The opening: fraught with menace. A man and his wife and infant daughter are staying in a rented house over the sea in a small Irish town where they are guests for a family wedding. The mood is tense. Wind blows doors shut. The house, the largest in the village, has been commandeered as an informal gathering place for the other guests, who thus intrude on the narrator, a novelist hoping to get some writing done. Eventually, in search of a distraction, the novelist and his wife go for a walk — she with their daughter strapped to her chest. They are accompanied by his wife’s cousin, with whom he has never gotten along but whom he can’t find a plausible excuse for ditching. They have a destination — a path along the cliffs — but are uncertain of the way and cannot (in these pre-Starlink days) get reception on their phones. They make their way through brambles and switchbacks, down toward the waves. Eventually, they turn back. But the day, without incident, is not without threat: “The strange colors and curious odors in this vector of time,” the narrator tells us, “I would often revisit to cross out, defang, dismember, making it ghastly so I couldn’t pretend to miss it after I lost them both: but of course I did.”
So begins In the Suavity of the Rock, the debut novel from Greg Gerke, founding editor of the online journal Socrates on the Beach and author of several collections of short stories and essays that explore his fascination with the sensory aspects of art — on the page, on the screen, on the canvas. His interest is in the phenomenology of perception: in what is, after all, given that phenomenology is a written mode, the translation of sensory experience into (highly wrought) prose. He is also an author of essays exploring choice sentences from favorite writers. (Though fascinated by the eye, his medium is the page.) His heroes among the prose writers — Salter, Faulkner, Proust — are those who, like Conrad, make you “see,” but especially those who move dreamingly back and forth between inner and outer landscape. (The ornate and philosophical Gass and Stevens — and, behind them, Emerson — compose another central dimension of his temperament.) And so is established, in the book’s opening pages, what might be called its future perfect tense. The narrator speaks from after the cataclysm, after the tragedy, after the loss. What one expects from the tense mood and dangerous switchbacks of the dicey path down to the Irish Sea will be a literal tragedy turns out — at least until the end — to be an effect only of internal incident. A novel at once highly external and internal, it orbits, designedly, around an absent center.
The narrator is Rick, a Midwesterner and a film school dropout, who recalls, from a shifting present, his perceptions and emotions as he falls in and out of something like love, works menial jobs (some spiritually satisfying, some not), and struggles to produce authentic prose. (By the end of the book, which spans Rick’s adolescence viewed in flashback — to his 20s, 30s, and 40s, as he shuttles between expatriate life in Germany and France to what might be called life as an internal expatriate among enclaves of the like-minded in Brooklyn, Buffalo, and Oregon, up until his 60s — we learn that he did ultimately produce one novel; his neighbor presents a battered secondhand copy to him.) Yet In the Suavity of the Rock is also a record of the encounters, erotic and affective, with others from whom Rick seeks one or another kind of instruction. These others are catalysts for his moral development, where the chief concern of morality is art — a statement not so much of pure aestheticism as of how, in Rick’s (and perhaps his creator’s) eyes, the moral and aesthetic are fused in a single ethic of letting things and people be, with an appropriate reverence for their otherness. The extent to which this ethic proves debilitating for Rick raises the question of his ironic distance from his creator, whom he resembles in several though not all respects.
The basic motif of the novel is that of the pilgrimage. This is literally (if ironically) realized in an early section when the 20-something Rick, working on a permaculture farm in half-desert southeastern France, goes to see the ruins of an old monastery in the company of a girl he is flirting with, but it also occurs in its secularized modern equivalent: the hike, distinguished from pilgrimage and tourism alike in being often without object or destination, a pure surrender to the journey as prompt for reverie and reflection. (At least three major hikes anchor the narrating present, from which memories branch out and ramify, though the visit to Notre-Dame de Lure itself prompts the first of the novel’s divagations back to Rick’s childhood in Milwaukee, when it calls to mind the Basilica of St. Josaphat.) Pretexts and motives do, however, suggest themselves on occasion. One such is a kind of demonic antitype of the pilgrimage: the journey into the wilderness to kill oneself, the act taken by Rick’s father, as we learn in one of the novel’s late-breaking revelations, and potentially by Rick himself at the novel’s ambiguous close.
