Love, Rock, or Riot

As the editor The Journal of Experimental Fiction, a series of scholarship and tributes to avant-garde authors, Eckhard Gerdes is a persistent advocate of innovative or experimental narrative. While publication of his own fiction has gotten more frequent, with Hugh Moore, one of his most ambitious early novels is finally available in print. The book largely illustrates the impulse to write while showing us dreamers who live the perhaps undervalued life of quirky, obscure writers.

Literary hijinks pervade the novel as it manipulates form, character, and plot with equal amounts of provocation and humor. These modes work naturally together, and, as with the best of provocative art, Gerdes uses humor to critique pretentions and satirize human failings.

At the level of narrative form and by the visual aspects of the page, Gerdes manipulates expectations of both traditional and experimental narrative, demonstrating the conventions, possibilities, and constraints of both. Hugh Moore is positioned among contemporary postmodernist novels that challenge the nature of art and narrative while also not taking themselves too seriously. The fiction’s subject matter is the lives of struggling artists, thieves, and 1980s bohemians. The characters can be solipsistic, foolhardy, and cruel, but they are also well intentioned and endearingly fragile. The book succeeds in making the descriptions and exploits of its characters both believable and sympathetic while flowing between scenarios without exposition and transition. In a procedural sense, the joy of reading this work is in finding which threads interest the reader the most and being rewarded as they inevitably lead to new curiosities. Perhaps surprisingly, within the rather free constructiveness of the novel, one also finds a compassionate engagement with the world and its strange inhabitants.

The funeral of Rose Moore, the event that is anticipated from the start of the novel, is the excuse for their compiled recollections and interactions. We spend more time reading about those who will not be attending the funeral than any events that transpire at the funeral itself because her wake acts as the attractor not the attraction. However, Rose hovers near, as an impetus for the actions. She is incorporeally inserted into one chapter, which she attempts and fails to claim for herself. Like any dead ancestor who brings people together, giving them an excuse to interact in new ways with, perhaps, distant relatives, her absence ends up moving them.

The primary characters are the reflexive narrators and authors Hugh Moore and Jackson Berlin, who claim to be the writers of sections of the fiction, and who often interpolate its events, sometimes while referencing the narrative and reading process. While they are partially professional and neighborly antagonists of each other, they also encourage each other’s creative output and are not unsympathetic to their respective fates. They act as two sides of a writerly persona. The other characters who are followed include their relatives, friends, and love interests; as these are treated, there is little ontological distinction between their own interpersonal and fictional associations.

The value/charm of these characters and their desires for love, sex, wealth, or fame is their ability to conjure both the minor failings and victories of being in the world—whereby they may ultimately benefit from their complicated human connections. One character exclaims their happiness over a successful, lucid night of sexual exploits despite over-intoxication. Another character self-deprecatingly enjoys sharing a story concerning the absurdity of taking up an offer for a free couch, only to have it end up costing a lot as a result of having to contend with multiple broken down cars, tows, repairs, and cab rides.

Wrapped together into the fabric of narrative association, alternative culture and nonnormative lifestyles pervade much of the novel, often providing for amusing contrasts to each other. One of the stronger oppositions that Gerdes establishes along a nonnormative vein includes Grace and Rich, contrasted with Perry, Fanny, and Dick (Grace’s brother). The prior two are cheating on each other, including during parties that they are both attending. However, their attempts at maintaining a semblance of normalcy are amusingly undermined...