In which the proprietors of Rake’s Progress and Tingle Alley begin to wind up their discussion of Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper. Catch up on the conversation here (start at the bottom and scroll up).

Giveaway: The first person to email with “People of Paper” in the subject line gets a copy of the novel mailed to them. Please include your mailing address in the email. Update: The book goes to Richard C. of Baltimore. We’ll be giving away a couple more copies, so if you haven’t won yet, you’ll get another chance.

Yes, let’s be pell-mell. (Frankly, the fact that I tore myself away from Missoula is a feat in itself, but more about that later. Or not.)

Anyway, I’m taking your word for it on the dots ‘n’ dashes and so forth. I made a point of charging past the glyphs without thinking about them too much; I figure that’s what re-reading is for. (I have some reservations about whether a complete understanding of what’s going on with the glyphs would enrich my experience of TpoP, but I have no doubt that Mr. Plascencia somehow has it thoroughly worked through for himself. In other words, I’ll bet there’s some method to the madness. With your cautionary example of overanalyzing in pocket, though, I figure I’ll just defer to better—or more patient—minds.)

I think it is a coincidence that Bret and Sal—as they like me to call them—are working with out-of-control characters, but I agree they’re both teasing the reader by playing with certain expectations (or inanities—“the characters really wrote this novel,” and so on). Of course, Ellis is doing something quite different—and savvy, in my opinion—by working with and against his bad boy writer persona, but I think both writers are skirting extreme self-involvement by invoking themselves as they do. (I find that they both carry it off, more or less, although I also find that some of the most sluggish moments of Plascencia’s novel come in the “Sal” sections. I think Bee Sting Girl is my least favorite character.)

And, yeah, I think both fellows are “expressing anxieties about the meaning and use of the modern novel” but that’s nothing new, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone. But then again, perhaps we still need to put questions to the so-called realistic method of writing a novel, since some of the practitioners seem so smug. For example, there’s this bit, from the McEwan/Smith exchange [from the August ’05 Believer]:

IM: …The real, the actual, they place heavy demands on a writer—how to invent it, how to confront it or pass it through the sieve of your own consciousness. So I was never a great Márquez person, I admired the Tin Drum but never really admired it the way I did Kundera, say. And it seems to me now that that style has become a bit like the international style in furniture, this sort of lingua franca that really defies the central notion of the novel which is that the novel is local. It’s regional, it’s a bottom-up process, and somehow these international styles seem to have a top-down process. They are too similar to each other.

ZS: They have trademarks. One of the trademarks is a kind of kinetic energy. Energy at the expense of everything else.

IM: Yeah. It’s tennis without the net. There’s no fun.

ZS: Nothing at stake.

Now, I don’t want to get into a pissing contest about the realistic novel, because I happen to like it and enjoy it. But, for me, a novel like TPoP really challenges the above argument; to wit: Would you say that nothing’s at stake in TPoP, even if its mode—to again paraphrase Donald Barthelme—is “wacky”? (Hell no!) And would you say that our author here has ducked the “heavy demands” of the writer by working in this mode?

Well, I wouldn’t. I would guess that most—if not all—literary novels are produced when a writer invents, confronts, and passes the real or actual through her consciousness. Still, some, like McEwan (and James Wood) seem to suggest that there’s a right and wrong way to do this, or, at least, a preferred product that emerges from the process. This is kind of a restatement of 8-foot Chicken, where it’s fine if one invents a bunch of gritty longshoremen living lives of quiet desperation—they’re real—but lazy if one invents an 8-foot Chicken who quotes Rilke, or whatever. To me, it’s a matter of execution. If the execution is fine, then the writing speaks. It can’t just be a matter of who cleaves to The Real the best (or how else explain the enduring quality of Greek mythology, or folk tales, or even cartoons, for that matter?).

That’s why I like Donald Barthelme’s quote: “You exist for me in my perception of you (and, in some rough, Raggedy Andy way, for yourself, of course). That’s what’s curious when people say, of writers, this one’s a realist, this one’s a surrealist, this one’s a super-realist, and so forth. In fact, everyone’s a realist offering true accounts of the activity of the mind. There are only realists.”

It almost seems unassailable. Almost.

At any rate, I’m glad to have encountered the true account of Plascencia’s mind. Anything else to add, my friend? (Also: Is the Novel local, as McEwan suggests? Can you make sense of that formulation? Do you want to?)