Sergio De La Pava

I'm giving up. A Naked Singularity is like a slightly more legible Infinite Jest, what with all the nasty digressions (which I actually appreciated in the beginning though they slowly became more and more overwhelming in their irrelevance and underwhelming in their literary merits) and infinite, somewhat-entertaining theorization and larger-than-life (and so fucking irritating) characters, all of whom speak like philosophy pHDs.

There's a point at which I clearly lost momentum, and the show more digressions had stopped doing it for me, and I started flipping past them to get to the next chunk of likable literature. That's when I knew I had to quit. Also, it's hard not to get annoyed at all the Wallacian ticks that de la Pava is so into, being all clever and ironic and shit. At some point past the 400th page, all of it got on my nerves, and I started being completely turned off even by the good parts.

I especially wanted to burn that weird boxing digression.

I can't give it one star, though, because I really liked the first two or so hundred pages, especially the legal dialogue, which rang true and punched right into my gut. Other than that... fuck man. Literature needs to get over DFW and start sounding authentic. show less

I really like De La Pava's work, especially Lost empress but also naked singularity (haven't been able to get a copy of personae). I dunno about this one - it's short enough I'd normally read in a short time but ended up taking a month, maybe it's better in a shorter sitting

The hard boiled detective part was fun enough, at times it was very magical realism in how some parts are detailed and other parts just time-skip and you can't overthink it (he puts up hidden cameras??).

But when it turns show more in the last 20%, I just lost everything. Partly I just don't like horror and you can have a horrifically dastardly villain without gore. But also I think De La Pava starts to speak too much like a lawyer and it just becomes annoying. In other books, it became so pretentious it almost goes full circle, and out through the other side into hilarious+tragic+solemn+philosophical+sincere all at the same time; thoughtful in a way where it seems like the characters (and the author) forget there's another way of speaking and they just want to articulate clearly. I remember particularly the ends of Naked Singularity (didn't love that one but it was transcendent) and of Lost Empress (which I did love) where it felt like a crescendo building.

This wasn't that for me. Maybe it just kept going too long. Maybe the others were offset by the mundane setting, while this was fantastical (in an honestly uninteresting way and unwarranted). Maybe I just prefer vaguely happy endings.

I always feel bad leaving a negative rating on a new book - he's a great author and it has lines which floor me. I think it shows how difficult writing is, that it can have all the ingredients which De La Pava has been uniquely good at producing, and I left less happy than I had hoped. I also think he was under his own constraints I don't understand, maybe it was all allegorical in a way I need to reread to understand. Will read whatever he writes next with enthusiasm show less

Casi is a public defender in NYC. His stories about the inside workings of criminal justice system--the types of clients he gets and their crimes, the back and forth with prosecutors, his droll musings on the differences (and sometimes similarities) between what the law states and how it works out in real life, and the the frequent inequities in the law as applied--are always entertaining, but never lose sight of the fact that these are serious matters. To this extent, the book sometimes show more feels like non-fiction, albeit humorous and very readable non-fiction. For example, his explanation of how criminal defendants have been given, and why they need their Miranda rights is told in such a tongue-in-cheek way that even non-attorneys will get a kick out of reading his musings. As a retired attorney, (albeit one in a field with far, far less trial practice and with more affluent clients) I very much identified with Casi's descriptions. For example, this description of what it feels like to know you have a case that is going to trial instead of settling really spoke to me:

"...a case that goes to trial is a hideously deformed corporal appendage that forces you to hunch down in deference to its weight. Always on your mind despite your best efforts, but you don't dare kill it for fear that you, the host, will join in its demise..."

and at trial:

"...{there is a} legitimate response to observers who question a trial attorney's particular decision or action during trial. The response in distilled form is that things happen a lot faster in the well than they do for someone sitting on the fat ass in the audience."

However, the book is also a compelling work of fiction. Casi is driven and ambitious; he has never lost a case, and wants to carry the largest case load in the office. Then Dane, another obsessively competitive attorney in the office, proposes, at first in theory only, the idea of a perfect crime--if you knew you could never get caught, would become immensely wealthy as a result of your crime, and would hurt no one (other than perhaps drug dealers) would you commit that crime? It's not long before Dane proposes the commission of an specific crime, and soon Dane and a reluctant Casi (who still sees the idea in theoretical terms only) are working out the details.

