(A word or two about) Autumn 2005 nominee 10:01 by Lance Olsen

Hello, it's your old pal the Rake here to discuss my nominee for the Autumn 2005 LBC selection, 10:01 by Lance Olsen.

Now what can I say about 10:01 that hasn’t already been said?

Quite a bit, in fact, because not as many people have heard about this book as should. I count one review—mostly negative—at PopMatters and a handful of glowing customer blurbs at Amazon. And to be completely honest, I probably wouldn’t have heard about it either—or its publisher, Chiasmus Press—but for a person (who took the LBC to task for picking Kate Atkinson) bringing it up as a novel worthy of attention.  (Good sir, I haven’t searched for your name, but feel free to take credit for pricking up my ears.)

By the time my copy arrived, I’d plowed through a fair number of obscure books and hadn’t come to one that I’d heartily recommend.  So I started with the 10:01 blurbs—always dangerous ground—and read this description:

Walter Benjamin envisioned the underground Paris Arcades as the quintessential 19th century industrial dream space. In 10:01 Lance Olsen provides us with the Millennial version: the Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota, large enough to contain seven Yankee Stadiums. Each page headlines a different character or set of characters randomly flung together in a movie theater there in mid-afternoon. They interface (often freakishly) with each other; with the Mall's blandishments; with the images on the screen; with their own fantasies. At the climax the theater and its inhabitants suddenly implode, perhaps out of the ultimate logic of late industrial capitalism. Or they don't implode but are sucked irresistibly into the black hole of American make-believe. Olsen has written a cunningly original docufiction of the American psyche post-9/11 and perennial.

Walter Benjamin?  The ultimate logic of late industrial capitalism?  Docufiction?

Yeah.  Well.  OK.  Even if I stuck around for the entire 200 or so pages, I’d be able to knock this one out in an afternoon and forget about it, on to the next.

But it happened that I started to quite like what Mr. Olsen had going: A friendly little book, acessible, smart, funny, even a little goofy at times—there are a coupla cartoon rednecks here that might surpass even the belt-buckle-broad comedy sensibilities of one Jeff Foxworthy—but one that always managed to sneak in some unexpected nugget of insight or bit of lovely writing. 

10:01 starts like this:

MIDAFTERNOON IN A MOVIE THEATER in the Mall of America. Glary lights before the show make everything seem stark and unfinished to Kate Frazey, a bony aerobics instructor relieving herself of her shocking-pink ski jacket, bunching it on the folded-up seat beside her, and sitting in row three, seat nine, seeing herself as she does so as if from a crane shot among these other filmgoers filtering in and settling down around her. Kate, blond hair so dark it is almost the color of high-fiber breakfast cereal, is Franz Kafka's great-great granddaughter, although she carries no awareness of this within her. She doesn't know her great-great grandfather once had an affair with another bony woman, Grete Bloch, friend of Felice Bauer, to whom Kafka was briefly engaged. Kate doesn't know Grete had a son about whom Kafka never learned, nor that his son was supposed to have died while a child, but was adopted by a Jewish businessman and his wife, and brought to New York in the thirties. Whenever Kate dreams, it is about the plots of Kafka's work, which she has never read because she believes there are already too many stories in the world. Kate dreams that two strangers in top hats and frock coats are always knocking at her door, wanting in. That she is a ninety-pound weight-loss artist dissolving in a cage full of hay in the town square in Prague. That she is a muscular hare darting through a wet field at night and that, no matter how fast she runs, no matter which direction she chooses, the beautiful hounds sleeping within the castle miles away will awaken the next day and chase her down. This is why Kate doesn't sleep unless she has to. This is why she hasn't slept for two nights, why she leans forward now, elbows on knees, concentrating very hard on keeping her glistery brown eyes wide open.

That’s the type of passage that makes me want to say that this book isn’t for everyone.  (But I won’t.)  Still, I think you either like this type of thing or you don’t.  Take, for example, this:

Thirty feet above Celan Solen skitters a mouse through the warm darkness flooding the ventilation system.  Tucked into the mouse’s breast immediately behind its heart is the soul of Remedios the Beauty, a young woman from a small village in Colombia.  When she was alive, Remedios the Beauty used to drive men mad with the sweetness of her scent, part orange, part cinnamon.

At the risk of assuming something about the General Reader, I’m saying that that’s the type of passage that either drives you away from a book or reels you in.  Me, I was reeled in.

The charms of 10:01 are not necessarily hard-won—there’s enough humor and character to keep you cheerfully speeding along—but on the other hand the little mysteries of the text and deeper philosophical underpinnings seem to be there, too, if you wish to dig.  (See this interview with Olsen, for example.)  You might also wish to simply ponder why quote unquote actor Josh Harnett is a character in 10:01, but my point is that he’s not in the book simply to amuse; Olsen’s a little more crafty than that and after a little bit more.

I’ll bet—and sort of know—that this book will be polarizing, and I can understand why a person might just want to toss it across the room and fall into the reassuring and waiting arms of, say, Richard Ford.  Olsen’s not as deliberate as Ford, and not seamless.  But I’d recommend him for just that reason, and to all readers who like to sink into a book and let their minds get a little untidy.  As a friend of mine used to say, It ain’t gonna cost you nothing to find out, either, because the whole book’s available as a hypertext presentation here.  (I recommend the paper copy, of course, but the hyper version gives you a good—if somewhat recontextualized—idea of what Olsen’s up to.)

Thanks to the LBC’s methods and madness I know about 10:01, a novel that cheers me up in the way that a truly novel novel can—it gives a bit of a lift that comes from knowing that the world of the possible, at least as far as literature is concerned, is larger than I’d thought.  And I now know of Lance Olsen, who has a bunch of other books out there to explore—to wit, "six novels, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and Rebel Yell: A Guide to Fiction Writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about literary innovation."

