Intertexted. Counternarrative.
Crossplotted.
Literary genres and subgenres are
conversations. Shouting matches between writers, some of them living and
some of them dead. Voices echo down the ages, answering to the unknown
author of The Epic of Gilgamesh, to holy Moses and J and the
redactor and the rest of the Bible’s editorial board, to Homer’s wine-dark
prose, to Virgil, all the way to the call-and-response of modern day
science fiction and fantasy.
In this living, swirling mass of
dialog and dialectic, some writers still manage to stand alone. Like a
street corner prophet shouting signs of the Apocalypse and crooked stock
tips in the same breath, Bruce Taylor is one of those literary unitarians.
His prose is as distinctive as his appearance: a lithe, lean man in a
travel-worn ice cream suit and top hat who perpetually seems to have
unfolded himself from the steamer trunk of someone’s imagining.
Taylor tells stories like a card
trick emerging from the fast shuffle of bitten nails and sly, smiling
patter. He plumbs the depths of biography, allegory and hagiography with a
charming lack of self-consciousness. Edward is as real as your memory of
last year’s breakfast and as strange as the Green Men behind the wheel of
a monstrous SUV. All of it brought to the page with a knife-edged styling
and a post-modern sense of structure that would keep a seminar full of MFA
students cross-eyed for a month.
Subversion. Inversion.
Perversion.
Reveling in the name of Mr. Magic
Realism, Taylor pursues difficult themes and topics in his work. Edward
the man is just that—a man—but Edward the book isn’t afraid of
anything. Infused with both a psychotically persistent optimism and a
powerful sense of indignation at the abuses of both authority and life in
general, this book is a road map to the awakening of the American mind.
I might say he’s a leftist, but
that would be to badly misrepresent Taylor’s politics. I might say he’s a
surrealist, but that would too simply label Taylor’s aesthetic. I might
say he’s a humanitarian, and there I would be right. His passionate
conviction bleeds through his work, staining the words with a post-hippie
samizdat leavened with heartfelt compassion.
Edward
is Steal This Book, The Anarchist’s Cookbook, and
Jonathan Livingston Seagull for this decade, written by the love child
of Tom Robbins and Philip K. Dick. Read it with an open mind and
willingness to be folded into a world you might not understand or trust,
but which will reward you.
Patience. Persistence.
Results.
Is Edward his masterwork?
I should hope not, if only because I expect much more from Taylor in the
years to come. Is it a statement? Surely—apocalyptic shout and investment
advice rolled together in eighty thousand words of peribiographical
speculation and moral philosophy. Or perhaps Edward is a fun read,
a slice of life that you can fold around you for a few shining hours.
What more do you want from a
book? Quit paying attention to me and read Edward.
Jay Lake
Portland, OR
