Thomas Glynn

review of
Thomas Glynn's Temporary Sanity
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 22, 2013

In addition to simply liking the title of this bk, I was attracted to it b/c it's published by the Fiction Collective. I like collectives, I like that people who might not be published by bigger publishing houses b/c of commercial restraints take the publishing into their own hands so that they can get it out there - hopefully w/ fewer commercial concerns to inhibit them. I know very little about the Fiction Collective, I associate it w/ Raymond Federman, a writer that I have an interest in but whose work I have yet to get to know very well. Otherwise, I met a woman recently whose 1st novel is also published by the FC & she was friendly & interesting so that got me further intrigued.

As for Temporary Sanity (1976)? At 1st it seemed a bit like an amalgam of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937) w/ its plot revolving around the protection of "Lennie" from persecution for his difference Paul Metcalf's Will West (1956) b/c of its main character being a native american on the run from the law Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) w/ its theme of incarceration in a mental institution & its native american character "Chief Bromden". Temporary Sanity has "Lester" as a character being protected against incarceration in a mental institution "Jim", a native american character, running from the law. Might as well throw in a little of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1875) w/ his malevolently stereotyped character "Injun Joe" being counterbalanced by Glynn's more positive characterization. There's even a bit of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, b/c of the fluoridation conspiracy theory. I'd even throw Thelma & Louise in there if it weren't from 1991.

At any rate, Temporary Sanity fits right in w/ a lineage of outlaw narratives w/ a subtext of glorification of a 'lunatic fringe'. The native american character, Jim, is depicted as less violently crazy & more stoical than the rest of Lester's family & crew. Lester gets kidnapped to an 'asylum' & his brothers, Jarrel & Jeeter, along w/ Jim, go to visit him w/ an eye to dynamiting him & the other patients free. The head doctor puts on his professional smile to meet the family & asks Jarrel what he does (ie: for a living). "Then Jim asked the doctor what he did and the doctor just smiled at him. It was a slow smile, the kind of smile someone does when he's getting a long, slow, hard look at something. The doctor hadn't paid much attention to Jim but he did now. He asked Jim who he was and Jim told him he was an Indian. Jim asked the doctor who he was and the doctor just smiled at him again, nice and slow." (p 22) Love it! A beautiful example of putting someone on the spot who's not accustomed to having his authority questioned.

Jarrel has a thing for dynamite. It's a bet sensational, like much of the bk, but it's not that overdone:

"They trusted Jarrel in chemistry until he mixed an explosive that blew a hole through a wall in the chemistry lab. He was taken out of chemistry and put back in shop. That was the first time he tried to blow up the school. There were several attempts after that, the last one landing him in jail. He ate his way out, gnawing through a cement wall." (p 19)

Jarrel hates doctors & anyone else w/ a legalized hierarchical position & this theme underlies the family's exploits. In an internal monolog of Lester's recounting various inmate's interactions w/ institutional staff there's this: "We will tell each other about the things we did and if there is anything that is not right with us, anything that is bothering us we will talk about that. I didn't do shit today. That's not being positive Mr. Mercer. You don't know shit from shinola. Your're [sic] not even a doctor. You're a bozo. All bozos. I hate bozos. We'll go on to Mr. Hollaway. I'm fine doctor. I feel just fine. Everything is wonderful. I love all the people here. I love you. Is that all Mr. Hollaway? Yes. Is there anything I left out? No, you did just fine. Thank you. Can I have a cookie? Does anybody else want to say anything? Does anybody else have any bad feelings they want to get out so they can feel good? Yes doctor, I just want to say in all sincerity that you are a shit and that I am being oppressed in here. I am in the company of dunces, condescended to by morons, instructed by idiots, denied my basic civil liberties, persecuted, and deprived of needed legitimate medical attention." (p 28)

