Alex Austin (1)

Built into that mysterious space between fairytale, myth and gritty authenticity, Alex Austin’s Nakamura Reality is achingly real, hauntingly surreal, and vividly imaginative. It’s a wonderful tale of love lost, loveless loss, and fiction’s cruel machinations, where family ties tear and weave into a literary tapestry, and a wounded father works his way through the chess game of a broken life.

Beautifully descriptive, the author’s writing is as sure and convincing in its depiction of show more surfing beaches as in the waves of human emotion. Foreshadowed disaster might terrify any parent, and the rear-view desperation of depression is filled with the haunted if-onlys of unshakable guilt. Meanwhile hope seems ever unreachable, a knight’s move away. And the game is afoot.

Author of his own life and its sorrows, Hugh McPherson once thought he understood enough of his beloved wife’s Japanese culture. Now he feels more like a character in his father-in-law’s novel, as fictional author Kazuki directs the path of another tale. Well-chosen fonts separate the story’s divided channels. Well-crafted words bring them together. Well-structured mysteries offer a wealth of well-sprinkled clues. And only the final pages will show if revenge or hope was the promise after all.

A novel to be read slowly and savored, with mystery seasoning the space between the lines, Nakamura Reality is a masterpiece and highly recommended.

Disclosure: I was given a free preview edition by the publisher and I loved it! show less

I read in the paper today of an Australian writer winning 200 Aussie grand out of the blue, and after expressing the delight over this stunning financial turn of events, she said. 'I feel thrilled and validated.'
It hurts me to read that. This is not a good time for writers who need external validation. I could not read Alex Austin's Nakamura Reality without its extra-cover context lurking in my mind, particularly because it is billed as Austin's first novel. Austin's protago is a guy named show more Hugh, about 50 years old; the photo of Austin on the back of the book is of someone who could be 50...so my guess is Alex Austin has been writing for some time, has written more than this one novel, and is only now 'validated' by the decision of Permanent Press of Sag Harbor, NY, to publish his book. If I am right, someone will say that after sticking to it, Austin finally learned the craft or some horseshit like that. (If I'm wrong, you can see what writing in this cultural death maelstron does to a writer like me.) Well, Alex Austin doesn't write like a guy who finally figured it all out recently, his authorial diktats are everywhere authoritative, his decisions are sound, his timing excellent, and his characters, particularly Hugh, compelling enough that Austin's labors only gave me two days of pleasure (I was busy or it would have been one day), reading this beguiling story of alternating realities that amount more to a dual realism than surrealism--though there are moments that any surrealists would enjoy, particularly the book's near obsession with crayfish and visitations of large sea birds. The book is by nature a mystery, but delivered fluidly enough that it doesn not move like a detective novel, which it shouldn't, as it is about the impossible. I could explain that better by spoiling the read, which I won't do. The book ends in one of the ways it could, but the theme I choose to take away from it is a neutrally tinted version of the impossibility of life and of grasping reality during life. There are pleasing moments in which Hugh's writer father in law writes in a sort of tandem with Hugh's own actions--a dovetailing, too—these are like life's synchronicities that we never quite know what to do with. In the book they serve the author—in life we know not who they serve.
Reviews—I can't keep all the external shit out of my head—seem no matter how they may rave, to have to wind down at the end to some minor criticism, lest the reader think the reviewer gullible. I would have liked the book to be longer. I'm not just saying that. I really wish it were longer. There is a gap in the book between the time Hugh loses his sons and the time he decides to off himself—12 years. There is a novel in those twelve years. A little is said about that period, but it strikes me that only as little as possible; there is Hugh as an adulterer, and that too is another novel—though particularly in this case in this book that was handled extremely well: virtually nothing is explained (I can see a workshop student in fits), which seemed to me the perfect move for this book (nor was the 12 year gap necessary to fill in this book)...but there are more books here in the making...So I guess I really have no criticism.
I will explain the stars simply—three is either average or a way out; five is reserved for books I should have read a long time ago and are actually as great as they were supposed to be; four is I urge you to read this book, beginning with the buying of it: books are expensive, yes, but you will waste 20 or 30 bucks weekly for the rest of your life in ways that do your soul no good. So buy the book and read it: 4. show less

Reading Nakamura Reality by Alex Austin is like riding a perfect wave. In its exhilarating, grips-you-from-the-get-go prologue, "slabs of water, rhinos the surfers called them" are booming off shore. Closer, the shore break "sounded sharply like a gunshot." As you read Nakamura Reality (and do know it will be difficult not to complete it in one sitting), keep in mind this dualism Austin first evokes here with the imagery of waves: inside versus outside, far versus near. Incoming infinitely, show more ephemeral as they are, Austin's waves foreshadow and harbor clues in Nakamura Reality's epic prologue.

Alex Austin is a practiced illusionist in words and images. He's been a playwright; he's witnessed his words and images staged in Los Angeles and New York. He's published many stories both online and in print, including publication in two issues of Black Clock. You could safely say, as I will, because yes I know Alex, that he has a special way with words and images; employing them both to pull the wave over your eyes! Tricking you over and over again, for 272 mesmerizing pages -- I wished it would never end. For Nakamura Reality amazes me, as I consider how many intricate, interwoven, parallel dramas, realities, and confabulations of fiction and fact are introduced -- in action -- simultaneously. Even seemingly insignificant details Austin includes are imbued with foreboding, or longing or loss, like those pesky seagulls we'll see "swooping down" and "mewing insistently" throughout the mysterious narrative(s) of the novel. I just can't help wondering what the seagulls portend.