The book is full of pop culture references which I had fun working out (i.e. "Come and knock on our door"--does anyone recognize that? Or how about "To the moon, Alice, to the moon"? And do you remember Father Mulcahey?) It's also a very leisurely, in a manic sort of way, book, and some might think it needs some brutal editing. I'm one who enoyed the Robin Williams like riffs on a wide variety of subjects with one exception. In the second half of the book, there are long digressions about boxing, and particularly the life and times of a particular boxer, Wilfred Benitez. (Is he real?) My personal view is that these boxing passages felt out of place and added nothing to the book. show less

Problems with Combining DFW's Prose with Detective-Story Plots

I'm writing these opening paragraphs in May 2018; I wrote the review that follows in fall 2011. At that time de la Pava's only book was "Naked Singularity," and it was not well known. It's famous now for having been self-published after 88 agents rejected the proposal; after it was published by University of Chicago Press (thanks, I think, in large measure to Kristy McGuire), it got more attention; in 2015 or so I found a copy, show more published by an English press, in a bookstore in a small town in Ireland, in with a small fiction selection that also included Melville, Austen, and others. Most North American readers probably discovered de la Pava in a review of his third novel, "Lost Empress," in "The New Yorker," May 7, 2018. More on that at the end of this review.

*

"Naked singularity" is a dense, 689-page self-published novel with no endorsements and, as far as I can see, only three reviews on the internet.

A tremendously perplexing novel. The first four hundred pages are more or less out to match "Infinite Jest." They are written at a pitch of cleverness and complexity, with asides, chapter-long irrelevant distractions (sometimes insouciantly declared, by the author, as irrelevant), philosophical interruptions, and compulsively micromanaged descriptions, all in the service, apparently, of a vast and continuously enlarging cast of characters and situations that can just barely be remembered by the ideal assiduous reader. This is done with the help of sharply written courtroom slang, strongly reminiscent of, and probably competitive with, "The Wire" or Richard Price specifically.

A reader who stops after four hundred pages might do so because she is exhausted by the prospect of another David Foster Wallace, even if that prospect is spiced by bleeding-edge contemporary urban conversation, larded with solecisms, misspellings, travesties against grammar, and "em" and "ums" and "..."s. (That is: ellipses marking where the interlocutor doesn't speak: an invention, I think, of DWF's.)

In next hundred pages things tighten up, and a reader will realize that there is a single plot after all, and that the novel is in fact driven by this plot in a way that DFW would have experienced as dangerously non-fractal. At that point--somewhere in those roughly one hundred pages--my interest peaked, because then I thought de La Pava was trying to pull off a new hybrid form of fiction, mingling the overspilling and intentionally excessive maximalist plays with language with the plot-driven intricacies of, say, "Law and Order." But I became perplexed when I saw that despite De La Pava's characters' unremitting, hypertrophied self-awareness, which involves mandatory long chapters discussing fate, causality, and freedom, with examples drawn from Wittgenstein, Hume, and other staples of the undergraduate college curriculum, he (the author) was entirely unaware that a large part of the appeal of his book would, in fact, be the suspense generated not by the turn to a "policier" plot, but by the possibility that he might pull off this new fusion of genres. He seems to have written the book in the grip of the commonplace feverish admiration and ambition generated by DFW and publications like McSweeny's, and he seems to have thought he could profitably and unproblematically use those fictional techniques to write a truly great crime story. But that, to me, is a misunderstanding of the stakes of the entire DFW project, and the author's obliviousness to those stakes made me rethink the reasons for his attachment to perfectly pitched, hyper-eloquent minimalist dialogue and madly overstuffed maximalist description.

