Prompted as he is by an epiphany concerning “the deadly relativity of literary judgments, and the deadly relativity of the value of literary works,” as well as “the undeniable inconsequence of practically all of the literature being produced” (thanks, he bitterly notes, to the proliferation of creative writing programs), he has turned instead to editing a small literary magazine. Style threatens at times to subsume substance in this novel, but beyond the spectacle of literary and linguistic acrobatics there may be a clever tale to unravel.įor the first eighty or so pages of the novel, our narrator-a lapsed poet several years into a wholesale abandoning of his art-decries the state of contemporary poetry and publishing, the pretense, posturing, and performance. One long paragraph composed of one long, multi-clause sentence after another-all admittedly impeccably written-with no chapter breaks and therefore no orienting signposts creates a demanding reading experience that is not for the uncommitted. And there’s no winding up to the action: from its beginning, the novel’s pace is manic and relentless, evincing the unnamed narrator’s unreliable, overwrought state of mind. From the earliest pages of English poet Sam Riviere’s debut novel, Dead Souls, the reader is catapulted into an extended internal monologue satirizing the follies of the literary world, particularly its poets.
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