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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Future Boston: Robert Arellano's Fast Eddie, King of the Bees : Page 1, 2, 3 Fast Eddie is taken in by Shep, "my makeshift Fagin," who schools the city's orphans ("rats") in civics and petty thievery in an abandoned candy factory. Despite his embarrassingly large feet, Fast Eddie becomes "Shep's fastest rat," a deft criminal for whom "crime is an art, and the criminal is an artist of disillusion." According to the School of Shep, pickpockets are altruists who serve the public by stealing, which provides the vital service of letting the hot air out of puffed-up folk who need to be reminded now and then that time undoes us all. "The picker," Eddie explains to his fellow ragamuffins in Shep's pickpocket training program, "comes bearing a message of transience to be sent by special delivery." If this description applies to the art of picking pockets, it also strikes me as a fine description of how a plot works. Unfortunately, for Eddie, the story of his life can't be orchestrated according to the aesthetics of "picking", or to any similar artful dodging; along with the reader, he waits in vain for the message that will answer, or at least assuage, his burning questions about origins, his in particular. But this message never arrives. (Did you really expect it to?) Instead, events unfold just because Eddie is hapless and lucky. Hilarity ensues, misunderstandings are perpetuated, and the story ("plot" is not quite right) rolls on from there. The underlying structure, this novel's prime mover, is nothing more or less complicated than the way things usually go: inexorable, mostly senseless, one after another, without letting up. In this, Fast Eddie reminds me of nothing so much as Der Laufen der Dinge (The Way Things Go), the 1987 film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. In this film, simple tools like levers, wheels, and inclined planes, are ordered in a witty 30-minute march of events in which energy is inventively transferred from object to object. While nothing unexpected ever really happens, the effect is peculiarly suspenseful, for even if the next event is obvious, events unfold so slowly that you aren't prepared for the inevitable until it happens, and sometimes not even then. I suspect that Eddie, such a persistent sense-maker, must have given Arellano a real run for his money while writing this book; the meandering plot often conflicts deeply with Eddie's perceptions and his persistent efforts to make sense of his life so often run afoul of what happens next that one senses a real effort, on Arellano's part, to keep control of Eddie's persistent chasing after sensible explanations. For instance, at one point, Eddie finds himself hesitating at the door to Madame Adelle's fearsome Penny Arcade in New Jersey, where darkness, the utter absorption of the players in their video games, the dank smells, the moldy carpet, and the insufficient ventilation conspire to give the place a quasi-mystical allure. At this moment, Eddie loses consciousness, or nearly does (he isn't sure) and when he comes to, he realizes "I had somehow been spirited to the forbidden back room...In a cruel accession of destiny a snippet of deliberation had been lost to me. How had I been robbed of the chance to chicken out?" Here, surely, Arellano knows that something important must happen to Eddie in this bizarre situation, so he pulls him, resisting, into the fray, in order to bring him face to face with Adelle, "the spookiest old gypsy staring with glazed eyes." The scene is suffused with scummy neglect; the air is viscous, the windows smudged with soot, and Adelle's pack of cards, spread face down on a table, are "only slightly less dingy than the tablecloth of rotting felt." Arellano has already tipped us off to what's coming: Adelle's image appears on a poster with DEUS EX MACHINA embossed on one side. On closer inspection, this goddess indeed turns out to be ex machina, for she is revealed as a female-shaped automaton, with "a coin slot where her navel might have been." Conveniently, Eddie finds his trusty talisman, a penny named One Cent, in his pocket; he inserts it, in order to gain some purchase on his fortune, but this communion with the future is interrupted by the arrival of an arch-enemy with designs on Eddie's outsize Adidas's. Eddie flees, the better to begin the next adventure. But he is none the wiser and neither are we. In fact, the scene with Adelle illustrates a tension that supplies much of the forward motion in this novel: Arellano must constantly negotiating the distance between how Eddie, the sense-maker, explains his life to himself, and how the chaotic, senseless order of events conspire to subvert that effort at sense-making. This tension is of a piece with Arellano's earlier hypertext work, Sunshine69, wherein accumulated ordinary events bear the burden of moving the story forward, replacing a mechanism of plot with an ordering that simulates "real time," the messy kind of time that's lived, as it were, one day at a time. In Arellano's hypertext, the reader is invited to filter, sort, organize, and backtrack, in order to come away with an understanding both of the whole work and of the complexity involved in any narrative project that aims to do a different, non-novelistic justice to the messiness lived experience, which doesn't usually wrap up like a novel by Agatha Christie. Yet, there's something about Fast Eddie — perhaps because it is a novel, or perhaps because it is Arellano's first novel, or for some other reason — that I found less satisfying than Sunshine69. The novel's more or less explicitly parodic stance toward conventions of genre — in particular, the kinds of narratives we have learned to expect from novels — suggests that no overall sense-making, even of a provisional sort, is satisfying. All our satisfactions are, at best, local. |
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