Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll
My rating: 5/5 cats
while i wait, seemingly endlessly, for subterranean press to send me my damn copy of The Woman Who Married a Cloud: Collected Stories, i will sit here and reflect on older jonathan carroll books and try to get him a few more fans. periodically, i will plop one of these reviews out for my unsung heroes: jonathan carroll and donald harington, in hopes that someone will take the bait.
frequently it works.
this particular book is a good starting point for someone looking to enter the world of jonathan carroll. true—characters from sleeping in flame appear in it, but not in any significant way that will mystify you if you are only going to read this one. also—venasque. venasque is in several of jonathan carroll’s books, but every time he is encountered, it may as well be for the first time. he is at once a cipher, and just what he appears.
if that makes no sense to you, you probably have never read jonathan carroll before. those kinds of paradoxes are just par for the course in carrolltown.
his work is woven out of dreams, visions, coincidences and contradictions, parallelisms, mysticism, world mythology and folktales…jonathan carroll does what he does, over and over, but it never really feels redundant. his female characters are always enigmatic and fantastically desirable, there’s always going to be a bull terrier, there is usually going to be some sort of porousness between the boundaries of life and death. and he will usually not stick the landing. it’s true. he is not great at endings. but because he is uncommonly good with the actual journey part, it doesn’t really bother me. his books always feel like he is working through a thought-cycle for his own amusement. they are fiction, but there is an intensely personal tone to his books that is very inviting, and they read like he is having just as much fun with his characters and his socio-philosophical puzzles as the reader.
me, i don’t always need a strict writing workshop 101 exposition/action/denouement (yeah, i collapsed it a little—bite me) as long as what i am reading is giving me consistent brainpunches of “oh, that is it exactly” and “ohhhhh—what a wonderful turn of phrase.” he has a very fresh take on all the old themes that reads like the final word on the matter. why would anyone reading jonathan carroll ever need to read anyone else trying to make sense of relationships, or grief, or purpose?
and the conversations…his characters frequently have conversations that i imagine leonard cohen would initiate. (and, yes, j.c. loves l.c.—their shared erotic mysticism is no accident) (not that they have ever shared anything erotic. to my knowledge.) their clarity, their insights, their paring down love and death and being to its essentials. even carroll’s douchey characters, like harry radcliffe in this one, are startlingly lucid and will frequently have insights that have been silently thrumming along under your skin, and when you read them, they are at once familiar and a revelation. and he is great at just tossing off one-liners, like
– Buying a pair of shoes is one of the most optimistic acts i know, next to falling in love
– Everything you want in life has teeth
– For lunch that day I ate fried mice
and then longer ones:
When you love someone deeply, you know secrets they haven’t told you yet. or secrets they aren’t even aware of themselves…she was also the person I wanted to share the trivia of my life with, because that too is part of the magic of concern: whatever you live is important to them and they will help you through it.
yeah, i know—a little treacly, but i’m a romantic, what can i say?
and then he will just toss off little stories as asides that illuminate everything he is examining in such a perfect way, that they could stand alone and you would be perfectly content to ruminate on them for hours.
this one is his most overtly biblical—focusing on the tower of babel story, but with his own spin, and a little nod to borges. but it broadens the story into a more universal mythology that is very satisfying and unexpected.
i have no idea if this is a review, but it is an endorsement for jonathan carroll, at the very least. i will go back to waiting by the mailbox.
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