Jim believes he can fly. In a pivotal scene, he stands perched on the edge of the roof of a bldg about to jump - w/ various onlookers, mostly trying to get him to stop. He recalls older Indians telling stories. "But you could tell the old people were Indians in the face and that was where everything was. It was like a map, like history. They had deep lines in their face. Each face had a picture scratched in. Sometimes it was a picture of the man who wore it but most often the picture a man wore on his face had nothing to do with the man himself. It was put there when he was young by his grandmother. He knew about the picture on his face and he treasured it and helped it grow and he also knew that the picture wouldn't be finished until he was very old and that any man who died before his picture was finished, unless he died in battle, that man's spirit would roam for a hundred years before it would find peace. Each man treasured his own picture and waited for the day when he became old and could show his picture to other men. Everyone would gather around and admire the picture on his face and he would be happy and feel good. Running Bear had a picture of the Sacred Tree and the older he got the more leaves and roots and branches you could see until when he was almost ninety you could see the whole tree in his face and when Running Bear talked the tree stirred and the leaves shook just as if the wind had come along." (pp 79-80) I particularly like that passage. It's left ambiguous as to whether Jim flies here or not. His presence in following chapters is minimized for awhile & the reader is left to choose between 'realism' &, perhaps, the desire for Jim, & the imagination in general, to 'win' in a battle against stultification.

There's plenty of heartfelt description here to keep the reader interested: a description of fishing, a description of the difficulty of farming in New York state, a particularly poignant description of a "berserk mountain man" (pp 103-104), & then.. & then.. we get to the rape scene where the woman eventually succumbs to the instinctive mating urge.. I've read elsewhere on GoodReads a woman reviewing such a scene & talking about how sick of them she is & I must say I agree. Nonetheless, humans are brutes & I prefer to not gloss that over.

In a scene where a military-like force attempts to capture the family in a raid on their wilderness hide-out: "They were almost up the hill when one of them started to run, a short, chubby faced ex-marine who liked to jack deer, and fell, his gun going off and the bullet passing through his own left shoulder." (p 107) For me, this hearkens to the raid on MOVE's Powelton Village house in 1978 when at least one policeman was killed in what very well may've been 'friendly fire' resulting in all 9 of the MOVE members under siege unjustly being sentenced to prison for this. W/o resorting to spoilers, let's say that this scene sees the death of dreams.

Later, the bk once again seems to show its place in a narrative lineage by trolling thru alternative pop culture by evoking The Who's 1969 album Tommy & having Lester be a Pinball Wizard.

Parts of this were reminiscent of my own youth in the 1960s & early 1970s: "Cars flew by in a fury of stones and dust and mud, smelling of oil and rubber. Once in a while a window would roll down and a beer can would be thrown in his direction. Or an ashtray emptied to the sound of disappearing laughter." (p 140) The walker in this scene being Lester. Lester's eventually given a ride by 'hippies' (not the way it's described here). This, too, is reminiscent for me.

""The world is pure invention from one minute to the next." So says character Ronald Sukenick in author Ronald Sukenick's last novel, "Out." So suggest these three books from the Fiction Collective. This kind of inventive urgency made Beckett demand of himself "an impossible art." Collectivists Sukenick, Russell Banks and Mark Mirsky choose an implausible art, a fiction of elaborate lies. Their stories grow out of play, fantasy and myth, where imagination asserts its own amorphous way, creates its own plausibility." So says Thomas LeClair in his May 18, 1975 New York Times review of 3 early bks from the FC & I think that this excellent review cd apply to Glynn's bk as well. LeClair, a teacher of "contemporary fiction at [t]he University of Cincinnati" at the time of the writing of the review, ends w/ "The Collective is committed to "non-commercial quality fiction." Sukenick, Banks and Mirsky don't have a mass appeal, but I do think they should and could be read by a wider audience then the Collective projects or cultivates. It wouldn't be an embarrassment for one of these books to sell a lot of copies." & I quite agree. Again, this cd equally apply to Glynn's writing.

I see online that Glynn has an "eighteen hundred page novel on the first one hundred and fifty years of Dannemora prison, called The Cathedral of Time [that's] currently in the archives at St. Lawrence University in Canton New York." ( http://members.authorsguild.net/tpglynn/ ) Intriguing. I smell another challenge for the GoodReads reviewers eager for literary massiveness (Nathan "N. R." Gaddis, eg).… (mehr)