS (A Gathering of Tribes, [...], September 2006)

This rambling novel has the nominal semblance of the mystery genre but the pursuers of crime are not laconic police dicks, cynical private eyes, or eccentric ladies in small English villages but rather, of all things, an association of poets, writers, and artists from New York's literary sub-culture. They are intent on finding the "perps" in a serial rape situation. In doing so the author moves through sociological and occupational truths that are absorbing in and of themselves. These culture workers are cab drivers, "temps," adjunct English instructors, and bookstore clerks who shift from job to job. They live in tiny rat-trap apartments for which they can barely pay the rent. But after all, it's Manhattan! Where else could they live? Money is always a problem in their hand-to-mouth existence, yet somehow they survive. writing poetry on their computer screens at work, using their boss's Xerox machines, getting their work published in regrettable little zines and, yes, solving crimes. And in some way they are engaged in a group literary activity which is the story of their crime solving efforts on the serial rapes. One has doubts about how serious this all is, but the novel is quick paced with amusing versions of dialect, and strong flashes of humor, as when one character is aroused by a woman recuperating in a hospital bed -- he's never had sex with a woman in a neck brace and demands immediate oral satisfaction. For this romantic offer he gets his scrotum torn with rose thorns from a floral display. The crimes are the loose framework on which to lay the many odd episodes and wild conversations, which are fun in themselves. There's nothing all that deep here, but there is a sense of atmosphere in the subterranean literary culture of Manhattan.

neo phobe, by Jim Feast and Ron Kolm.

(New York: Unbearable Books, 2006; distributed by Autonomedia. US$12.00)

One of the paradoxical aspects of life in New York City lies in its microcosmic communitarianism. To maintain a kind of sanity, The City's artists (poets, writers, actors, musicians, and sexual athletes, in particular) form social cliques that often become scenes. When you're active here, the enormities of population and territorial scale first collapse into an intense focus on lively venues in sympathetic neighborhoods, and then explode along friendly fault lines and charged cleavage planes.

Jim Feast and Ron Kolm are true veterans of an endlessly morphing underground writing scene which, in the '90s, spawned the group known as The Unbearables (originally The Unbearable Beatniks of Life). At its biggest bang, The Unbearables claimed Hakim Bey, Ann Charters (biographer of Jack Kerouac), Samuel R. Delany, Chris Kraus (of semiotext(e)), Tuli Kupferberg (co-founder of The Fugs), Harry Mathews (of ULIPO), Judy Nylon (inspirer of Brian Eno), bart plantenga (historian of yodeling), John Strausbaugh (then with the New York Press), Lynne Tillman, Janine Pommy Vega and many many others among its members. Feast and Kolm were founding members, and neo phobe, the novel they concocted together as an exquisite corpse and published under the Unbearable Books imprint, is a classic roman à clef.

The plot centers on a luckless band of semi-proletarians called the Neo Phobes struggling in a vaguely nonspecific future for literary recognition. Individually egocentric yet strangely loyal to one another, the troupe sets out to solve a mystery -- a murderous serial rapist is stalking Gotham -- and then to write a best-seller based on their uniquely inept combinatorial brand of sleuthing. By the end of the story no one is any better off than they were at the beginning, but hijinx, maimings, and nervous breakdowns have ensued and they've had one Hell of a ride.

Part of my delight in reading neo phobe lies in the joyfully two-fisted talents that Feast and Kolm bring to the writing. I've tracked Kolm's work since 1983, when he ran with the Between C & D crowd (which included Kathy Acker, Bruce Benderson, Dennis Cooper, Gary Indiana, Darius James, Tama Janowitz, Patrick McGrath, Catherine Texier, and Lynne Tillman). His tiny Public Illuminations parodies enchanted me and his steely, grit-based styling in neo phobe nails both the character portraits and the ambience.

Feast, for his part, slaps the ironical gifts of a true satirist on the page. Among cognoscenti, he is notorious and widely admired for restlessly clever interventions. Chez Rollo, the Unbearables' long-running peripatetic reading venue, emerged from his fertile imagination. More recently, to my astonishment, he coaxed an alternative life-style guru for whom he was ghost writing into letting him interweave his own exotic chapters into the best-selling health and fitness texts they produced. His cavorting sense of literary exuberance infests every page of neo phobe.

