A Naked Singularity

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 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 show more 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

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, 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, show more "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

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 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 show more 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

Casi is a public defender working on the front line of America’s War on Drugs. So far he’s on the winning side. He’s never lost a case. But nothing lasts forever, and pride like his had a long fall.

Funny, smart and always surprising, A Naked Singularity speaks a language all of its own and reads like nothing else ever written. Casi’s beautiful mind and planetary intelligence make him an inimitable and unforgettable narrator.

As from the author narration, the labyrinthine miseries of the New York Justice System are as layered and diabolical as Dante’s nine circles of Hell. But the Devil doesn’t hog the best lines. There are plenty here to go around. The character got a chance to survive and earn big and can do well for his show more friends and partner who want to break through the misery of broken government wheel under it own pressure and Don't want to belong to that part of world where work look likes jail to them then work. show less

This is the most satisfying reading experience I've had since I kicked off 2016 with [b:The Recognitions|395058|The Recognitions|William Gaddis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1309209622s/395058.jpg|1299804]. This is a significant achievement for a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer (born in 1970, Sergio de la Pava self-published this novel in 2008 via XLibris) and a testament to an individual's vision over the strictures and biases of the marketplace. Like [b:The Recognitions|395058|The Recognitions|William Gaddis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1309209622s/395058.jpg|1299804], [b:You Bright and Risen Angels|45633|You Bright and Risen Angels|William T. Vollmann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389841557s/45633.jpg|2310146], show more [b:V.|5809|V.|Thomas Pynchon|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328110787s/5809.jpg|2999000], and, more recently, [b:Novel Explosives|29363276|Novel Explosives|Jim Gauer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1461083307s/29363276.jpg|49608696], A Naked Singularity is a constituent of a tradition of debut novels that shatters conventions and expectations. Pava reaches wildly for every pulsing fiber of life, transforms it into metaphor, analyses it exhaustively, and pins it to his specimen board like an obsessive lepidopterist. The result, an 864-page novel (in the hardcover MacLehose Press edition), is a museum of twenty-first century consciousness.

If there is one thing that can be said about this hefty tome, it is that, unlike many books billed as such, it is savagely hilarious. I'm not talking about a quippy little amused-chortle-and-forgotten type of humor; I mean, Pava is obviously quite comical and it shines through on page after page. And the humor is wide-ranging, too, not just the same brand of puns or off-the-way-bananas gags. No, this book offers all kinds of comedic entertainment from pitch-perfect deadpan sarcasm to the utterly side-splitting 10-page episode involving Señor Smoke burritos. I'm not sure I ever laughed so hard in my life as stilted lawyerly locution is brought to bear on a bathetic scatological scandal. For the most part, though, the laughing gas is served up at small, quick clips while the narrative races you headlong toward the conclusion.

The protagonist, apparently a stand-in for the author himself, is the perfect blend of a character readers like me want to follow. We get to the point in the narrative that we cannot wait to hear his take on one situation or thought or another. At once, he is: a charismatic, driven public defender (the opening 50 pages are dedicated to getting a sense of a day in his frenetic life, effortlessly moving from one client to another spinning webs of logic and rhetoric to circumvent even the most dire of charges, surmounting defeatism repeatedly); a successful individual who has, at twenty-four years of age, established a perfect defense record in the courtroom; an amateur philosopher, pulling out the ideas of Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hume, Locke, Leibniz, and Popper at will; an admirer of musicians of the ilk of Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen (he blasts Malmsteen's "Far Beyond the Sun" through his headphones in the courtroom!); a possessor of intelligently drôle humor that asserts a sort of control variable to the madness swirling around him (for a while, at least); and the perfect counterpoint to the enigmatic Dane, who will take us into explorations of perfection and mediocrity and failure ad nauseum.

Indeed, one of the book's greatest strengths is in it relentless and multifarious perspectives and ruminations of mediocrity. Dane, who is obsessed with achieving perfection, presents his latest in a spate of ploys to attain his goal: the perfect lawyerly representation. He plans to channel everything into this one case, whatever the cost to himself. But: "If it turned out I was no better than the average chump, if I was unable to achieve perfection even when every fiber in my being was pointed towards this simple goal, then I would accept it, this soul-robbing mediocrity, like a man" (237). Again, this aspiration is beautifully counterpoised with: "...chances were nobody could be as smart as I thought I was, and fools are often the last to know their status as such" (293). But the whole plight to transcend the dregs of mediocrity is so deftly drawn in this book that this theme alone makes it a universal text. How many people have I listened to who feel trapped and even like failures because of our culture's constant message that we can be and do whatever we want if we just work hard enough? It's simply not true and it is hindering more than it is helping, even if it does sound inspirational. Of course, money helps a bit, and the novel really takes off when Dane introduces this (complicating) factor into the plot.

