Comic Dystopia

It would be a grave and highly predictable mistake to try to summarize a book as vertiginous as Chuck Richardson's Smoke. Nominally speaking, Smoke follows a series of mixed-up, often interchangeable characters who are either wanted by and/or work for an agency called "The Agency," an amorphous, secretive, and inept sociopolitical entity responsible for governing and protecting "The Tribe" in some alternate upstate New York. On his blog, Richardson describes Smoke as, "apocalyptic, magically real, eco-political-economic-post-future-SciFi-psychological-horror novels in the ecstatic mode…[i]n other words, I imagine them as rather comical." Perhaps that's too much to gather in one fragile book. Indeed, Richardson's refusal of traditional narrative devices such as round characters and a cohesive plot, supplemented by healthy doses of hallucinatory confusion and metafictional slippage, can in no way hold together. That, however, seems to be the point. Smoke suggests that only an extreme attention to the fragmentation, doubling, merging, and reconfiguring of characters, plotlines, and philosophies, all of which amount to a broad critique of univocal truth and an uncomplicated human identity, can (in)adequately depict and enact a de-natured and de-ritualized universe.

Richardson's attack on a holistic notion of truth finds literal and symbolic representation in a comically utopian device called the "electroempathy spectrometer." Employed "The Agency" for interrogation, the spectrometer "combines internal acupuncture, string theory and quantum mechanics, as well as your body's natural energies to emit light relating to whatever power center, or chakra, is dominant in your body at any given moment…. And it's also something like a lie detector test, but better." Improving on the lie detector, the EES determines not simply the truth of speech, but the truth of the subject's soul by evaluating (like a really sophisticated lava lamp) a composite of the rational, emotional, psychic, corporeal, and spiritual.

The EES, however, has an even more important function. Hilarious, odd, and perverse, with its seven needles destined for seven human orifices, this machine functions as a conductive medium which, by the exchange of fluids, allows oppositional subjects to synchronize. The truth provided by questioned subjects is less important than the complete empathy the administrator of the EES feels for the subject. "We actually feel what you feel by using it," agent 8P5 tells Linda, who has been brought in for questioning because her son, Raymond, has been kidnapped by her upstairs neighbor and suspected father, a shaman named Carlos Castaneda. 8P5 uses the collective "we" to register that the EES creates a circuit of empathy not only between subjects but between subject and governing institution. In a description of perfect subject/state accord, another suspect, Zbigniew "Ziggy" Fumar, makes even more explicit the merging of suspect and agent. "[Y]ou'll respond," says Ziggy, advocating his concurrent use of the EES with agent Lester, "I'll hear you, the empathy between us will grow, we'll both end up on the same side, and the Agency will be greatly served. Whuddaya say?"

Lester, who "appeared very similar" to his informant, agrees to Ziggy's proposition. They splice together the wiring of the EES ("a mutant jellyfish with seven bodies"), and the EES transforms from "truth gatherer" to, well, sex toy. Sex, as an opportunity for the temporary loss of self, the intermingling of bodily substances, and a place where things are perceived to be at their most "real," further represents the blurring of boundaries and subject positions fundamental to Richardson's project.

Smoke is part X-Files, part Philip K. Dick, part Three Stooges.

In addition to the promise of a good time, the electroempathy spectrometer promises to reveal inaccessible truth, lubricate the border of subject boundaries, and facilitate the integration of the individual into the state mechanism. But, as lovely as this vision might seem, you might justifiably doubt the seriousness of Richardson's intentions. The EES's ability to acquire truth and create über-empathic connections is compelling but utterly ridiculous, and Richardson exploits every opportunity to lampoon the pursuit of truth...