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Play, A Novel
Alan Singer
Grand Iota
www.grandiota.co.uk
270 Pages; Print, £10.00

What has always interested me about Alan Singer's singular, dynamic, and underappreciated work—which I initially encountered back in 1988 through his second novel, The Charnel Imp, about a hallucinatory prairie slaughterhouse and wooden ventriloquist's dummy that may just be that novel's real narrator—is its dedication to density, difficulty, and an avant-gothic vision. The first self-reflexive line of his latest, Play, A Novel is, "There will be no intermission." That's it exactly. Reading Singer, you know there will be no time to drift off, none to pop out to the metaphorical lobby for a tub of popcorn.

Open Play and you discover a one-page theater piece: an aristocrat with dueling pistol enters a forest clearing, raises his gun, and unaccountably shoots the manservant waiting for him. That piece, it turns out, constitutes part of an experimental off-Broadway play titled Killer Killing Killers (resonantly, KKK for short), the creation of a pompous and often unintentionally buffoonish (in a Nabokovian key) director/author named Pan Fleet. KKK consists of nothing save a relentless chain of gruesome unconnected murder scenes. Descriptions of them alternate over the course of the novel with monologues about the planning and rehearsing of Fleet's drama, intertwined with a number of sexual intrigues motivated primarily by rabid ambition, manipulation, and revenge.

This play in violent fragments, Fleet hopes, will function as a provocation for his audience in the shape of an evening filled with senseless bloodshed and death. Each bit samples a different genre, from Greek tragedy to Theater of the Absurd, and beyond. In other words, Fleet's undertaking is also about drama's history, about its underlying aesthetic and existential assumptions. By extension it—like Singer's novel—is about narrativization itself, why stories attract us, how surprise, blocked desire, and barbarism live at their center. It's not for nothing, then, that all the carnage is perpetrated by the same male actor in a host of costumes, nor that that male turns out to have been played by a female, or even perhaps a hermaphrodite, or an actor made up to look like one. The last line of the novel—"So you never know."—functions as much as thematic nucleus as an off-handed comment made by Fleet.

Fleet is both friend and patient of Dr. Todorow, a heart surgeon, whose name echoes narratologist Tzvetan Todorov's. Todorov's seminal 1970 study, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, defines the fantastic as that instant in a text when the reader experiences a hesitation about whether to read an event as the uncanny, wherein apparently supernatural phenomena have a rational explanation, or the marvelous, wherein the apparently supernatural phenomena are confirmed by the story. Fleet and Todorow often converse over dinner in an elegant restaurant, the latter recounting the surgeries he performs (those performances suggest Todorow is a kind of actor as well), the former laying out his aesthetic views. Their intersecting monologues—sometimes melodramatic, sometimes comic, always stylized—lead to a Todorovian hesitation over where the uncanny ends and the supernatural begins. A case in point: Todorow's opening depiction of his operation on a baby girl during which he claims to have released a minute, venomous white spider through a concealed pipette into his patient's heart. Did he? Didn't he? In any case, Fleet finds himself abbreviating Dr. Todorow's name to Dr. Tod—German for Dr. Death.

Todorow's vampiric wife, Sigrid, a child psychologist who embraces a method she calls Uncompassionate Care, wants to become the understudy for Siri, the female lead in Fleet's play, as well as his lover. Siri is the Norwegian diminutive of Sigrid and, as the novel continues, the two blur into each other's doppelgängers. Again, we are inhabiting Todorov's realm, lost among a narrative funhouse of mirrorings, inverted roles, exercises in irony, performances that may be real and real events which may in the end be no more than performances.

It isn't lost on the...

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