To be continued. show less

It’s not every day that you encounter a book that pulls you under for hours at a time, submerges you in a world that’s surreal and real at the same time, one that’s eerie precisely because it’s so familiar. You don’t even notice that you’ve been holding your breath the entire time until you surface from the book, so dazzled by what you’ve experienced that you have a hard time processing what just happened. That’s how I felt the entire time that I read all 678 pages of this behemoth of a story by Sergio de la Pava. Each time that I tried to marshal my thoughts on this book into writing, tried to capture the experience of this book, my words just scattered everywhere. It’s difficult to describe a book that is about so show more many things.

A Naked Singularity will appeal to those readers who love overstuffed, ambitious books, full of ideas, seemingly random tangents, action and non-action, grittiness, whimsy, philosophy, absurdity, fairness, injustice, winners, losers, characters who are wise, characters who break your heart, and characters who are bullshitters; readers who can put their trust in the author and just go along for the ride, even when you don’t know where the fuck he’s taking you.

Right from the start, A Naked Singularity gets up in your face, pushing and prodding you to pay attention, to keep up. You end up in the middle of some conversation and you don’t know where the hell you are, but you just go with it. Soon, you come to realize that you’ll be experiencing this world through Casi, a young, talented public defender, as he navigates the criminal justice system in New York. He introduces us to the myriad people he’s defending (those accused of selling drugs and murder, those who are truly guilty, the innocent, the mentally-impaired); his encounters with a weird, high-strung guy who convinces him to take part in a heist to steal drug money; and his interactions with his strange neighbors conducting a silly TV experiment. Also woven throughout are continuous glimpses of the rise and fall of a famous Puerto Rican boxer.

You get meditations/digressions on how the law enforcement system isn’t just some disinterested party arresting powerless people, morality, the war on drugs, the death penalty, ideas about genius and talent, perfection, self-perception, the power of television and advertising, and those are just the obvious ones.

Even as all of these things are jam-packed into the book, never did it feel like a chore to read and that’s a credit to the strong narrative voice we have. De la Pava just has a way with dialogue and monologue, where the language just feels alive and authentic; it holds your attention, regardless of what the subject is. My four-star rating is a nod to this energetic prose.

I left off one star because there were a few misteps for me. There were one or two too many absurd situations for my taste. Once Ralph Kramden showed up (or did he?), it was just too much for me. But even then, I might’ve been able to overlook them had there been more emotional depth in the story. While I gulped down the story, I never felt any emotional pull, never understood Casi, never truly empathized with the characters. The only times in which the book seemed to get at some emotional truth were found in the stories of the mentally-impaired murderer on death row whom Casi defended and the story of the boxer. They evoked some sense of pathos, but they were tiny ripples of emotion, barely breaking through.

A shorthand way for a lot of people who tried to capture the appeal of this book is to compare it to Infinite Jest. And this comparison holds in a few ways, I agree. However, where the two diverge most distinctly for me is the effective expression of emotion. Infinite Jest had it, but A Naked Singularity didn't.

That being said, I still really liked the story. So the book had a few misses in the midst of the hits; that’s just the risk any author takes in plunking something this huge and ambitious onto the laps of readers, and that the readers take in agreeing to the challenge of reading it. By the end, you just hope that in the final tally the hits outweigh the misses. Good thing that this is the case with A Naked Singularity. show less

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Uh-oh, I thought when first receiving the 700-page, print-on-demand A Naked Singularity from Sergio De La Pava -- another self-published stream-of-consciousness epic for me to slog my way through. And the reason I had that reaction of course was because of a growing realization I've been making since opening CCLaP two and a half years ago, a surprising realization given how much of a self-publishing advocate I've been over the decades -- that for the most part, the publishing industry is pretty much a self-regulating system, and that the vast show more majority of self-published epics out there exist in that form because they sincerely aren't good enough to warrant a publishing contract from an outside organization. I mean, obviously there are many exceptions to this rule; but after now reviewing hundreds of self-published titles for this site, I've been surprised by how rarely it's the oft-argued case that they are unknown little sleeper hits that have simply slipped most people's attention, that in fact eight times out of ten it seems that either word-of-mouth or a grassroots fan base or a forward-thinking industry executive will get a legitimately deserving book the kind of attention it warrants, at least to the extent of convincing a stranger to spend their own time and money publishing it.

