Lincoln County Road or Armageddon

It took me quite some time to get through Roberto Bolano's 2666. I wish I'd been able to sustain a prolonged, unity-of-purpose type read of its 898 pages, but other works wormed their way into my attention span, so I read this, as I typically read longer sprawling works, in little bits and starts.

The five parts of the novel (offered across three volumes, in the version I read) cover five different stories, each of which overlap without ever exactly intersecting. The connection between each is largely left up for the reader to deduce, a bit like the elephant assembled by the descriptions of the blind men.

This novel's range is incredibly impressive. Bolano is a master of lore (or fake-lore). "The Part about Fate," about a black New York City newsman who comes to northern Mexico to cover a boxing match, and "The Part about Archimboldi," about a Prussian kid who becomes a WWII-era German soldier and later a "disappeared" novelist, are stand-out sections. Certain tropes and images recur throughout the sections, despite their lack of (total) covergence: a lot of characters order food and then don't eat it.

Despite its length and discursions, the "story" here remains incomplete -- in fact it's hard to pin down in concrete terms what the "story" is, or what whole these "Parts" suggest. What you'd want, at the end of a long work like this, is some closure and resolution. You'd want to know who's been committing the murders in Santa Teresa, for example, and so it's frustrating that Bolano never conclusively resolves this central mystery, but it also allows the work to be much more than a murder mystery. For as much as the crimes and their perpetrator(s) might be a central focus for the reader, they are not at any point the central focus of the author.

So, as I say, 2666 is both hyper-encyclopedic and yet still incomplete. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest has a similar incompleteness, telling a long and discursive tale that can't quite circle around to completion. Both novels -- and I suppose we may as well lump Pynchon's work in here too -- subvert the ideas of what we expect the writers of stories and novels to do: tightly wind their plots, condense their timelines, develop characters, come to a clear and satisfying conclusion. That subversion can be interesting, but it comes with a price. In other words, Sullivan's mad.