The Mayor of Wonderland

In an early chapter of Rivers Last Longer, Barry Auer, knocked into a near fugue state by the death of his mother, both of them "mistreated by America," flies from New York City to London "rudderless and victimized" with his mother's ashes in an urn—his ambition to write or be known for anything "all a colossal illusion," the city of Shakespeare failing him, as so many people and places and his memories of them will in this brilliant and dread-inducing novel of madness and love—and then onto Madrid, where, after a misbegotten encounter with a prostitute, his "police" tell him to take the first flight available. In Los Angeles, exhausted and disoriented, he has another encounter with a prostitute named Jordan, one of whose lines gives the novel its title and who tells Barry she was named not after the basketball player or the country, but the river. Neither character tells us—nor does Richard Burgin need to—the river Jordan drains into the Dead Sea.

This encounter informs the rest of the novel, as Barry develops a double named Gordon, both of whom consider themselves cosmopolitan men of the world, and both of whom use their personas in their respective worlds, one in the normal if disturbing light of day, the other under cover of night, the street in the small town west of Philadelphia where Gordon has rented an apartment and like a predator has built a cage, or a trap, for his seductions, all of whom insult and infuriate him in some fashion—a zombie unawareness that they are in fact zombies, soul-dead and promiscuous and addicted to terrible and beastly pleasures (from which low vices Barry and Gordon are naturally exempt) and one of whom, even before he can lure her back to his soundproof apartment, Gordon, or Barry, discovers is a man. Or is she?

Part of the story is about two estranged friends finding common ground again. Barry is charming, brilliant, and manipulative, Elliott a socially awkward idealist and classicist. But as the story unfolds, and the dread deepens, the reader recognizes this is not a novel about friendship at all, but about Elliott's inability and unwillingness to see Barry for what and who he is, and about the very thing Elliot considers the problem with literature: "People were generally depicted as good or evil." Only Cheri, a painter Elliott meets at a loft party, has the emotional radar, or metaphysical antennae, to sense that there is something terribly wrong with Barry, that Barry is not merely selfish, narcissistic, manipulative, cunning, and deluded, but malevolent, "grotesquely lighted from within." But to Elliot, Barry is merely "incomprehensible."

With alternating points of view—we move with ease, and unease, into to the minds of Barry, Elliott, Cheri, and one of Gordon's victim's bent on revenge—and with a plot that rivets from the first page to the last, where shirts "lay across [Barry's] bed like souls in purgatory" to the "hell" of the end, Rivers Last Longer engages, fascinates, and appalls, lightened midway with a deftly timed satires of our celebrity-besotted culture. If Barry has literary pretensions—in one final desperate comparison, he realizes he's Kirillov of The Devils (1872), not Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment (1866)—his mind is littered with the detritus of vampire and zombie pop culture, ghouls and ghosts. He cites Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Søren Kierkegaard in painfully pretentious fashion (without a scintilla of irony or self-awareness, he compares himself to Bobby Fischer), but he sees himself and others as either the monsters of B-movie nightmares, or as animals and insects. "'I trust my instincts and just go for it,"' he tells Elliott. These comparisons are well timed and with terrible effect magnify his growing madness, where he rationalizes his grand mission with such perverseness he should be comic were he not so frightening: he moves "fast as a cockroach or a frenzied wasp...