For me, this little LBC endeavor has turned up some real finds, and for that I'm thankful to be a part of it and to be following along.  If this round helps a bunch of hungry readers track down a book they’ll enjoy as much as I enjoyed 10:01—or The Angel of Forgetfulness or Stephen Dixon's Old Friends—then we've lived up to the task.

Now please stay tuned for more discussion of this title and the other nominees, coming soon. And if you'd like to join a discussion about this book, we'll be kicking it off October 3rd.

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

Sounds interesting Rake, thanks for the description.

I like the new method of the LBC, discussing all of the nominees within a week of the announcement, much better than the original process.

Enjoy,

[ed]

V. nice summation, Rake. For the record, I was also one of the LBC cats who grooved to Lance Olsen too. The recurring criticism, as demonstrated in the PopMatters review, is largely directed towards what is considered to be either "clunky" prose or unnecessary digressions. But when one considers the structure, and when one views the omniscient narrator as someone trying to pack in as many breathless thoughts into the time as possible, it becomes very clear why the book was written the way it was and why the character depth ranges from paper-thin archetype to fleshed-out fridge-letter fetishist.

Is it possible that Olsen might be playing a grand joke on how Americans perceive each other through inconsequential moments? Why else would this novel be set in the Great Mall of America?

Plus, any novel that references bukkake so explicitly gets a vote from me.

[CAAF]

>Plus, any novel that references bukkake so explicitly gets a vote from me.

Ed, you are a cheap date.

Mr. Wickett, if you're still lurking, you mentioned in a comment to the earlier post that you guessed wrong on the Stern, based on Ed's clues. I'm curious about what title you thought it would be.

[DAn Wickett]

If I'm still lurking...I'm always lurking.

I was thinking Kirby Gann's Our Napoleon in Rags. It met all of Ed's clues - KG, 211 pages, four word title, male author, etc.

Even had a nice blue cover. Plus Ed has raved about it so there was the possibility of his having nominated it and it's a damn good book!

Enjoy,

[Rake]

Ed:

Yeah. I mean, I think the difficulty with a book like this is that some people take the Richard Hugo Stance--somewhere in his book, The Triggering Town, Hugo tosses off a remark about how "experimentation" in literature/poetry is more commonly called "fucking around"--and just ascribe weirdness and apparent incongruency to author carelessness or whimsy. (And, sure, sometimes that's the case.)

Olsen, however, clearly has a plan here--I think one can argue about the execution, but he's not just throwing everything at the page and seeing what sticks.

The interview I linked to is interesting & helpful I think in sussing out where LO was trying to go with the book. For example, he sez:

What fascinates me about the communal event is how when you’re in it you’re always surrounded by an ocean of other people, an ocean of secret histories. And I have always suspected those secret histories are much more emotionally and intellectually engaging than what’s going on on the screen. That suspicion led me to write the print version of 10:01, which is set in an AMC theater on the fourth floor of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, one December Sunday—that is, smack in the heart of the American Dream. The narrative drifts in and out of the minds of forty-some-odd moviegoers, one mouse, and one cat during the ten minutes and one second before the feature begins, nestling into various narriticules behind what appears to be The Narrative (i.e., the about-to-begin movie) but isn’t.

Ah, see! Hadn't even noticed there was a cat-and-mouse game going on.

[Rake]

(One additional note: It's a little misleading to say that the "whole book" is available in the hypertext version. Olsen sez:

...[T]he closer you read the two iterations, the more textual dissimilarities you will uncover between them. Some characters appear in one, for example, but not the other. Some details of their lives don’t harmonize between versions. Some of the text blocks have more or less information in one form than the other. And so on.

So. Pretty close, but not an exact copy.)

[Kassia]

Olsen, however, clearly has a plan here--I think one can argue about the execution, but he's not just throwing everything at the page and seeing what sticks.

I'm looking forward to the discussion of this book because of what you're (Rake) saying here. I'm glad you linked to the hypertext version -- it really does turn the reading experience around. While still a bit clunky, it actually brings some of the original visions of hypertext to life.

[Lance Olsen]

I just wanted to thank you all for such attentive, thoughtful readings of my novel, and for keeping LBC keeping on.

[Jozef Imrich]

The namesti:
the square that bears your name,
bore the names of soldiers
of the young Red Army—until nineteen
eighty-nine, the year no one had to die,
not God nor Kafka, for whom the fire
to warm the icy world was words
http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/2001/54-plumly.html

Brilliant post! Anything that mentions Kafka and Prague tends to set world on fire ;-)

[hebdomeros]

I'm pleased LBC picked this. It's a fabulous book and considering its very po-mo ideas very easy to read.

The style of the book will turn some people off, but Olsen's approach is intentional, not accidental. You only need to look at his other work to know that he does it all deliberately. Most of his real playing around takes place in his short work (some of it more successful than others).

As a pointer, he has his own website www.cafezeitgeist.com with a forum. Right now there are some discussions about his book with some students reading it in college classes.

[Willie Stark]

More proof tying the litbloggers into a vast liberal conspiracy. They can't even pick a proper title! A conservative would never nominate a title like this. The title of this book shows a lack of originality on the part of the author and the litblogger who nominated the title. Did the author look at his watch or something? What next? An LBC pick culled from some author's shopping list? "Head of Lettuce?"

I'm extremely disappointed at the choice. It sets a bad precedent for books and a bad precedent for America. Please tell me that the litbloggers here can do better.

[hebdomeros]

Interesting...and very visceral...reaction. Could you possibly explain your reaction? Olsen certainly comes fromt the left side of politics, but what specifically angers you about the choice? Simply his political leanings, or something specific within the book itself?