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So here's the project that I came up to, and I hope you will see the random all over it.
I got one of these black and red, bound, they're kind of handsome in a really functional way,
they're lined notebooks. And there's a hundred pages in each notebook, and if I write on
both pages, each notebook therefore will have two hundred pages of manuscript. Really, manuscript,
because I'm writing on it with a series of really beautiful fountain pens that I use.
And so my idea was that, I bought ten of 'em, and I said, when all ten notebooks are filled,
I will be done. That's the only way I'll know that I'm done, is when I fill all ten of the
notebooks. There will be no other, sort of, "measure of doneness", for this. The other
thing that I decided I wanted to do, I've actually kind of introduced you to today.
I want it to be a kind of memoir. I want it to continue the kind of, social commentary,
philosophy thing that I've been doing for the last few years, and third, I want to get
back to writing fiction. So it's a very, as my former colleagues like to say, in a way
that never failed to drive me crazy, it's very "hybridigal". Go into an English department
and you'll hear words like that, unfortunately. Doesn't matter how ugly they are, as long
as they have some cash value currently. So, I really, only, I'm just getting started on
this. Maybe I've been doing it for about a year, but I did want to kind of give you a
little taste of it. And the remarkable thing about this taste that I'm going to give you
from this project, is that the thing has been reviewed already, believe it or not. My project,
I haven't even barely got it started, and already somebody has written a review. So
I'm just going to read this review to you, it's a very distinguished review from a principal
book reviewer for the New York Times. So it's "Books of the Time", December 10th, 2020.
A review by Michiko Kakutani. "All At Once", that's the title of my project, "All At Once",
published as an e-novel only, by Curtis White. Published by" Absolute Optics and Laser Technologies"
in Raleigh, North Carolina. Begin review: For readers who remember Curtis White's last
novel, they will recall a dismal and highly self-conscious work in the manner of John
Barth, writer of "Windy Doorstops", as the New York Times once put it, presciently. That
earlier novel, titled, "The Owl Who Curled Toupees" was so utterly self-conscious that
it is a wonder that he was even able to speak the words into his dictaphone. That novel
was rigid with self-awareness. The reader is only surprised that writing the book didn't
send him into a paralytic coma. If the novel can be said to have a "style", it is the limp
style of performance anxiety. Imagine my astonishment then, cracking open his new magnum opus (my
e-reader actually makes a tiny cracking sound when I start a new book, so cute). At better
than three thousand pages I was anything but optimistic, but from the first, this novel
was a joy for, as she likes to say, "the reader". "White showcases", and these are all quotes
from her, "White showcases an impressive literary toolkit. Every essential storytelling skill,
plus plenty of bells and whistles." "'All At Once' provides a picture window on modern,
middle-class life, and about time." "White creates an unforgettable american family."
This story concerns a man, Gerald Tristano, who discovers that his marriage to a younger
woman has been a mere illusion, a chimera. What he discovers, to his horror, is that
she, Burget, has met a man, Bobby Boy, at an online dating service and has been having
sex with him. The new couple announces at dinner that they have ambitious plans to create
a website of their own, where they will invite "guest stars" over to have sex with Burget
for later posting on the web. They ask Gerald to be the webmaster, a sad one to be sure.
The site is called "doozy.com", although in the course of the book, the name seems to
change without explanation to, "dinner", "dandies", "delight", "doggies", and even when things
get really grim, "dungeon". Much of the novel's action is described as taking place inside
of Gerald's computer. A first-person narrator, Gerald provides harrowing accounts about three
confused, searching people, capable of change and perhaps even transcendence. White limbs
the delicate, finally-articulated consciousness of even the most disturbing characters, even
Bobby Boy, who is often tellingly referred to as 'that swinging ***'. But in Curtis
White's world, even "a swinging ***" can inspire sympathy, truly. It is as if White
has finally dropped all the precious posturing of meta-fiction and returned home, the prodigal
son, to the riches of the american novel, in the american grain, in the rich vernacular
of the american voice, for goodness sake there is even a character, a boxer named Jake. The
miracle of it all is that the novel takes place entirely within a network of computers,
but how richly it is felt, how striking, how resonant, and finally, how familiar it all
is. Perhaps the most moving section, one that touches every modern life, concerns Gerald's
attempt to find his wife by searching in an enormous cloud site, something so vast and
metaphysical that it seems to transcend all the thousands of personal computers in a thousand
separate family dens that in theory make up this ethereal world. The long mournful searches
among the web's seedier dives are some of the most painful, revealing, and finally beautiful
passages in the long history of the novel. One thinks of Goethe's Doctor Faust. One minor
complaint here. Gerald is said to be led on this journey into the twilight of the web
by a homunculus, who seems not to be much more than an intense dot of light in a glass
file. For all White's painstaking and detailed realism some of the descriptions of the homunculus
and his little test tube or whatever it is, "walking down a brick staircase", are hard
to swallow. Still, something had to lead him to the homeplace of the mothers, or MILFs.
I have to say that I have no idea what to make of the strange claim that these MILFs
are the eternal feminine. This will perhaps offend some of his readers on the West Coast,
of whom I can't help but hope there will be many. Still, Curtis White's "All At Once"
is a masterpiece. You know, I've never heard anybody say that about any of my work its
funny, I had to say it about myself, finally. It is, as he says, and this is the subtitle
of the book, "the last possible work of literary gigantism". It is a romance that will not
leave the reader's eye dry. "All At Once" is an indelible portrait, not only of our
time, but of any time. And that, is all I have for you this evening.