Dhalgren (1975)

It was good to finally get to this monster after much of a lifetime circling it. It's both maddening and seductive—deliberately obtuse yet surprisingly lucid. Full of strange surprises and effects. Rampantly sexual. I usually had a good sense of what was going on—spoiler, it's all weird. I have a natural suspicion of large novels (or even short stories) that begin midsentence, and I did bog down midway and it became harder to keep going, but mostly it's a pretty good ride. The setting is a city in the Midwest, Bellona, that has been destroyed by something never explained. Not only are there inconveniences of no radio, TV, or telephones, but also basic physics of time and visual perception don't seem to be particularly reliable. The main character cannot remember his name. Clues indicate it's likely William Dhalgren. He's known among the postapocalyptic survivors as the Kid, or Kidd, or just Kid. He wanders into the city—the only way in or out is a walk across a bridge over a river—and then has strange adventures. Among other things, he fancies himself a poet after he finds a partially filled notebook. Many passages of the novel, including much of the last section, are transcriptions from the notebook. Another theme is in the title of the second-last section, "Palimpsest" (dictionary definition: "a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain"). In the '90s the novel was used as the basis for an online real-time texting destination (or "MOO," as it was called), which fit Dhalgren's whole aesthetic well. The novel is intensely textual, with bizarre interpolations of multiple sources all the way. I'm not sure you could even do a kindle version of the last section. You might be able to do a movie, with some of the memorable images and ideas it has—a second moon, a sun that threatens to swallow the sky for one day (and one day only), a gangster rig that turns into giant holographic images of dragons and other creatures. The gang is casually called "scorpions." More than anything they remind me of '80s DIY hardcore punk-rockers even though the novel came first. Maybe Jamaican rockers. Dhalgren has an amazing amount of gay and polyamorous sex for 1975 SF but it's just woven in. It might still be ahead of its time, or have finally just arrived at it.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.