`My Writer's Road to Damascus'

I look forward to reading the fiction of Roger Boylan, an American novelist raised in Ireland and Switzerland, among other places, whose thinking is cant-free, independent and tart. His first book, Killoyle, An Irish Farce, was published 10 years ago by Dalkey Archive Press, and in the Boston Review, Boylan has published “Nabokov’s Gift,” an appreciation of the Russian-American novelist on the 30th anniversary of his death:

“His humor reflected his soul, for he occupies a rare position in the annals of literature—especially modern literature—as that oxymoronic creature, the happy writer…. He was happy mainly because he loved being Vladimir Nabokov and he knew that his genius demonstrated the near-infinite possibilities of language and life and art. He cared not a whit for the carping of critics and the sour grapes of lesser writers, and, 30 years after his death, his overall influence as a one-man mission civilisatrice is still growing. He remains the master of the art of beauty in exactitude. Unexpected yet precise words are connected in his writing like the fine, unbreakable links of a silver necklace. Lesser writers settle for second best; he never does. He finds the right word, however unexpected.”

The critical point here is “beauty in exactitude,” for precision is the soul of both art and science. Nabokov was one of the last century’s great literary pleasure givers and a lepidopterist of global repute. Boylan quotes, from Speak, Memory, a favorite Nabokovian sentence:

“How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!”

Despite the horror and perversity often on display in his fiction, Nabokov was by nature a celebrator – of life, art and the expansive imagination. In a Dalkey Archive Press interview, the wonderfully named Eamonn Wall asks Boylan, “Unlike many writers nowadays, you are not part of a university. Do you think that the LitCrit crowd, as you call them, have taken the fun out of reading? What can be done about it?” Boylan answers:

“Yes, I think they have taken the fun out of reading, just as their ideological forebears in the Politburo tried to take the fun out of life. Like all ideologues, they -- the deconstructionists, the Lacanites, the Post-Modernists -- fear the individual spirit, i.e., Art, and they condescend to those who invoke Beauty. They prefer to speak of politics, and semiotics, and symbolism. It's all a mish-mash of psychoanalysis, sociology and politics, and none of it has anything to do with literature. What can be done about it? Ignore them, if possible; oppose them, if not.”

How refreshing, especially coming on the same day I happened to read the following sentence: “It is in this way that the analyst's desire is in Lacan's words, purified - it bears upon the role the analyst must play with respect to the patient.” I have no idea what the hell that means, except it confirms my contempt for the figure Nabokov condemned as “the Viennese quack” and all his silly progeny. In fact, Boylan’s literary tastes are consistently excellent. For instance:

“The discovery of Flann O'Brien's work was my writer's road to Damascus. His near-insane precision of language, unremitting absurdity, mixing of the mundane and the supernatural: didn't Joyce himself call him `a writer with the real comic spirit?’ Burgess, too, was a devotee. I return to O'Brien (or O'Nolan, or Myles) whenever I can, especially At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, but also (in deference to my publisher) The Dalkey Archive, and even his minor Keats and Chapman pieces cheer me up when I'm low.”

And this:

“Actually, Beckett's been misrepresented. Like Dostoevsky, he's much funnier and more accessible than the LitCrit crowd would have us believe (they want to keep great writers to themselves, the way the Catholic Church traditionally kept the Bible away from the average churchgoing punter). There's great compassion in Beckett's work, and hilarity, and the same kind of questioning of God and the universe you find in the Russians, who were, as a matter of fact, my favorite reading when I was young, especially Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Goncharov (Tolstoy's great, but lacks humor). I believe there's a strong emotional and spiritual kinship between Celts and Slavs, and it comes out in their subversive, slightly crazy view of the world (Jaroslav Hasek's a good non-Russian example), as well as in their devotion to language. Nabokov was a fine example of this, and he's long been one of my favorites; in fact, he reminds me of Flann O'Brien.”

As O’Brien might have it, Boylan is your only man.