The last two hundred pages plunge into crime and courtroom drama. There are three concurrent plots: the narrator, a public defender, is under investigation; he has participated in a robbery; and he is trying to get a stay of execution for a death row inmate. Each of these is treated with a maximum of drama. When the narrator talks to his death row client, the prose is suddenly, frighteningly maudlin, Oprah style, including a tearful scene in the jail. ("Your eyes are funny now," the simple-minded inmate says to the narrator, implying that the narrator, and potentially also his readers, have been crying listening to the inmate's pathetic story; p. 491.) Then, when the narrator robs some drug dealers, the scene is edge-of-your seat exciting for a good thirty pages (starting abruptly on p. 516). That kind of writing has absolutely nothing in common with the prose experiments of the preceding four hundred pages, and the fact that the author does not notice the nature of that mismatch--he certainly understands that there is a mismatch, but not what it means in terms of the self-understanding of genres and writing projects--made me intensely disappointed.

So: given that the novel is a hybrid, in the pejorative sense of that word, meaning that it is an attempt at mixture where mixing remains the principal issue, what can be said about the writing itself? When the narrator and his legal colleagues talk, their speech is relentless in its cleverness, and when the perps talk, their speech is consistently surprisingly realistic and entertaining. Blending those two modes is a real accomplishment. But when the educated characters and think or speak, then it's DFW territory, and that part is problematic. There is a line to be drawn between writing that is tortured in order to be expressive, and writing that is tortured because the author is a compulsive torturer of language. Here are some lines I experience as compulsive, non-expressive cleverness. They might redouble my admiration for the author, but they don't mix in interesting or expressive ways with the scenes, the characters, or the story.

1. From the recounting of a corner store robbery caught on videotape. Two men, Rane and Cruz, have been stalking the store.

"Now Rane signals Cruz with his chin and they rhyme toward the counter, and the near-future decedent." (p. 77)

"Rhyming" to the counter is clever and visually effective, but "the near-future decedent" is a needless complication of "the man they were about to kill," intended, presumably, to keep us in mind of the legalistic context, and to foreshadow the mangled language that will be used at the trial. But here it's too much (spending so much time with the book makes me wonder if the author would prefer "supernumerary"). It's distracting because it points for the hundredth or thousandth time back to the author's wit.

2. "I recently began my thirtieth ellipse around our sun, an anniversary that as you can imagine barks louder than the usual ones." (p. 95)

Again, "my thirtieth ellipse" is clever, and expresses the speaker's resistance to acknowledging his age too directly; but "barks" distracts by bringing me back to the author and his wit.

Overall, too much of the writing is of this sort. Sentence sparkle is not the unproblematic virtue the author hopes it appears to be: it's a symptom, a sign of anxiety about straightforwardness, a sort of fear of the plain style, a tic, a compulsive complication with a life and logic of its own. In "A Naked Singularity" wit is intense: not so much intensely expressive as intensely compulsive. The issue is whether that compulsion is experienced as such by the author, thematized, explained by context and purpose, pondered, used for expressive purpose--or simply expressed the way a patient expresses a sign of illness. Wit, as DFW realized very deeply, sincerely, and ineffectually, is a problem as well as an accomplishment.

*

That's the review I wrote in 2011. The main point wasn't that de la Pava didn't take on board DFW's anxiety about the overwrought qualities of his own prose--a concern that became clear with "The Pale King"--it was that the detective-story plot didn't mix with the maximalist prose. And that was mainly because it was not thematized in the novel itself: nothing in "A Naked Singularity" explains or explores why the intricate legal plot needs its verbal fizz, or whether that style has a function beyond its compulsive drive to razor-wire sharpness.

Now, nearly eight years later, it seems that the readers who like de la Pava enjoy him precisely because he mixes maximalist prose with real-world plots. Here is Jonathan Dee, in "The New Yorker," praising de la Pava's third book, "Lost Empress":

"There are, to be sure, trace elements in 'Lost Empress' of David Foster Wallace and William Gaddis and other postmodern giants. What's unusual--electrifyingly so--is to see this kind of polyphonic, self-conscious literary performance and all-stops-pulled-out postmodernist production value brought to bear on upperclass lives, and on questions of social justice...." (p. 71).

It's "electrifying" for a hundred pages, but the shock wears off, because it's meaningless. show less