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Review of On A Flying Fish from Absinthe, New European Writing 6
FRANK, 2006
Paperback 279 pages
US $18.00
Isbn 2-913053-06-8

A sophisticated American expatriate in Frankfurt takes stock of the random objects assembled in the apartment he shares with his girlfriend and faithful dog. Among the recognizable paraphernalia of the Woodstock generation are a pair of worn out hiking boots, a copy of the Findhorn Cookbook, and a tattered novel manuscript, “half nuisance, half talisman” lugged about from one life to another. Thus begins David Applefield’s novel On a Flying Fish, a romping excursion into metafiction, a realm well-known to the author, noted critic and avant-garde editor of the Paris-based literary magazine, FRANK..
The action of the novel develops upon two planes. The first, narrated in the present tense, plots the daily domestic ups and downs of the narrator, indicated only as “I,” in his relationship with his luscious young companion during their moveable feast across Europe. “I” seems to have few activities in life except looking after girl and dog, reading and rereading the manuscript he keeps hidden in an armoire, while ruminating on the relationship between art and life; sex and writing.
The second plane is presented in alternating chapters in counterpoint to the first person narrative. This is the story of a young man named Ernest, told in the past tense from a third person point of view. Ernest has left the US to seek adventure on a Caribbean island where he intends to write a novel. To this task he applies himself with dwindling success, in increasing states of undress as he adapts to the climate and the solitude.
As Ernest settles in, learning survival in shantytown, he is befriended by the native community and by fellow drifters and drop-outs, but soon finds himself out of sorts with the people who really count: North American investors and their agent on the island who exploit him as well. The crisis peaks when the agent is murdered in a rite involving snakes, torn out eyes, and voodoo. One of Ernest’s friends is unjustly accused, and his attempt to defend the hapless native fails. Afraid of being involved in the case, Ernest manages to escape, taking with him a puppy he has been given as a gift, and of course, his unfinished manuscript.
Two more planes unfold within this twin tale: the brief stretches of Ernest’s novel in progress, which we are allowed to glimpse, and the marginal notes, comments, and quotations, fixed at the head of every chapter which like stepping stones guide the reader through this labyrinth. These are partly an authorial intrusion, partly the editorial scribblings of “I” as he goes over the manuscript. Together they create a sort of superstructure linking the two planes, helping the reader see the shape of the whole, and detect the intertextual influences woven into its fabric.
Applefield’s double narrative is informed by theories of structuralism, deconstruction, reader reception, and post-colonialism while invoking Conrad, Rimbaud, Camus, Kafka, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Walt Whitman, Franz Fanon and Roland Barthes. One question repeatedly rises to the surface of both planes: Where lies the source of fiction? In desire, says “I.” In travel, in the exotic, thinks Ernest.
Real life may indeed be elsewhere, but as Ernest discovers, things never work out for you to stay there long, without unforeseeable and possibly dangerous consequences. Re-entry to the mundane world is required , with your passport and your boon ( in this case both dog and manuscript) safely stashed away for the trip. Compared to the bumbling and ingenuous Ernest, “I” is wiser, cautious, and ironic. But he suffers from an obsession: “Is the instinct to frame life as it is being lived “art” or a perverse subversion of the original?”
The two planes reflect the two selves every writer harbors: the dreaming inspired self who floats through the world, absorbing impressions, and the meticulous scribbler who rises in the night to fuss over a pile of papers while chewing on a pencil. What better symbol for the writer than the Flying Fish… with its erotic and mythic undertones, its versatility, its mastery of two antithetical realms? Crisp, comic, dazzling, On a Flying Fish is a delightful journey through the netherworld where fiction and life are fused.

reprinted from Absinthe, new European Writing
Nov. 2006

Book review for The Literary Review, “Editors’ Choices”

The Miserable Deranged Addiction
by Thomas E. Kennedy
A review of:
On a Flying Fish (a novel), by David Applefield.

A young man liquidates his holdings, retreats from New York, and withdraws to a tropical island to write. Call him Ernest. He has “the book gene floating in a dark vein, wishing sightlessly for some way out…the blind aim of so many, less universal than the urge for orgasm but its spasms were longer and measurably more enduring.”

But wait! Young Ernest’s book is already in manuscript by the time we come into contact with it, in the hands of an older, unnamed, first-person narrator who has abandoned a promising job in “early mid-career flight” and who has been hauling Ernest’s “heap of deserted typewritten pages” around with him “like shoes you can’t throw out…like a framed picture of Jesus or Mom that occupies every move.” The narrator’s name is “I” while Ernest is “he.” “I” is the present, “he” is the past. The narrator is now in Frankfurt, Germany, living with “the girl” and his dog, making one more desperate effort to turn the failed pages of his past into some kind of success – or at least art.

