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(More customer reviews)Foucault's Discipline and Punish opened our eyes to the powers that be that watch us and subjugate us, imprison and punish us, which over the course of history became our own eye. D.A. Miller brought Foucault to the novel in the Novel and the Police, examining the all too conspicuous presence of police in 19th century novels in terms of the novel's rise in the "age of discipline," tracing the novel's "policing function" and exposing the development and workings of the "novelistic Panopticon." Carl Watson's novel, The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts, seems a new development in the genealogy for the 21st century, another turn in the Foucauldian screw, if you will. We don't get discipline. We get crime (or it might be better to say that discipline gets rewritten as crime). We don't get the novelistic Panopticon. We get a hotel.
The novel almost defies summary. I could tell you that there are four main characters: Jack Matlow and Vince Petefish, the criminals, Nicholas Jukes, the madman who confesses to crimes he did not commit, and Esmeralda Hopper (Aka Madame Little-Ease), the artist, who denies crimes she may have committed. I could tell you that there is only one character and his name is Jack Matlow. Or I could tell you his name is Nicholas Jukes. I could tell you that there is an attempt to steal a piece of art and that there is a murder, or two. Or I could tell you that nothing happens, really. "Really" is a key word, one already problematic in fiction that Watson here complicates even further. What is really happening? Structurally, Watson makes it very difficult to locate yourself in the text. The narrative voices are constantly switching. The novel begins in Jack's voice some time after he and Vince botch an attempt to steal Hopper's newest art-piece possibly killing Hopper in the process. We don't get this scene yet, though. It comes later--much later. Immediately after that we move into Jack's reflections and memories. Chapters 4-6 are in the voice of an unidentified character--not your typical third-person omniscient narrator, but someone with his/her own "I" who has an uncannily intimate knowledge of Jack. Vince then takes the focalization from Jack for a while. A psychiatric article on Nicholas Jukes, an essay by Esmeralda Jane Hopper, a conversation between Jack and Vince as recorded by Jack, mix up our sources of information, the voices that help us make sense of this--whatever this is. There seems to be a chronology in the backstory that unfolds, but we are never made to really feel it. Moments seem suspended from temporality in their narration. While we move from Jack's boyhood to his adolescence to him as an adult, there is no developmental chronological progression. Temporality and voice are dislocated to disorient us.
It is precisely, however, through this disorientation, as our familiar notions of "reality" fail to serve us, that we locate ourselves really. Again, what you would think is the central action of the novel, the crime, is deferred while we wade through Jack's reflections on guns and television, tabloids and their production of the modern reality, memories of boys collecting used condoms and other debris from the action around the Agnes Marsh, fish with skulls in their eyes, the drunk, rat-eating dummy Jack and his friends called the Pope that they'd swing in front of drivers to make them think they killed children, people gestating stone or gelatinous fetuses in their heads, chests, throats, etc. If we don't get the event of the crime yet, we are immersed in a perversity, a criminal insanity, diffused throughout. Fantastical realism, surrealism, expressionism, carnivalization--none of these words quite do it. Ultimately, it's reality. At the novel's most bizarre, there's always something strangely familiar. Whether it's Freudian psychoanalysis, another novel, a headline you're always reading in the paper, a thought you yourself have had, something always hovers behind the scenes and reflections of the novel. Watson plays up the realities that haunt our fiction and the fictions that haunt our reality, compromising the integrity of the boundaries between them. "[T]he things that create us are the things we create," Jack says.
In the psychology article on Nicholas Jukes, the companion of Hopper who confesses to the crime Jack and Vince may or may not have committed, Dr. Irma Blachbaal describes Split Brain Syndrome (SBS).
"Here the left side of the brain creates stories in response to the attempts of the right side to discern narrative sense from raw data. In most cases, the `victim' of this war is not conscious of it, thus he or she regards these `stories' or fabrications as reality. If the fantasies are harmless or fit into prevailing social contexts, they are tolerated. Indeed SBS may be quite common among `normally' functioning individuals."
SBS, in fact, sounds like the condition of readers and writers of novels. The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts strips us, however, of the illusion that we function normally. Jukes fictionalizes crimes he does not commit because he wishes he had a secret to hide. Hopper creates art from blood and body parts because she wants to fight the airy and replace it with the real. Vince comes to the vision of "a world in which crime will be all there is, and prison the only satisfaction," surveillance as "mother's milk," crime as transcendence, and the perfect crime, the theft of art. Because crime is transgression, it becomes the way to mediate this fragmented fiction/reality, art/life. It, like the novel in general, like this novel in particular, crosses the line.
There's a lot more to say about the novel, a lot more to think about. The more you inhabit this novel, the more it inhabits you. But where exactly is this hotel? Is the hotel the halfway house/hotel 1338 W. Wilson where Jack lives or 4868 N. Sheridan where Jukes was placed? The halfway house/hotel, asylum, hospital all seem to blend into each other, just as the characters all blend into each other. Maybe Jack, Vince and Hopper are characters in Juke's head. Maybe they're all characters in Jack's head. Ultimately, the only thing of which you can be certain is that they're in your own. The Hotel is in your head. In the end, The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts is like the roach motel. You check in, but you don't check out. And it probably has a lot of roaches in it, too. It's not a clean place, after all. It's actually quite filthy. It harbors criminal minds. It is the scene of crime itself. But it manages to be a five-star Hotel because for those of us `"normally' functioning" split brain readers of novels, it feels like home.
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In the warped underworld of Uptown Chicago, two petty thieves, Jack and Vince--Dostoevskyan in their criminal use of philosophy, exalting in the stealing of art as the highest human act--meet their target, their nemesis and their double: Madame Little-Ease, a Satanic Grandma Moses, who paints on refuse with polluted blood.
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