-
I ♥ Oklahoma! by Roy Scranton
Roy Scranton's humorous road novel, I Heart Oklahoma!, is as proto-historical in its admittance to narrative as it is, simultaneously, dis-narrated against it. An ever-reincarnating succession of characters ultra-depicts a wind-strewn American heartland, which lends itself the idea of progress leading but to environmental destruction that the main character, Suzie, personifies, as a form of hyperobject. Suzie is Suzie, a jaded writer, and also "Suzie revolver… metal flesh," as well as "Suzie America," polyamorous pile of weapons expressed with fervent tanks. In this polycentric careen of a text, the only constant seems to be Jim, a filmmaking dilettante that greets all that exists in his world with hypercritical derision. It is around Jim that a trio is formed, as Suzie sends her cat away and joins him and Remy in a 1971 lime green Valiant. The three embark on a journey, to film themselves barreling across a continental landscape scalped by the positivistic myth of industrial success, its accelerated projection of Hegelian world-destructive equivalences, and its Malthusian spree.
The absurdist stoicism that these semi-hardened characters embody and let come forth, in their demonstrated full awareness of rationalistic futilities, seems to be a through line in Scranton's work. It is eerily reminiscent of the multiple ways he has written broadly about the occupation of Iraq, during which he found himself in charge of weapons while going through a seemingly Beckettian motion of waiting for, and expecting, fatal violence to occur, all of which [End Page 125] culminating in a permanent state of befriended despair. But instead of caring for weapons, in the novel, Remy and Suzie concern themselves with remaining reeled into Jim's own vortex of aimless artistic aspirations that pass for educated subjugation of who the latter can convince to involve.
Objects are heavily present in the novel. Scranton's preoccupation with revisiting the ontology of objects itself, perhaps due to his time as a soldier in Iraq, is apparent in phrases such as "dirty socks dumped in rest-stop trash cans," or "condoms jammed in ATM money slots." In a war zone, every object is a threat, a possible camouflaged explosive, a questionable thing with potential to cause something other than what it appears, or is believed, to be for. There seems, also, to be an argument for how porous boundaries of objects in the world are. In the novel, how objects seem only to relate to one another through the "likeness" each of them presents to the world are transliterated into the ways the characters are rendered alive and extant—Remy is a genderqueer Jesse which is also Jesse II; Trump's dream of the South is realized through cage kids, while a Russian orgy that takes place at Kanye's house is subsequently, and diegetically, mythologized in Dream Ballet—a chapter-long epigrammatic tribute to the bizarro nightmare of a namesake sequence in the musical classic, Oklahoma!. There is the marionette-opera-inspired tagline, "The Rape Metaphor," which follows in content as not a metaphor, an inversion of Magritte's not-a-pipe. Time scale, too, is an object, a whole trope of an object by turns attenuated and set palpably sprawling, while still textured by temporal landmarks containing real and made-up historical trivia, altogether ironizing the inescapability of narrative as a human condition ("Lee advanced toward Gettysburg … Miley Cyrus announced she'd converted to Islam and would be making the hajj").
I Heart Oklahoma!, no doubt, is a fun read that while spherically camp in the sense of imminence throughout, flows silken like chant that has been broken into well-timed pauses by the vast, white spaces between chapters. Altus, where the character Suzie is from, in real-life Oklahoma came by the name, meaning "high" in Latin, after a flash flood in 1891 drove its residents to higher ground. The novel raises many an existential question, particularly in the ongoing midst of real-world ecological collapses and rising sea levels, which might soon send civilization as we know it spiraling into further splintered, entropic totalitarianism. For all the archaic nature of national oneiricism, might humanity, as a whole, dare dream of an environmentalist "anti-doomsday race" in like spirits of nuclear arms race, space race, and most curiously, vaccine race? After all, even the hardiest of all, the cockroach, has a particular reference to the phallic in its label, a wonder of intelligent taxonomy as arguably Hegelian as the psychical core of a jingoistic mega-party, a MAGA-party, that the novel's plot at some important point finds itself in, though hand on heart, one thing is for sure—none of it will matter. [End Page 126]
AGNES HANYING ONG is a poet, the recipient of the 2022 Billy Maich Academy of American Poets Prize, and a finalist in the 2022 Black Warrior Review Flash Fiction Contest. Her work, primarily poetry, has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review; The Minnesota Review; Black Warrior Review; The Carolina Quarterly; as cover art on Witness Magazine's print issue of "Saṃsāra: Asian Voices," and elsewhere. She has worked as an editorial fellow and a teaching assistant at the University of Notre Dame du Lac.