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You can syndicate any boat you row

This past fall we released Marc Estrin’s third novel, a (to say the least) provocative book entitled Golem Song. As a reading experience, it’s outrageous, difficult, politically immediate, slapstick funny, baldly “in-your-face”, and endlessly allusive. As its editor, I imagined it would leave many of its readers as it first left me: eyes wide open and hair blown back (as the wind blows the water white and black).

Following the glowing reviews that Estrin’s first two novels garnered, I genuinely thought that Golem Song would get wider attention in the traditional review media than it ultimately did. I did not expect all of the reviews to be good. I thought some would be combative. But I was certain that every one of them would be engaging. They probably would have been, had they arrived.

But the pub-date-limited window for the traditional review media ultimately — read quickly —closed with a resounding hush. And for awhile I thought we would simply pass on to Marc’s next book. There are four in the works at the moment (and a remarkable novella about G-d forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil.)

But after awhile, the internet reviews and interviews began to appear. First amongst the online reviewers, I think, was Jason Jones’s assertive response at PopMatters. Most recently, it was Peter Quinones’s insightful and challenge-issuing evaluation at The Bohemian Aesthetic. Ron Jacobs interviewed Estrin for Counterpunch, and note has been made of the book at The Elegant Variation, Conversational Reading, The Emerging Writers Network, elsewhere.

In light of the print media quietude (if not quite silence) on this provoking novel, the online interest is, I think, significant. I know that so far this post must read like simple promotion of a book I care about, but if it is that, I also mean it to be more.

Golem Song is a challenging and unique novel. I think it’s broad fun, too — that is, Comic in the largest and oldest sense of the word — but it’s definitely a challenging and unique novel. I’ve been asking myself why it wasn’t more widely reviewed and have answered that there are two particular possibilities that seem reasonable. The first is that Estrin’s profile may not yet be high enough to warrant a newspaper review when his new book is hard to describe or categorize or compare to any but his earlier work. The reviewers’ prior acknowledgment of Estrin’s intractable brilliance notwithstanding. The second possibility is that Estrin’s publisher is a small press. The issue there is not personal to us. And I don’t take it that way. It’s just that, even though our books are widely available through all the traditional bookselling channels, book-page editors may assume that their readers won’t be able to find a book with our imprint because it’s not that of an Island publisher.

I could well be wrong about both possibilities. Maybe reviewers just couldn’t take this one, either couldn’t stomach it or were unwilling to take on the challenge it poses to the reader. Maybe editors were trying to do us a favor by delivering us from their reviewers’ condemnation. I would certainly appreciate that sort of thing for one of our debut novelists, would even be downright grateful. But I should think the reception of Estrin’s first two novels would preclude such considerations. I mean, a fellow with a couple of lauded, if not well-known, books is pretty much fair game, isn’t he? Perhaps the pub month for Golem Song simply coincided with the release dates for too many books by brand name authors, celebrities, guiding literary lights, the proven, anointed, and assumed. Or maybe it was something else. I fully realize that there could well be perfectly logical and wholly insignificant reasons for the Golem Song Passover, reasons of which I’m just naively unaware.

But the reason for reviewers’ silence really isn’t the point here, anyway.

To my thinking, the point — and what invigorates me today — is that I can so clearly see in this sequence of events that a literary community is forming online, an expanding and interrelated readers’ forum that isn’t circumscribed by the print and canon traditions that seem ever more frequently to let strong, smart, and beautifully written works slip quietly out of the channels and into the endless, shushing black-and-white waters.

Fred Ramey
posted 2/19/07

 
 

Comment

  1. When I’m not writing fiction, I’m a book critic for the El Paso Times where I often review books that are worthwhile reads but are not likely to garner many print reviews (I usually review Latino/a writers, but not always). Drop me an email and I will send you my address if you want to send me a review copy.

    — Daniel Olivas · 02/23/2007 12:35 AM · #

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