The Lost Novel by James Shea (review)

In "Thinking of Work," the first poem in James Shea's second collection The Lost Novel, Shea writes of the work to be done after a storm: "There was much / to do: sun to put up, / clouds to put out, / blue to install." The only response to a storm that is truly effective, the poem's bemused speaker reminds us, is the natural fact of its passing: the return of sun and blue sky, the blowing away of clouds—matters in which we have no say. Instead, we do what we can with what we have, which in this case amounts to patching things up: "(The grass failed. / We ordered new grass"). "Thinking of Work" means thinking of the small ways in which we try to repair, piece together, or clear away the debris. What Shea creates from this "short storm, / short with its feeling" is an opening for thought, for seeing what exceeds the frame of our everyday habits of perception: "Something flew out of / the window and then / the window flew out of the window." The Lost Novel doesn't just open a window, it takes out the whole wall.

The openness of these poems is not an apathetic postmodern open-endedness but rather a hopeful grappling in the open air with the fact of uncertainty. The response the poems offer to this fact, then, is not a wholly ironic distance from meaning but an earnest striving for action. As "City of the One-Sided Sun" explains, "Now, when we're beyond / credulity, can we insist / on knowing what is true / . . . It's the act that matters / . . . The belief in believing, / the faith we have even / in reason, a partial tree." It's in this sense of believing in believing—or believing in spite of the knowledge of inevitable shortcoming—that Shea's work taps into a cultural and aesthetic moment that some have described as "meta-modern." Metamodernism, according to its chief theorists, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker¹, is the term that best describes our current after-postmodernism moment, characterized by "oscillat[ion] between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony." And while "postmodern irony is inherently tied to apathy," they argue, "metamodern irony is intrinsically bound to desire." Desire—for knowledge amid confusion, for permanence amid the transitory, for a finished product from the uneven rhythms of an artist's life—is ever present in The Lost Novel. When Shea writes in the poem "Plato's Balls," "I heard you say something recently / and I want to make it permanent," we can hear simultaneously the ironic self-consciousness of a voice that recognizes the impossibility of permanence (the speaker jokingly calls himself "a spokesman for the dictionary") and an honest lament for the incurable desire to witness, record, and attempt such permanence.

Vermeulen and van den Akker describe metamodernism as a Kantian "as-if" mentality—that is, the metamodern text, while acknowledging history's lack of telos, nevertheless carries on "as if" historical purpose exists. Echoes of this mentality are heard perhaps most explicitly in "The Phrase You Gave Me," which ends: "My wayward ways are never without purpose. / The purpose is simply not always productive, / a purposeless purposiveness, these days." The repetition of "purpose" in each line underscores the necessity of an end goal, even while the final emphasis is on "purposeless purposiveness"—a phrase owed to Kant's Critique of Judgment and describing a necessary quality of the beautiful. The beautiful, according to Kant, must appear to have been made according to a design and affect us as if it had a definite purpose, even though it fulfills no predetermined form.

The Lost Novel is beautiful in precisely this way: while resisting appeals to easily identifiable sentiment and narrative legibility, these poems are nevertheless tense, wondrous, and whole. What is "lost" in the lost novel, it seems, is not the story that it sought to tell nor the figures it would memorialize, but rather the novel form (or the demands of "form" more generally). When Shea writes in the first...