Review: Inconceivable Wilson – JA Tyler

JA Tyler has discovered the secret of time travel. There is no other explanation for being able to run mud luscious magazine and ml press, produce several chapbooks and novellas, contribute to Rumble, The Chapbook Review, and Lies With Occasional Truth, work as an editorial intern at Dzanc Books, have a publications list longer than Rapunzel’s hair– and I’ve probably missed something. His latest attempt to deny the laws of time is a novella, Inconceivable Wilson, available now from Scrambler Books.

The plot of Inconceivable Wilson concerns a man who leaves a woman to travel to a mysterious foreign country and observe the native people, only to discover that all is not as he had hoped. But it’s silly to even try to talk about plot. Laid out in the form of 100 small prose-poems, the novella isn’t so much a story as a collection of one-page (or sometimes one-line) images and memories.

It’s clear from the first page that the narrator is the focus of the novella, and that we will be spending a lot of time in his brain. For the first few pages I felt as if my face was being pressed right up against someone else’s, so close that our lips almost touched, so close that I couldn’t see them properly, as they sneered words at me. Sometimes this person would pull away and slam my face up against a series of photographs I didn’t understand. It’s impressive to be able to create such a sense of violence and claustrophobia in such a scant few words, but I kept feeling the need to pull away, to get a sense of where I was in the story. Slowly, a feel of the background seeps in: humidity, deserts, stone gods.

I spent the first quarter of the novella trying to find my feet. OK, I’d think, I get this now: it’s a hallucination. Or it’s a dream. Or he’s just waking up. Or he has a fever and the world is filtering through. Finally I stopped worrying about it, and just got caught up in the prose. Unfortunately, every time I got involved I’d be brought up short by an overwrought phrase like “Weep. Cry. Tear. Go. I go. I have gone. Go.” or “Trailing dessert at the top of my top.” The text is fraught with repetitions, and some of them become obnoxious: the strappy red shoes, the contrast of black and white, and — most of all — the word ‘go’. I’m sure Tyler is doing something terribly complicated that I just don’t understand, but it didn’t work for me. On the plus side, there are some beautiful phrasings — I particularly like “the red description of her shape” and “constancy of hands” — and the unusual syntax often reaches an effective rhythm.

There is one final point, which I do not want to make but must. JA Tyler is a very busy man, so perhaps he does not spend his Sunday afternoons watching crappy films on TV. But I do, and that is why I have seen the shameful Castaway, and that is why I am uncomfortably amused by a man lamenting over the name Wilson.

When I let go and allowed the words and rhythms of the novella to wash over me, I did enjoy it; but all things considered, it just wasn’t quite enough to hold it all together. But don’t take my word for it. Go and read Inconceivable Wilson, then come back here and tell me why I’m wrong. Love it or hate it, there’s plenty to discuss.