The result is a novel which consists of two simultaneous novels, the interweaving of a life-in-progress and a novel-in-progress, the present and the past, life and art – all of it being, of course, one complex piece of art, one book, which is a little bit like a tapestry whose sub-weaves comment with such arresting irony on its central pattern as to modify and transform it, enlarge and diminish it.

The main question at the heart of this remarkable novel seems to be, in its own words, “Is the instinct to frame life as it is being lived ‘art’ or a perverse subversion of the original? Or both.” The answer it offers is itself, the manner in which it captures and dramatizes the process in dynamic clarity. And the result is one of the more exciting, mysterious, heart-breaking, howlingly funny, painfully honest, suspenseful, powerful and original novels this reader has had the pleasure of immersing himself in for quite some time. It combines the tickle of humor in high and low places, sometimes both at once, simultaneous with an arresting story and solid aesthetic nutrition.

We find ourselves in the winter of the narrator’s discontent in Frankfurt, wracked by the “miserable deranged addiction” to finish his book, which is no longer merely the book he ran away to write some years before, but the book of his continuing life, the book of everything that rallies against his writing it, together with the book that rallies to prevent him from having a life in the present with the girl. To make things even more complex – though Applefield succeeds in keeping them clear in their complexity – the narrator is living his life bilingually, in a patois of English and French spiced with a smattering of other tongues.

“You call this living together,” the girl screams. “Pas moi.” And even as she screams it, he is writing it down and criticizing himself for doing so. Just as they are about to tear asunder, she flings herself back at him, “Mais je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime,” she murmurs and he comforts her with one hand, “Je t’aime aussi,” taking notes with his other: “It is wrong exploiting your own life like this.” And “The truth is you can be a turd and be right at the same time, and wrong and an angel, too.” And even as he writes, he is noting the exquisite texture of a chair cushion against his naked backside, “You should treat your ass to moments like this once in a while…” And, “If art is a person’s reaction to the world, then there’s nothing I can’t include in it.” This is an essential part of it all: how is the artist to capture in sudden illumination the details of the moment, of the present, those that generally fleet past barely noticed – for somewhere in those fleeting impressions is the solid stuff of life; it just never stands still except in art.

Parallel with the metafictional, post-modern present tense in Frankfurt runs a past-tense post-colonial tale of murder and exploitation from the islands in which civilization is measured against the jungle and found lacking, even as the luxurious dream-house of the novel’s American psychiatrist is enveloped and consumed by wild growth along with his cherished edition of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, back to the primal elements.

At once sophisticated and down to earth, literary and realistic, told in a sustained voice of ironic lightness, On a Flying Fish succeeds in the remarkable task of flying the reader along through both parallels, breathless for the next development in each of the broken tales that amount to the whole. Applefield has a rare gift – a bit of Miller, a bit of Mailer, a bit of Graham Greene, all driven by the pure, careful, courageous and expansive voice of Applefield himself, taking time out now and again from his engaging tale to spin riffs on the moon, on the jungle, on sex… The sex scene that occupies pages 89 to 92, for example, has to be among the most unusual, original, strangest sex scenes in the history of the genre, “written in dick on a Fed Ex electronic pad,” while another scene of discrete masturbation by the narrator, excited over one of his own novel’s blue moments and glimpsing himself like a gorilla in the mirror while the girl, making dinner in the kitchen, calls in to ask where the capers are and he stills his breath to call back, Second shelf on the refrigerator door – rivals anything in Portnoy. “There are some things you must never ever share with anyone,” the narrator writes later, after having shared such a thing.

The narrator of Flying Fish struggles throughout to explain to himself and to the reader why he is making “the massive sacrifice you make to be able to waste your time on a book.” “To celebrate the imagination as our only hope for interpreting and surviving an otherwise absurd world,” he postulates, never quite certain himself whether it is hope or hype. “Why write it down?” he asks himself. “I’ll forget, that’s why.”

The narrator of On a Flying Fish is not only an original and unforgettable character, he is also a painstakingly honest, moral and likeable one, and the tales he tells amount to an original and unforgettable novel.

Reprinted from The Literary Review

Novelist, expat publisher, founding editor
of Frank, a literary magazine published in Paris,
Applefield is the author of On a Flying Fish
FRANK, Wynkin deWorde Publishers
2006. Distributed by Small Press Distribution Berkeley, CA.