{"id":71162,"date":"2022-04-01T03:03:52","date_gmt":"2022-04-01T07:03:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=71162"},"modified":"2022-04-05T13:13:04","modified_gmt":"2022-04-05T17:13:04","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-26","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2022\/04\/01\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-26\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan<\/a><\/strong>
\nTanguy Viel (Clayton McKee, trans.)
\nDalkey Archive<\/p>\n

Finally: An international novel that takes place in Detroit! Sort of. The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan is a novel by a French author about a French author who is tired of writing French novels and instead wants to write the kind of novel he sees everywhere, in airports and bookstores around the world: an \u201cinternational novel,\u201d written by the same set of authors, all of whom are American.<\/p>\n

Thus, the international novel is necessarily an American novel. More so, the narrator thinks, an American novel must be set in a mid-western town, which in this case is Detroit. Furthermore, since the narrator is following what he sees as a successful formula, he decides that his protagonist, Dwayne Koster, should be middle aged, recently divorced, and possessed of a drinking problem. The novel\u2019s \u201cDetroit\u201d is also reductionist, sounding like factoids about the city and its suburbs cobbled together from the first 20 results of a cursory Google search\u2014which is to say that, while the individual facts deployed may be true, in the aggregate they form a portrait no Michigander, let alone Detroiter, would recognize, or at least would see as anything other than a shallow caricature. This is part of the novel\u2019s charm: it\u2019s clunky deployment of authenticity signaling.<\/p>\n

For instance, when the narrator is introducing the backstory to a character named Susan Fraser, Dwayne Koster\u2019s future, then ex-, wife, he writes: \u201cShe was the kind of girl that you could imagine in a Renaissance Center office, managing the sales department of an automobile firm, as easily as you could picture her at a punk concert at the Masonic Temple, especially a punk concert at the Masonic Temple.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was born too late to be a part of the punk movement but one of the first things I thought to myself was that it would be good for a character to have been a punk while growing up in Detroit, maybe even to have fallen in love at an Iggy Pop concert. Then a little later, having matured over the years, the character would honeymoon at Niagara Falls. That\u2019s exactly what happened to Susan Fraser. The first time she kissed Dwane Koster was the day of the legendary Iggy Pop concert at the Masonic Temple on March 23, 1977, without knowing that she was going to become his wife, let alone the mother of his children, or that they\u2019d spend their honeymoon in the mist of the Falls, or that twenty years later she\u2019d regret it.<\/p>\n

At any rate, the narrator describes to us the contents of his \u201cAmerican\u201d novel as well as the reasons for his various editorial decisions in having his characters behave as they do. I won\u2019t repeat the plot here, which indeed does have a so-called action novel structure to it with illegal international shenanigans, but in Tanguy Viel\u2019s hands, the plot is secondary to Dwayne\u2019s foibles, which, true to classical tragedic form, lead inevitably to his final act.<\/p>\n

Rather than a parody of genre writing\u2014which it is, in part\u2014Viel\u2019s The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan<\/strong> demonstrates by inverse example that the conventions of genre\u2014its plotlines and character types\u2014are not the elements that make a story bad or good but that how a story is told determines whether it is liked or disliked, found comic or tragic, etc. Who\u2019s Jim Sullivan? That you can Google, and maybe stream his songs.
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