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A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava – review
Stuart Kelly enjoys the raggedy brilliance of a publishing sensation
A look at liberty … De la Pava poses moral questions more thorny and vexing than most. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters
Self-published in 2008 and this month awarded the PEN prize for debut fiction, A Naked Singularity has had a long, slow burn. Gradually it garnered online reviews in which it was compared to Dickens, Melville, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Lethem (and the Coen Brothers, Police Academy and The Wire), before being taken up by Chicago University Press and now the MacLehose imprint of Quercus (the publishers of Stieg Larsson). It is currently the favoured stick with which to beat conventional publishing – proof, we are led to believe, that the soulless minions of orthodoxy can't distinguish between Henry James and EL James. It is ambitious, affecting, intelligent, plangent, comic, kooky and impassioned. I've read a lot of novels this year, between judging the Man Booker prize and the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, and I've yearned for this kind of exuberant, precise fiction. I would also say that now Sergio De La Pava is part of the Corporate Behemoth of Old-Fashioned Publishing, his next book will be far, far better. As much as I loved it, I wished he had had an editor.
A Naked Singularity might be considered part of the "maximalist" tradition, or even what James Wood described as "hysterical realism". After all, we have Casi, the child of Colombian immigrants and a New York public defender, whose life intersects with an experiment to turn one of the characters of The Honeymooners into a real person; the perfect heist devised by a perfectionist; people called Melvyn Toomberg, Troie Liszt and Devin Quackmire; a child who has gone mute during her mother's pregnancy; experiments on rats; hair cancer; a recipe for the perfect empanadas; a child who has been abducted by children; boxing; a death row inmate with the mental capacity of a child; a strange freeze incapacitating the city; some quantum physics; more pondering on genetic manipulation; judges called Cymbeline or Sizygy; hotel managers called Big Mac Wideload Santageleeskees and gangsters called Ballena (Spanish for whale: cute Moby-Dick reference); and a TV show based around Catholic confessionals. The frenzy is fabulous, but the energy, at points, lacks direction. The opening scene, where Casi is defending a series of unfortunate, bewildered individuals, is excellent in its surrealism. The hoops which must be jumped through, the simple, complex silliness of the judicial process, is rendered in delightful and stiletto-sharp detail. At one point Casi has to deal with an HIV-positive client who will have to go to prison if his health improves; another case rests on whether or not a truck is legally a building.
Among all the comparisons, it is curious that William Gaddis is not mentioned more frequently. Like Gaddis, De La Pava uses speech to giddying effect; not just as dialogue but in set-piece speeches and deranged polyphonies, with characters intercutting, talking over, and glancing against each other. Moreover, the law's asinine tendencies were also the subject of Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own.
The zany proliferations of the book are not in themselves a problem. Rather, it's the shifts in tone between them that appear awkward. At one moment we have social realism and a genuine, emotionally urgent social conscience, albeit with a carapace of cynicism – the reader will care and despair about the clients as much as Casi does – then, with a shriek of crunching gears, we're into offbeat comic cadenzas on, for example, why the phrases "fat chance" and "slim chance" have an identical meaning, or what happened on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Then it's grand guignol stuff as Casi gets drawn into his acquaintance Dane's plan to steal millions of dollars from a drug cartel. It is as if there are three separate novels trapped between two covers, or as if, fearful of never appearing in print, De La Pava thought he'd better get in everything, including the kitchen sink and the history of kitchen sinks. Sometimes, more is less.
Caveats aside, this is a compelling debut. Ambition might outweigh execution (and indeed does so literally in the plot), but thank goodness for such ambition. I would rather have the raggedy brilliance of A Naked Singularity over the pursed and smirking lips of much contemporary British fiction any day of the week. More than that, A Naked Singularity poses moral questions far more thorny and vexing than most, and to some extent the disparate, centrifugal elements of the plot are tethered to one question. The Dantean chilly setting, many of the debates (such as has the Second Coming already happened?), the inability of the law to be graceful, all tie back to a quotation from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus that seems the hidden epigraph of the book: "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it."
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by Sergio De La Pava(Favorite Author)
review 1: "I'm just no good at concision". p. 586A Naked Singularity is a very well written novel, with an amazing story, or stories, although every dialogue and thought of the characters is so long and dense that it's quite easy to get bored after a while. Nonetheless, it well worth the reading, once I learned to find and skip the overly-detailed parts that I didn't find very interesting, for example the entire boxing career of Wilfred Benitez.
review 2: Fantastic. Sergio de la Pava speaks in a hilarious, insightful voice, and despite this book being nearly 700 pages, I'd have been happy with a few hundred more. He often drifts into long discourses on law, philosophy, morality, time, and a multitude of other topics, but despite the serious intellectual nature of these d... moreiatribes, his humor manages to shine through, preventing the book from becoming an overwhelming or pedantic read. I simply cannot recommend enough. less
Amazing, thought provoking and extremely smart. Read this.
A little uneven, but mostly brilliant.
Not perfect but that's not the point.
That was glorious. One helluva book.
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