By employing the exquisite corpse game as their overarching structure, Feast and Kolm elegantly illustrate the Neo Phobes' group writing style. First one, then the other contributes a chapter, with the resultant chaotic subtextual amalgam of philosophy, fundamentalist parody, and allusion emerging from multiple voices and narrative lines to lend a deeply artistic verisimilitude to the novel. Set pieces and story hooks abound, offset by characters of such emotional fragility that they have a Pale Fire glow about them -- loveable in spite of themselves.

Neo phobe is a unique book that will, I hope, find its place alongside more overtly historical treatments like Brandon Stosuy's Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (NY: NYU Press, 2006) and Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips's A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 (NY: NYPL/Granary Books, 1998). By and unashamedly for the underground, neo phobe takes a long affectionately unvarnished look at the chaos and confusions of current literary life in The City. "Fitzgerald and Kerouac are gone," Feast and Kolm suggest, "we live with their remains." Here are all our aspirations, on display for you. Don't ya think it's strange: what life puts writers through?

Reviewed by Jordan Zinovich
(This review was previously published in the Pacific Rim Review of Books, Issue 10, Fall/Winter 2009, pp. 29 & 32)

Jim Feast's novel Neo Phobe, written with Ron Kolm, is a shaggy monster of a book, redolent of meta-narrative and deconstructionism and word and mind games the likes of which have not been seen since the 70s heyday of Donald Barthelme and Tom Robbins. The novel is ostensibly a crime mystery, but it is leavened with so much postmodern gamesmanship and scabrous jokery that the plot quickly and transparently becomes a springboard for metaphysical and sociological conceits, with decidedly uneven results.

Feast's novel resists summary, but for what it is worth, the book tells the story of the Neo Phobes, a group of beer-drinking part-time poets and philosophes who unwittingly stumble upon clues regarding a string of rape/kidnappings. The multiple protagonists enthusiastically decide to solve the crime, partly with an eye to turning their account of the case into a bestseller. All manner of skulduggery ensues, revolving primarily around a running confrontation with Operation Savior, an anti-abortion church group attempting to use computer projection to re-program the minds of the heathen. In cracking the case, the Neo Phobes become extricated in an undercover sting operation to a mental hospital, an anti-abortion rally gone astray, a Mafia kidnapping, extensive computer hacking, a motorcycle chase, several shootings and stabbings, an attempted rape, and lots and lots of sex, drinking, and barroom pontificating.

If all this sounds chaotic, it is, although Neo Phobe has it merits. Feast and Kolm are obviously bright and literate, and underneath the freewheeling literary roadshow is a thread of serious contemplation of engaging issues: the role of evangelism and faith in society; gender roles in the workplace and elsewhere; the decline of capitalism and its implications for the individual. Feast's thinking, as best it can be adduced, defies categorization: the anti-abortion cleric Tamilwire, for example, is a nuanced character capable of remorse and self-reflection rather than the cut-out caricature one might expect. The book is often quite funny, as well, with a palpable delight in weirdness and slapstick that runs in refreshing counterpoint to the somber tone of so much recent literature. The book rides a manic energy that conveys a sense of joie de vivre and play, rare in an age oversaturated with dread.

Unfortunately, however, the overall effect of the novel is hampered by a variety of serious deficiencies. The prose is at times shockingly clumsy; Feast has a near-endless supply of similes (a pistol lying on the street is "like a petal blown off a flowering apple tree," a glum mood is "hardening like quick-drying cement," a line of protesters appear "as solid as St. Patrick's Cathedral," an attractive woman is "like a fresh corsage thrown into a park of wilted flowers," etc.), and when metaphors are released with such indiscriminate abandon it is inevitable that not many of them will reach a level of Donnean precision. The manic sprawl of the plot has as its price a diffusion of narrative clarity; this reader found it difficult to keep track of the various characters and subplots, not a sophisticated objection, perhaps, but an unanswerable one. The Neo Phobes are based, not very loosely, one suspects, on the underground poetic collective the Unbearables, of which Feast and Kolm are members; yet for a quasi-roman a clef the characters are disappointingly insubstantial.

A friend of mine pointed out that Feast, like most of the Unbearables, has the kind of creative mind -- associative, improvisatory, non-abstract -- that is perhaps best suited to the more concise media of poetry and free-form polemic. Neo Phobes confirms that; when one of the characters says that the group's writing "is unfixed - almost transitory...everything happens quickly, like a jazz solo. Just blowin' in the wind," one cannot help but feel that this is true of the novel the character inhabits as well. Aficionados of 70s-style postmodern fiction and fans of the subculture of the New York literary scene will find this book endearing at the very least. -- ML (Brooklyn Rail, May 2006)