Submitted by Ronald Christ, May 5, 2007 13:33

Dennis's right-on comments about Paul West's The Immensity of the Here and Now, a novel of 9.11raise two points: 1) the prior rejection, not neglect, of Paul West's 9/11 novel by mainstream reviewing venues; 2) the black-out of West's work in general by such publications as the New York Times Book Review, New York Review of Books, etc.
One reason for this withholding of critical comment is that West has too often been seen as and praised for being a "stylist," which he is, and our best to boot; but in the strunked and whitened world of most reviewers such praise means "mere stylist,", and West's defense and practice of Purple Prose—in both manifesto and manifestation—rules him out of bounds for these gray people—as though West, or any great stylist, did not also have a symbiotic content.
At any rate, the Santa Fe New Mexican did not neglect or reject his heroic nove, and I wrote a review:

The Immensity of the Here and Now, a novel of 9.11
Paul West
Voyant Publishing, $23

Paul West is not only a novelist, he is an entire library; and his much-honored style is not a "high-wire act," as the Boston Globe called it—no, it's the whole grand show: from the glittering, lonely beauty twinkling on high, down to the sawdust and, yes! the dung on the arena's floor. Paul West is all three rings and the clowns on the sidelines and the cheering crowd too.
Because his prodigious style dazzles in a lusterless time, "when the taste for literature seems to have gone out the window," when distinctly less in prose is predictably valued more, West's bountiful spectrum has received its just praise, sometimes, at the expense of what he says. Now his timely new novel, a mourning meditation on our post-9/11 minds and souls that is charged by wit as well as philosophy and melody (and literary criticism and autobiographical detail and . . . ) may redirect readers' perception of more readers to what this great writer has been up to over the course of forty books. Let his "lover in extremis," his lamenting 9/11 character speak for him:
What I want to do is sweep them into my awkward embrace, including those few spare, unlucky ones who inhaled and miserably died because whoever mailed the anthrax had found some way of beating the electrostatic charge that kept the spores in place, allowing them to soar and be puffed. While millions survived.

Or again, "Why, he's just trying to tell us how it feels to be alive, that's all. Isn't that enough?"
The Immensity of the Here and Now, as its title proclaims, unfolds the 9/11 disaster across three years following the attack while also folding it back over all thought and felt history—looks backward and forward at once, as directed by the epigraph from Broch's The Death of Virgil, which lends West his title—at the same time that the novel excavates and elevates the soul of one survivor who lost his beloved in the towers' collapse and, like so many of us, to some degree, lost part of his mind as well. In such extensive and exactly sighted crosshairs, West views 9/11 relative to tremendous collapses—say that of the "topless towers of Ilium," the Fall of Troy—as well as to the unique suffering of an individual, the protagonist, Shrop, full name Shropshire, who visits a war-wounded psychiatrist, named Quent. As usual in West, the view is expressionist, in the sense that the awful event figures largest in Shrop's after-experience of it, not the calamity itself.
Shrop lost his beloved and his genuine philosophy in the wake of 9.11; Quent lost his lower limbs and an eye in the last World War: "a man who could remember only losing his memory confronted by a man who seemed to forget losing his legs and eye." No voodoo therapist, Quent does not try to revive Shrop's lost memory; rather, he attempts to instill another's, that of the philosopher Wittgenstein. Eventually Quent immolates himself at Ground Zero, in an act that confirms as well as annihilates, and miserable Shrop, who has now also lost his talking partner, dedicates himself to activities that might restore conversation—a multitudinous bash at his place, for example—only to ever more eloquently enter upon an entirely one-sided exchange with his lost love. At the novel's end he is reciting, "I'll never leave you, I'll never budge," as his seeks gunshops in the Yellow Pages, "amazed by how many brandish the Stars and Stripes." Finally he resorts to Pakistan, precisely to Sahhakot, "a market town of towers and forges, expert weaponsmiths." There "he is confident that fate will bring fugitive terrorists to the village in pursuit of guns or rounds, and then his moment will strike, most probably his last." Waiting, "he renews his appeals to his beloved to answer him direct from wherever, again with all of her transmuting skill: Sonia Judith Goldblatt, translator."
Without political or cultural bias, with a basis in a universal ethic—"Confronted with a horror, you at once assumed culpability for it, no excuses made. It so much belonged to the race entire, there was no backing down from it."—West views his 9/11 story on a world scale balanced by a private weight. Like Susan Sontag, in her regrettably notorious New Yorker response, West raises neither false pieties nor hollow denunciations. Perhaps he will suffer some of the same muddled, self-righteous rejection for writing that the disaster, which has been pronounced unique, is far from so, "more a loss of a nation's virginity than a cosmic singularity," as Sontag endured for correctly stating that the suicide attackers of the towers were not cowards. Shrop thinks: "Is America the broken what angers me?" (How many have dared utter: "America the broken "?) Shrop continues: "Who ever said that America was unique and would not be like all other countries, subject to the tyrant's sword, the devil's plots?" We all know, all too well, who continues to declaim such arrant arrogance, and to what ends; so thanks, to any power that will accept the thanks, for writers such as Sontag, West.
In the range of West's expressionism, you come to expect the unexpected as well as at least two predictable modes: one, the grotesque grubby, a literary semblance of George Crumb, truly nasty and exponentially elevated—or is it nether-worlded?—as when Quent is discovered with a paste of dead roaches covering his face. The other, of sometimes coloratura carnality, at others modal lyricism that would break an angel's heart, as in Shrop's final lament:
Instead of saying it alone, I ask others to join in, especially those who have lost someone. On we go, pleading and praising. To no answer . . . . We are special people, of course, the bereaved just as much s the lost. Grieving is bereaving, and bereaving is a way of being lost. All o four useless cries—Are you there? Will you come out and see us? Is there no allowance for the shattered soul?—fall on deaf ears and exploded minds. You are chanting to rock, to impossibly shrunken layers, for whom it is no good throwing any kind of bash. We have no future, have not had much of a past. The hammer blow comes next, impersonal as a year's weather, and all our minds need succoring, to be taken out, aired and polished, then replaced with a watchmakers precision. If it works at all and, whoever you are, you get a glimmer, a squeak, from the other side, a cuticle moon.

After such chanting, what praise?

Ronald Christ is president of PEN New Mexico

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