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A Prefatory Notice to Vincent Czyz's Adrift in a Vanishing City Like every one of the last three dozen MFA theses I've read, Adrift in a Vanishing City (Rutherford: Voyant Publishing, 1998) is neither a novel nor, really, a collection of stand-alone stories. Familiar characters— Zirque (rhymes with Jerk), BlueJean, the Duke of Pallucca—disappear or are abandoned, reappear or are revisited tale to tale. But equally clearly these are not novel chapters. Our young writers seem unhappy with the strictures of both genres and are struggling to slough them. If you are a reader convinced of the irrevocable sociality of fiction, I warn you: Byand large, the text won't linger on how characters manage to pay for their various flights from Pittsburg, Kansas, to Paris, France, from Kansas to Amsterdam, how most of them make their living, or even scrounge up change for the next pint of booze, not to mention make the rent on an apartment in Budapest—another trait writer Vincent Czyz shares with many of his contemporaries. In their conviction that the world's socioeconomic specificities are every self's necessarily distinctive background, neither Austen nor Flaubert, Knut Hamsun nor James Joyce, VirginiaWoolf nor Henry Miller could have let such an omission by in their successive attempts to delve more and more deeply into some more and more highly foregrounded presentation of the subject. But the clash of micro-class and micro-class, macro-class and macro-class, that makes fiction interesting, or even useful, to the average Joe or Sue (not to mention to the commercial editors riding shotgun on the stopcock of the smoky trickle of confused tales—overplotted, understructured , and as incoherent and mixed in metaphor as the images within these parentheses, outside these dashes—throughout our Barnes &Nobles , onto our Big Name bookstores' shelves) are simply not in focus on Czyz's screen. They are bracketed along with all notion of labor. 23 Vincent Czyz's Adrift in a Vanishing City 397 If you feel art is an enterprise in which, when you have found an artist doing what every other artist is doing, you have necessarily found an artist doing something wrong (yet another story or poem voicing its appeal to aesthetic distance in that artificial and so-easy sign of the literary, the present tense: Yawn.. .), some of the elements—or absences—I've highlighted here, in a book such as this, might give you pause. What's extraordinary here, however, what recommends and finally makes such work more than commendable, what renders it a small landmark in the sedimentation of new form in fiction, is a quality of language , a surface that signals that the structure of anything and everything that surface evokes beyond it is simply other than what we have grown used to. Finally such a surface signs to the astute that the reductions our first three paragraphs suggest are, in this case, wildly off the mark. (Czyz is not an MFAproduct.) Such language as we find here projects an aesthetic conciousness, rather, it might be more profitable to read as interested in other things, and not as one merely slovenly, unthinking , or ignorant of the tradition. Nothing is careless about this writing at all. Poetry is about the self, as it is defined in the response to love, death, the changing of the seasons . . . However indirectly, however mutedly, traditional fiction has always been about money. I could speak easily, and easily speak honestly about how much I admire Czyz's considerable talent, his fictive range, his willingness to plunge naked into the gutter, to leap after stellar contrails, his grasp of how ravenously one body grasps another , or of how his impossible apostrophes out of the night are the necessary utterances that make life possible, confronted with the silences of the day. But this is still a more or less rarefied, a more or less dramatic bit of lit. crit. It only becomes a recognizable "story" when I write that Vincent Czyz is a longhaired, newly married taxi driver living in NewJersey, who wants to publish his first book and, as such, has sought my help—a gay, gray, pudgy professor with income tax problems, who commutes to work in Massachusettsby Peter Pan (cheaper than Amtrak), and who has published thirty books over as many years with various presses, commercial and university. . . . But Czyz's are nottraditional stories. Indeed, they are part of a counterfictive tradition that attempts to appropriate precisely the substance...

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