Little Boy: A Novel by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (review)

"great father great artificer stand by me now in good stead as I set out now to meet my fate in the forge of the world"

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Little Boy: A Novel

"Literature is news that STAYS news."

Ezra Pound¹

The American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned one hundred years old in 2019. To mark the occasion, he published Little Boy: A Novel, a compulsively readable feast for the mind stuffed into a breezy 192-page text. Though calling itself a novel, it is hardly fiction. The book reads more like a memoir written as an epic poem in a lyrical thought-stream prose style devoid of plot, bereft of punctuation, laced with literary criticism, and seared with socio-political commentary. It is a novel in the truest sense of the word: Ferlinghetti made something new.

Little Boy is the capstone of an aged author's career, the (hopefully not but perhaps) final look back on his life with its accumulation of literary and cultural artifacts all laid out in a miraculous and unusual little book that blurs the boundary of poetry and prose while gazing clear-eyed at our world and asking the big questions about life and death.² Infused with those qualities, it has few comparable texts but in many ways reminded me of David Markson's "Notecard Quartet"—the four experimental novels Reader's Block, This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point: A Novel, and The Last Novel that Markson published at the end of his career.³ In those works, Markson describes his project as "[a] novel," "an epic poem," "a sequence of cantos awaiting numbering," "an autobiography," and, most importantly, "his synthetic personal Finnegans Wake."⁴ Those can all apply to Ferlinghetti's Little Boy, as well. Ferlinghetti makes frequent allusions to Finnegans Wake in his own novel-poem-autobiography. Little Boy is also his own version of the Wake. A dream book wandering through the repositories of history and memory, Little Boy describes itself as "a labyrinth a labyrêve" or a labyrinth-dream (rêve is French for "dream"—139).⁵ Much as Markson's quartet gathers a repository of literary and art-history facts, Ferlinghetti's text is a fabric woven of allusions or, as he envisions his method on page 21, "he could just be an echo chamber an echo of everything that was ever writ or said or sung still hanging in the eternal air the eternal dialogue of philosophers fools and lovers and losers the very tongue of the soul sounding through time." Another noteworthy parallel is that, much as does Markson in his quartet, Ferlinghetti often returns to his passion for the beauty and minutiae of baseball.

For the sake of contrast, it is worth bringing up another extraordinary novel—Lucy Ellmann's 2019 Booker Prize finalist Ducks, Newburyport, a one-thousand-page behemoth that deploys a distinctive stream-of-consciousness style.⁶ The rushing verbal river of a fictional midwestern mother's innermost thoughts in Ducks, Newburyport garnered frequent critical comparisons to Joyce and Ulysses, but Ellmann, the daughter of the legendary Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann, scoffed at the comparison, saying, "to me the connection seems remote. … I think it's weird for reviewers to bring up what my father did for a living."⁷ Ferlinghetti's Little Boy, on the other hand, is an unabashed homage celebrating the author's love for Joyce. For much of Little Boy, Ferlinghetti adopts the style of Molly Bloom's soliloquy for his prose-stream (with "yeses" clustering as his long sentences build rhetorical momentum) while frequently dabbling in Wakean wordplay and invoking the Wake's river goddess Anna Livia as his muse (something he has done throughout his career as a poet⁸), all within a compact autobiographical novel that describes itself as "the portrait of the artist as an old man" (122). While both Ducks, Newburyport and Little Boy proceed free of chapters, Ellmann at least uses commas to separate each distinct thought of her narrator...