Tripticks Book

If you come filled with dreams, it may happen that your dream changes about every 15 minutes. The most is yet to come.

This would have been the perfect road-trip reading, had I known about it one month ago. As it is, this indeterminate landscape of exercise crazes, seedy motels, and Joshua-tree ringed hot springs is all too familiar. And though we never made it to Phoenix, I feel like Robert Altman was aiming at the same America seen here when he made O.C. and Stiggs.

Something I read had lead me to believe Ann Quin would be super-dry avant-garde opacity. In fact, her final novel is hysterical, a certainly experimental but dagger-witted rampage across an America burning with sex, consumerist bloat, and roadside attractions, deftly rendered in lists, statistics, and various cut-up interruptions derived from advertising, pulp blurbs, and brochures. These interruptions, which often occur mid-paragraph and with no warning besides a sudden disappearance of the first-person 'I', can make this a little confused at times I suppose (rumors about difficulty), and tends to garble the elegance of the prose a bit (none of these extra-story sources possessing Quin's own command of language, of course) but the technique really works. How better to present a universe being systematically brainwashed by television and 70s search-for-self culture. It takes a little adjustment, but once you get it, it really works, becoming more fun and readable than alternate dystopian road-novel Flet, for instance, and I liked Flet. It certainly seems more tightly directed than the Burroughsian cut-ups of Naked Lunch.

Eerie rites greet the morning sun. He kneels on the floor grasping a small wheel with both hands and slowly prostrates himself. On a roof not far away someone runs on a treadmill. The president of a dressmaking company puts on a belt that sends electric shocks to his abdomen, while his wife stands with one foot on a four-wheeled board and the other foot on another four-wheeled board reverently squatting and rising, while their daughter lies head down on a slanted board, jerking convulsively at the waist. Sauna belts to sweat into. Executive Barbells to swing. Tensolators for building up muscles; vibrator massage machines ('both centrifugal and percussive action') and roller massage machines ('for deep-penetrating massage') treadmills and rocks and vibrating belts and electric bicycles ('Do your story dictation aboard a Trimcycle'). Tone-O-Matic weighted belts - belts weighted with 10 pounds of lead and intended to be worn in the normal course of a day's activity. One man cried that his hands were getting bigger and bigger.

The actual plot is pretty simple: our protagonist and apparent embodiment of his times is on the run from his No.1 X-wife, their paths crisscrossing so that they often end up at the same motels, where our (anti)hero can peer through the keyhole at X and new lover doing naked yoga together or whatever (he's jealous that she never did naked yoga with him of course). In the process, various pulp-inflected scenarios play out and the protagonist mulls over his three failed marriages, jumping in time and through a long epistolary section (perhaps he has brought his letters with him in order to re-read. Again, it's a little garbled and uneven at times, but it seems true-to-subject and a perhaps natural result of reminiscing and channel surfing at the same time).

The book is also notably interspersed with images seeming traced from collaged ephemera of the times: advertising circulars, noir scenes, sex, superheroes, random details of faces and objects. These come as rythmic interuptions that pace out the action, mirroring motifs and themes without ever actually illustrating. The technique works, I think, another sub-hum of the major information hum continuously barraging the story.

Anyway. This was great, and I'm totally excited to read more Quin. A shame this was the last thing she wrote before swimming out into the ocean and disappearing at age 37.