So it's always such a welcome surprise, then, to come across an example of that other 20 percent, the one out of five self-published novels that really does deserve more attention; because A Naked Singularity is indeed one of them, a book that for sure has its problems but that really is going to be intensely loved by a certain crowd out there. And that's because De La Pava is a writer's writer, a lover of big words and complex phrases put together in clever ways; and so like fellow complex writer's writers such as Thomas Pynchon or Denis Johnson, there is a limited audience only for De La Pava's work but an extra passionate one, the kind of author destined to always linger at the bottom of the bestseller lists even while racking up major awards year after year. And in fact, just like so much of Johnson's work as well, A Naked Singularity is at its heart a simple crime noir, the kind of intelligent caper story that simply breeds such basic narrative needs as conflict and drama, in order to make it an intriguing tale to begin with.

It's essentially the story of a young Latino public defender in New York who we only know as Casi, an idealistic workaholic who lives in a trendy section of Brooklyn, and who always seems to surround himself with fascinating characters who all tell great, convoluted stories, from the grumpy older attorneys in his office to the pop-culture-obsessed slackers squatting in the apartment next to his, to his "Ugly Betty" style cutesy-eccentric extended family. As we watch Casi go through the motions of a typical work week, then (including a look at a dozen lowlifes he's randomly assigned to in open court, a pro-bono anti-death-penalty case in Alabama he's taken on, a snippy judge who he gets into an ongoing fight with, his neighbor's attempt to psychically raise a corporeal form of The Honeymooners' Ralph Kramden through repeated drug-addled TV watchings of the show, and a lot more), Casi starts slowly learning from a co-worker the details of a plum situation that has randomly landed in their lap, info from a loose-lipped client on a major drug buy at a secret and hence unsecured location, in which nearly $20 million in cash will be on hand with barely any security. As Casi and his cooly sociopathic co-worker have more and more stoner-like hypothetical conversations concerning how exactly one would go about successfully ripping off said twenty million, the plan starts becoming more and more real in their heads; and about two-thirds of the way through they decide to actually try to pull it off, which in typical noir style goes disastrously wrong, the repercussions of which make up the surprise-filled last third of the manuscript.

But it's a mistake to judge A Naked Singularity only in terms of its noirish plot, no matter how inventive it sometimes is; because like so many other writers of this type, De La Pava uses this familiar framework as a way to hold together dozens of lengthy dialogues and digressions found throughout, to really explore both language and the pacing of speech in a way that will be much appreciated by his fellow fans of patient, well-crafted literature. And in this you can compare De La Pava not only to Pynchon and Johnson but to such other polarizing figures as David Mamet and Richard Price, in that all these authors tend to treasure and even fetishize the patterns and rhythms of the underclass, the accidental poetry that inherently comes with the slang-filled street talk of barely literate criminals and immigrant families. And much like Price, De La Pava gets away with this precisely by basing the plot itself on the exciting conventions of a crime noir, letting the story zip along on its own so that he can deliberately take long pauses within, in order to explore these dense and well-turned digressions that occur between the action-based set pieces.

Now, like I said, there are definitely problems with A Naked Singularity as well, starting with what you'd expect to be the biggest problem of a self-published stream-of-consciousness epic -- that it's in desperate need of an outside editor, someone who can go in and judiciously hack away at the sometimes novella-length side stories and get to a nice tight 400 pages by the end, basically the one thing right now stopping this book from having a chance of being a Price-style mainstream breakthrough hit of its own. But like I said, mostly I was surprisingly pleased by what I found here, given that overwritten self-published stream-of-consciousness epics more often than not make me want to claw out my own freaking eyes; and unlike 95 percent of basement-press books I review here, A Naked Singularity actually gets better and better as it continues, instead of starting strong and tapering off like so many others. It's not for everyone, but will definitely be a pleasing read for anyone into well-done crime projects, as well as those who like it when genre conceits are used to display an academic kind of superior writing style. The very definition of a hidden gem, it is just the thing for those who enjoy taking chances in the arts every so often.

Out of 10: 9.0 show less