Jumping Fiction

"Boy, I do hate lazy reviewers," the narrator of Passes Through writes. What a daunting thing for someone to contemplate before sitting down to review a book! Nonetheless, this reviewer will hereupon attempt to at least partially unpack Rob Stephenson's stunning debut novel-in-fragments.

Passes Through, which is described by Lance Olsen at the beginning of his introduction as "the opposite of an easy or fun book," is nonetheless quite readable. The shape of the novel—I will call it a novel in the nominal sense only—is unique. There are three main sections: "Dyad"; "Ja, Mehr: La Mer"; and "Etceteras or An Epitome of Ruins." At the start of all three of these main sections, following the headers, are to be found a list of three, three, and two quotations, respectively, which seem to be instructions of a sort to the reader as to how she or he might read what follows. The opening section, "Dyad," is further broken into subsections of one and one, while the second section is a single block of text, without paragraph breaks, that drifts from topic to topic, thought to thought; the third consists of a number of partially ruined, if not completely ruinous, fragments that are anywhere from a few sentences in length to a paragraph that wraps around to the top opposite side of the page (these blocks of text all start three-quarters of the way down the front of the page, so even the longest paragraphs are still quite short).

So, where does one begin with this book? There is, particularly upon subsequent reads, the temptation to start at the beginning of any of the three sections and then work one's way around the text the way one might, say, a novel-in-parts such as B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates (1969). But, unlike that work, there is no such explicit instruction or permission given by either the author or the publisher to do so, so I will therefore approach it from a more-or-less linear perspective. Although each of the sections has a slightly different emphasis, all three are more alike than they are different: all deal with relationships, with the act of writing, with art and music, and with what it means to be an individual in the world with human desires and feelings. There are, however, thematic variations between the three sections, as in a musical composition or a triptych of paintings, as well as stylistic differences, as mentioned above.

In "Dyad," doubling and repetitions abound— for instance, the color red (anger, blood, fingernail paint), mirrors, the idea of something "passing through" something else, an old couch. The narrator obsesses over his relationship with a man who has had a traumatic childhood, wears black panties under his suit, and has trouble breathing at night, nightmares. There is a power struggle between the two; it is a relationship that manifests, at turns, in ways both tender and hostile. The narrator is criticized, critical. He struggles with his own identity. He writes, "I need someone to be a mirror. But not to look like me. They have to be different so they can reflect me in a highly personalized distortion." He laments the fact that he is always the one who has to wait for things at work, contemplates murder, realizes that the desire to kill and the desire to die are two sides of the same coin, feels unimportant, wants to grow his ego to gigantic proportions. As a way to cope with the darkness he finds inside himself, he takes up the pen, turns his lover into so many words on a page. He has trouble "reading" him at times. Writes: "He was clipped out of an intricate essay in favor of reader abuse. I miss the space he filled. And the one I filled in him. Forever playing the same song over and over, until I made a nasty retort." The lies between them become like characters in his non-narrative. His lover sucks the end of his...