Literary Grotesquerie

Dystopian novels have a tendency to stick to the same topics—corrupt government regimes, say, or machine-controlled societies in which free will is forever a damsel in distress, waiting for her Galahad. Our knight-errant in question generally takes the form of some free-thinking rebel who refuses to be acclimatized to the horrors around him. Sociological points are made, ideas are hammered into metaphorical forms, and we end up with a novel that doesn’t teem with characters and motivations so much as it teems with symbols and warnings. I’ve enjoyed quite a few books like this, even if the message of most dystopian novels—“Heed what you have read here, lest it come to fruition!”—often makes me snicker in the same way that those old predictions of Criswell make me shake my head and giggle: “Future events such as these are bound to affect us in the future.” Indeed.

But far less common in the realm of the dystopian novel is the work that centers less on systems and their impact upon individuals and instead focuses on a single individual: the dystopian novel as one-man band. Some of Kafka’s stories have this quality, but I’m hesitant to say that Richard Burgin is writing in a Kafkaesque vein. In fact I’m hesitant to say that he’s writing in any tradition, save, perhaps, his own. When reading Rivers Last Longer one becomes acutely aware of what the book is not, simply by what it suggests and then appears to refute. Joyce had a knack for this kind of technique in certain strains that emerge in Ulysses, a tacit stylistic nod to a predecessor, and then a sharp veering away to create one of those readerly “Ah, so that is what he is after” moments that mark some of our more thought-provoking fictions. Rivers Last Longer is ostensibly a story of two friends rediscovering their friendship after a long hiatus—one of those periods that is familiar to all of us when enough phone calls are not returned, or geography imposes its will, or there is some other bit of nasty business: a drunken accusation, jealousy over a fetching spouse, or a loan that never got repaid.

In the case of Rivers Last Longer—brace yourself, literary students—that falling-out results from a disagreement about starting a literary magazine. Friend Barry lashed out at friend Elliot, and a parting ensued. Eventually Barry—who has a penchant for phoning Elliot late at night and hanging up without a word—makes his way back into Elliot’s life; or, rather, the latter comes East to live in New York City with his talented writer friend. Elliot commutes back to Philadelphia to teach, and our literary upstarts prepare to unleash the literary review Beekman Place on the world. Literary-culture mavens can feast on plenty of insider details—the parties, the agents, the trading of favors, the cronyism, the conniving, and the awkward flirting that makes up a lot of what gets things done in Manhattan publishing.

This is material that has been lived in, and it’s observed and depicted with a fastidiousness that would please a journalist, but with more devils—and meaning—packed into the details. Barry, in party-planner mode, states, “I’m going to invite The Paris Review crowd, too. . . . I’ve networked my ass off, and now I need a way for that to pay off.” And so it does—after a fashion. But what a conceit, then, that a novel that deals in so many literary niceties is also a variation of American Psycho for the world of journals, with internal demons taking outward form. Burgin’s stroke of inspired irony is that this is a brutal, violent book about a niche of publishing that often shuns violence—or, at least, is not made up of a great many violent, as in potentially murderous, people. But just as you start to think that Barry is a literary variant of Norman Bates—complete with mother complex...