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  • Beneath the Surface of Letters
  • James Tadd Adcox (bio)
Twentieth Century Man
Michael Joyce
Otis Books
www.otis.edu/books-readers
144Pages; Print, $12.95
Foucault, in Winter, in the Linneaus Garden
Michael Joyce
Starcherone Books
www.starcherone.com
184Pages; Print, $16.00

Gertrude Stein once said that we always see the previous generations as being either children or very old, whereas we inevitably conceive of ourselves and our cohort as young men and women, whatever our age. We, who are so used to doing, can never quite get our heads around what time is doing to us. An epigraph from Ernst Mach at the beginning of Michael Joyce’s novel Twentieth Century Man says something similar, if slightly more abstract:

The boundaries between things are disappearing, the world and the subject are no longer separate, it seems time stands still.

With this, Joyce is preparing us for, or perhaps warning us, what we’re getting into: narrated in the second person, the novel allows no separation between reader and protagonist, and often precious little separation between its elderly protagonist and the world around him.

Cy, a ninety-something professor of linguistics, has come alone to a friend’s lake house for reasons that are not quite clear. It’s possible that he doesn’t know them himself. Sometime shortly before the book’s beginning, he has discovered a body in the woods, one he recognizes: the boyfriend of his research assistant—a young woman who has been hired as much to serve as an in-home aide as to research the history of the nearly lost language Cy is studying. The boyfriend’s body and Cy’s failure to report it to the police come to haunt the book, shading and corrupting nearly every interaction Cy has—whether with the property caretaker who comes to check in on him from time to time, with the local police, or with his daughter, Diedre, who has her own complicated relationship to the dead boy.

If first-person narrators, with their tendency towards unreliability, can occasionally leave readers feeling trapped, the second-person voice employed here by Joyce can be downright claustrophobic. Sometimes it feels as though we are overhearing Cy’s internal monologue, addressing himself; at others the protagonist is elided entirely, and movement is achieved in the space between one perception and the next:

There is a spring-locked and gasketed plastic container of Grapenuts on the counter, the hard brown things like mouse turds but surprisingly sweet and, yes, nut-like. Nonetheless roughage, especially on a throat dry from weeping. A can of low-sodium chicken stock and the can opener where it should be in the drawer where, programmatically, a householder would be expected to put it. But the burners of the stove, a modest—for people in the entertainment industry—Aga Companion four burner in black, fail to whisper, the LP valve turned off at the tank for the season.

The two-quart saucier sits stable upon the embers of the fire although its sides are scorched by the time it comes off.

Such techniques bring to mind Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy (1957), a book that Twentieth Century Man recalls in other ways as well. As in Jealousy, there is a murder at the heart of the narrative, and there’s sufficient ambiguity to make it nearly impossible to know whether this murder really occurred or is a product of the protagonist’s imagination. Joyce, however, has a sympathy for his protagonist that makes Twentieth Century Man, perhaps paradoxically, a more difficult book to read. Cy’s refusal, again and again, to simply tell someone about the body, or otherwise get help, is at once maddening and understandable. This, combined with the lack of narrative distance, often makes one feel as though trapped in a body over which one has no control. I found myself needing to put the book down, at times, as if to come up for air.

Joyce’s most recent novel, Foucault, in Winter, in the Linnaeus Garden, shares a number of concerns with Twentieth Century Man: subjectivity, narrative ambiguity, and what is referred to, in academic circles at least, as the...

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