Robert Kelly (1) (1935–)

Ordinarily, when a book is full of unresolved puzzles and loose ends, when its narrator is sexually insinuating without detail or description and when a book fails to end in a conventional way, I hate the book. Much of the OuLiPo literature and the hyper-saturated symbolist literature that “The Scorpions” sometimes resembles is also, as far as I’m concerned, supremely irritating. But I’m a sucker for unconventional detective fiction and lethal, arrogant, philandering eccentrics.

Kelly is also a talented, deliberate and sensitive prose stylist. I enjoyed, “Now no memorial of her act was left besides my own rapidly blurring memory of the open-lipped tension of triumph in her face as she’d taken the steaks under her wing, her quick stiff-kneed sumptuous walk away.” & “Cat fanciers, dog breeders, parakeet tenders, goldfish feeders, little they knew or cared how much of themselves they alienated to the animals in their charge. Beasts crave souls from men, suck those souls.” Kelly’s solid physical humor is a perfect antidote to the potentially eye-glazing details about astrology and numerology, just as the narrator’s libido is an ideal counterbalance to his ritual, cerebralized paganism.

I’m still incredulous that I judge Kelly to be successful in attempting exactly the sort of closure that he describes in the afterword, which is an especially helpful lubricant and apology for the book’s uncompromising end. The shrug of a conclusion is a smashing commentary on all of the novel’s ploys and titillations. It could be taken as a fond dismissal of recently popular forms of over-precious and over-wrought American experimental fiction.

Worth mentioning: it feels, in its oddness and pace, like a Murakami novel with a toxic protagonist.… (mehr)

This is an odd sort of a book. It seems to be describing a case of UFO abduction in terms of a Native American shamanistic initiation. I am uncertain about that, being neither a shaman nor an abductee.
I was put off initially by the flowery diction of the narrator. I grew up not too far in space-time from when and where the protagonist grew up near the Delaware River. I assure you that nobody spoke like that in that region. It occurred to me that this is probably because the narrator is describing events of childhood after undergoing the transformative event, whatever it was.
I was unable to finish the book, but may try again later.… (mehr)