We meet at least three (but maybe more) of the major players in the prologue: Hugh and his twin sons Takumi and Hitoshi. They are on the beach in a supposed paradise in southern California, surveying those "rhinos" whose "chaotic" enormity is reminiscent to me of those magnificent rhinos in the grand finale of Big Wednesday. Once in a lifetime day. And what a likewise rare day for two boys and their Dad. To surf, or not to surf? That is the question; the question that preoccupied the double-minded indecisive Hugh who must decide for his eleven year old sons.

Twelve years pass from the prologue to chapter one. Hugh's sons, you probably figured, are long gone. Presumed dead. Disappeared. Likely drowned. Hugh's Japanese wife, Setsuko, resultantly divorces him. How could Hugh, she must have thought even if she never exactly stated so, though her relatively swift abandonment of Hugh clearly implied as much, be so reckless, so irresponsible, so stupid as to let Takumi and Hitoshi, her only sons, her defenseless children senselessly put in unnecessary danger for crying out loud!; how could Hugh let them paddle out into the surf that damnable day? And if it wasn't the recklessness of that dangerous surf, it was bows and arrows, and who knows what else! How could Hugh -- a schoolteacher for junior high punks (think pawns Aaron and Anna) because he couldn't make it as a writer; couldn't make it like her father -- let her boys play at archery unsupervised? What a dunce! Ergo, divorce was predictable. Perhaps her return to Japan, where she had first met Hugh at the university, was inevitable too. Home to the house of her famous father, a man of unimaginable power and influence as we'll soon find out; and whom, if we're to believe the boasting of his bodyguard, has "fans among the Yakuza -- big fans," Japan's most popular literary author next to Haruki Murakami, the magical realist, Kazuki Ono.

Once we meet Kazuki Ono, Nakamura Reality goes rogue wave. A novel-within-a-novel emerges. Fingal's Cave, Kazuki Ono's novel-in-progress, the novel we get to see him write and we get to read as we turn each successive page in the parallel time and the parallel life of Kazuki Ono's super real realityfiction. A lifelike realityfiction as believable and plausibly enacted as, say, The Truman Show's realityfiction. I can't help being reminded also of the cosmic puppeteers in Frank Herbert's The Heaven Makers, jaded and bored by eternity, playing God and making rook or knight moves in the finite realities of pathetic little earthlings. Let's just say Kazuki Ono treats his former son-in-law, Hugh, like a pathetic little earthling and leave it at that.

What an experience, reading a novel that's really two novels in one, the second novel (Fingal's Cave) like some experimental commentary on the first novel (Nakamura Reality); the former serving as both a biography and fantasy future history in the fated life of an unfortunate and unjustly bereaved man who did not deserve, no matter how many idiotic and impulsive and regrettable flings and affairs he had, the cold and bewildering punishment served to him by that shady conglomerate we never really see and can only imagine known as "Nakamura Reality".

~~~~~

Nakamura Reality is slated for publication by The Permanent Press in February, 2016. Heartfelt thanks to Alex Austin for titling the novel that was Fingal's Cave's predecessor what he did -- I like it a lot! -- and for thinking enough of the novel (was it Kazuki Ono's tenth?) that Kazuki read an excerpt from it at Pasadena's revered independent bookstore, Huddle's (I think that was 2010 or 2011, right?), when Ono's book tour arrived in Los Angeles. May that novel of Kazuki Ono's, the one preceding Fingal's Cave, come out of realityfiction someday soon and shine like the brilliance that is Nakamura Reality's. show less

Raphael Lennon works as an End Man at the Norval Corporation, which gathers up the digital life of every recently deceased person and makes that data available to their loved ones (at a price). But Norval has much more ambitious goals, and when Raphael goes on the trail of a possible "possum" (person who may have faked their death) he's drawn into the intrigue. Raphael also struggles with an unique mental condition, whereby he's physically unable to step outside of a square mile area in Los show more Angeles, known as the Miracle Mile (not to be confused with areas by the same name in Chicago and Las Vegas). This issue complicates his investigation, but also possibly informs it?
This book has a lot going on, and as with a lot of science fiction, it takes a while to get used to the terminology and the geography. I'm not sure whether I was helped or hindered by my familiarity with the area in which the story takes place. A reader who'd never been there might not have been as distracted by trying to figure out which of the specified landmarks are currently in existence.
The concept is an intriguing one, and definitely explores an area of sci-fi that seems imminent and also familiar. We're already invited to bequeath our gmail and facebook accounts to a "trusted friend" .. what if there was a corporation that aggregated all of our online life, including stuff we thought we deleted, and dressed it up in a nice package for sale? What's the logical next step to that?
Besides the complexity of Raphael's character, there are also some fascinating secondary and tertiary characters. I enjoyed reading about Pink, an unhoused woman who sells data on the street, and Geo the megalomaniacal Norval CEO with a digital eyeball. I would have liked more back story on both.
Overall, I enjoyed reading the book very much, and thank the author not only for the original Early Reviewers copy, but also a digital copy he sent over when I lost the paper one. show less