Dissolved

Albert Camus once observed that "A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers."

That about says it all for the present as well...except for the fornicating and the papers. For us—whatever "us" means—we are certainly not modern, and postmodern no longer seems to say much—a single word will suffice: we have been dissolved.

Of course, there are still many among us who have a recessive fondness for sentences and even sentences in vast conspiracy with other sentences. We used to call those conspiracies in sentence-making novels, but for the contemporary novelist, the sentence is in crisis: a legitimacy crisis, an efficacy crisis, an existential crisis, and finally, a who-gives-a-fuck-what-I-do crisis.

This sense of crisis creates in the novelist scary feelings of irrelevance, denial, anger, and hopelessness ("acceptance" is out of the question [if only we were merely dying]). Fortunately, for artists, the feeling of hopelessness is also the gateway to freedom: since no one seems to care much what I do, I'll do what I want.

Christopher Grimes's new novel The Pornographers/Pornographies is so free it tempts me to be hopeful. And it is so joyfully energetic that it is hard to believe that its distressing subject is homo dissolvere: we-the-dissolved.

The Pornographers is a novel written in one long, grammatically correct (the back cover assures us) sentence. Pornographies is a collection of stories that tells the same story as the novel, mostly in the same words, but broken up into "stories." (Why these stories aren't just chapters is beyond me.)

There is a plot and even characters, lots of them, sort of. The protagonist is "us," low-level bureaucrats in the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. There is also "them," meaning the wives of "us." Beyond that, there is only an ersatz if irritable Mayor and Ms. Thumbtack, so named because her head resembles a thumbtack. (Couldn't quite picture her, but maybe that's the point.)

The storyline is this: in the year following the 9/11 attack, the federal government mandates (without funding) increased security measures requiring a massive outlay for new equipment (especially a Whisper CP 750 server). In desperation, the Mayor turns to the DNR to come up with a plan for creating new revenues. The DNR concludes that the best way to do this quickly is by creating a taxpayer-funded online pornography site of terrorist themed scenarios such as "The Burqa Bitches." At the same time, "our" wives are coming increasingly under the influence of yoga gurus Thumbtack and Swami Patanjali, with whom they plan on traveling to India, perhaps permanently, "we" fears. "We" spends a lot of energy trying to keep "them" home. "They" is determined to go, and seems more or less happy about the idea of leaving "us" behind.

A plot like this, funny as it is, cannot by itself sustain a novel, and writing in the first-person plural, funny as that is, doesn't help much. In fiction of this sort, there is huge pressure on the line-by-line life of the prose. Happily, it is in the energy and inventiveness of its language that this novel is most alive. Because that is what the work is finally about, that wonderful redundancy we call "art," showing us once again, as if we aren't capable of permanently learning the lesson, the way from death to life.

There's plenty of death in this novel. What passes for humanity is dissolved in systems: information technology systems, bureaucratic systems, systems of work, gender systems, ideological systems, and even occult systems. Unfortunately, this is a frighteningly close approximation to the way we actually live; if it weren't, we wouldn't get the joke. Grimes has written a satiric comedy about the tolerant, creative, and liberal management state.

Although this work wears its anarchic innovations on its sleeve, it is morally old-fashioned. It claims a place in an old and honored tradition...