David Applefield, On a Flying Fish

Literary Review, Spring, 2005 by Thomas E. Kennedy

Ontario and New York: Mosaic Press, 2001.

A young man liquidates his holdings, retreats from New York, and withdraws to a tropical island to write. Call him Ernest. He has "the book gene floating in a dark vein, wishing sightlessly for some way out ... the blind aim of so many, less universal than the urge for orgasm but its spasms were longer and measurably more enduring."

But wait! Young Ernest's book is already in manuscript by the time we come into contact with it, in the hands of an older, unnamed, first-person narrator who has abandoned a promising job in "early mid-career flight" and who has been hauling Ernest's "heap of deserted typewritten pages" around with him "like shoes you can't throw out ... like a framed picture of Jesus or Mom that occupies every move." The narrator's name is "I" while Ernest is "he." "I" is the present, "he" is the past. The narrator is now in Frankfurt, Germany, living with "the girl" and his dog, making one more desperate effort to turn the failed pages of his past into some kind of success--or at least art.

The result is a novel which consists of two simultaneous novels, the interweaving of a life-in-progress and a novel-in-progress, the present and the past, life and art--all of it being, of course, one complex piece of art, one book, which is a little bit like a tapestry whose sub-weaves comment with such arresting irony on its central pattern as to modify and transform it, enlarge and diminish it.

The main question at the heart of this remarkable novel seems to be, in its own words, "Is the instinct to frame life as it is being lived 'art' or a perverse subversion of the original? Or both." The answer it offers is itself, the manner in which it captures and dramatizes the process in dynamic clarity. And the result is one of the more exciting, mysterious, heart-breaking, howlingly funny, painfully honest, suspenseful, powerful and original novels this reader has had the pleasure of immersing himself in for quite some time. It combines the tickle of humor in high and low places, sometimes both at once, simultaneous with an arresting story and solid aesthetic nutrition.

We find ourselves in the winter of the narrator's discontent in Frankfurt, wracked by the "miserable deranged addiction" to finish his book, which is no longer merely the book he ran away to write some years before, but the book of his continuing life, the book of everything that rallies against his writing it, together with the book that rallies to prevent him from having a life in the present with the girl. To make things even more complex--though Applefield succeeds in keeping them clear in their complexity--the narrator is living his life bilingually, in a patois of English and French spiced with a smattering of other tongues.

"You call this living together," the girl screams. "Pas moi." And even as she screams it, he is writing it down and criticizing himself for doing so. Just as they are about to tear asunder, she flings herself back at him, "Mais je t'aime, je t'aime, je t'aime," she murmurs and he comforts her with one hand, "Je t'aime aussi," taking notes with his other: "It is wrong exploiting your own life like this." And "The truth is you can be a turd and be right at the same time, and wrong and an angel, too." And even as he writes, he is noting the exquisite texture of a chair cushion against his naked backside, "You should treat your ass to moments like this once in a while ..." And, "If art is a person's reaction to the world, then there's nothing I can't include in it." This is an essential part of it all: how is the artist to capture in sudden illumination the details of the moment, of the present, those that generally fleet past barely noticed-for somewhere in those fleeting impressions is the solid stuff of life; it just never stands still except in art.

Parallel with the metafictional, postmodern present tense in Frankfurt runs a past tense postcolonial tale of murder and exploitation from the islands in which civilization is measured against the jungle and found lacking, even as the luxurious dream house of the novel's American psychiatrist is enveloped and consumed by wild growth along with his cherished edition of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, back to the primal elements.

At once sophisticated and down to earth, literary and realistic, told in a sustained voice of ironic lightness, On a Flying Fish succeeds in the remarkable task of flying the reader along through both parallels, breathless for the next development in each of the broken tales that amount to the whole. Applefield has a rare gift--a bit of Miller, a bit of Mailer, a bit of Graham Greene, all driven by the pure, careful, courageous and expansive voice of Applefield himself, taking time out now and again from his engaging tale to spin riffs on the moon, on the jungle, on sex ... The sex scene that occupies pages 89 to 92, for example, has to be among the most unusual, original, strangest sex scenes in the history of the genre, "written in dick on a Fed Ex electronic pad," while another scene of discrete masturbation by the narrator, excited over one of his own novel's blue moments and glimpsing himself like a gorilla in the mirror while the girl, making dinner in the kitchen, calls in to ask where the capers are and he stills his breath to call back, Second shelf on the refrigerator door--rivals anything in Portnoy. "There are some things you must never ever share with anyone," the narrator writes later, after having shared such a thing.