Rick’s final pilgrimage comes when, estranged from wife and child (for reasons we never learn), he drives across the country to Heceta Head in Oregon, the site of a historic lighthouse perched on a perilous cliff. Yet though this literal concluding journey “to the lighthouse” might suggest a debt to Woolf, the echo haunting Rick’s ear is Hecate — Greek goddess of crossroads and witchcraft, though also, in some variants, a manifestation of Diana, the huntress goddess and subject of the Ezra Pound canto from which the novel takes its title. Invoking her here lets Gerke bring together in one figure three manifestations of the feminine (“All three of them — mother, lover, and daughter — marry in an instance . . . which became the instant on the windy beach, reverberations from the rock”). The mythic and aesthetic likewise combine in Rick’s final descent to the waves, those bearers of the sea-wrack and detritus that have been been one of the novel’s central metaphors throughout, for the lashings of the present by the past, which builds up in a steady, if wavering, accumulation.
Reading Gerke, I was several times put in mind of a pithy assessment by the poet and essayist Alice Gribbin of the author of a quite different novel about an American abroad seeking enlightenment through art. Of the cringing and mawkish Ben Lerner, crippled by his self-conscious sense of the artwork as a test he passes or fails, Gribbin writes: “All art lovers know this is false. The mark of a masterpiece is that it cannot be finished with. It haunts us.” Whatever else Gerke’s Künstlerroman is — and it is not immune to a certain studious spirit — it is miles away from Lerner’s self-recrimination. There could be no better description of the form and principle of the work than this observation by Gribbin of artworks: “Our encounters with [them] are never confined to a moment but ongoing, our responses — now active, now passive, through recollection and revisits — coming in waves.” Or, as Rick himself writes elsewhere: “Epiphanies can have a long durée — days, weeks. They begin unnoticeably, in the belly of our hesitations, in the spoor of distractedness . . . .” Rick is not, however, immune to self-consciousness — as evidenced above all by his desire to transcend or obliterate the self. His ideal of art is self-erasing, kenotic: “Art can jugger like that — it pries into our everydays and wrenches out the ego’s mocking snarl in favor of pure soul.” And the same is true of art’s media. (So, seeing old photographs look down at him from the walls of his grandmother’s house, kept on by his father after her death, where he hangs out alone and masturbates to porno mags, Rick has an epiphany in the form of “the uncanny sense that those assembled there are looking directly at the viewer, nullifying their egocentricity, as if they had a sense of the eternal and held a spectral view of future generations.”)
Perhaps the fullest description of the novel’s aesthetic emerges in a comment on Rick’s friend Tanner, a writer who is dating a third friend, Gerhardt, a bisexual German expatriate who will later be discovered as having an affair with Rick’s girlfriend, Alex:
[Tanner] accommodated too many overarching strictures in his art — thinking he needed a satisfying plot when what would have helped was emotion, a coloration with textures and lusters coming not from reading, but from living more, living differently. Any project not adhering to formula was abandoned — he always made the text go the way he envisioned instead of letting it guide him where it would, into the infinite territory of the blue.
What Tanner rejects — art’s need for living, for maturation, letting things sit — is one of Gerke’s central themes. Yet if this suggests fermentation, there is also, at a deeper level, a notion of achieved distance between subject and material, which must finally reveal itself in a distant prospect — or, as the novel puts it elsewhere, “the nearest minor Alp.” (A more successful image, it seems to me, in its concreteness than that “infinite territory,” and more illustrative of the novel’s strengths.) For Rick, living is seeing, and seeing requires a certain withdrawal: “Many people claim to be living their most when they are involved in their most risky behavior. The reverse for me. Instead of seeing more, I was seeing less,” he writes in a revealing aside. To truly live requires a separation from which one can take the measure of things, and it is tempting to say that the retrospective angle of the narration reflects the same effort at taking distance from living, such that the true living is that which is able to hold life at a distance, to view it in a certain prospect and evoke, and by evoking, distill some conclusion from it.
Is it churlish, in view of such self-knowledge, to say the novel arouses promises it does not deliver on? That, in its preterite or future perfect tense — announced in its opening chapter’s implication of a retrospective vantage point, looking backward across calamity — it hovers too exclusively in the fumes of incident, and that this choice, doubtless deliberate, eventually becomes mannerism?
The narrative, an emanation of its protagonist, shows a studious avoidance of incident. Opportunities for the kind of events that would ordinarily drive a plot are presented to him, but he habitually refrains. The recurring rhythm is one of anticlimax. Invited to join a group of British Sikhs traveling to Nice — only belatedly does Rick realize the girl who invited him had been flirting with him — he considers the offer, then rejects it. He flirts with a pair of tourist girls, British and Irish, but only in his head; he doesn’t make a move. Rick hikes in the woods outside Buffalo with Gerhardt, who it has just been revealed — though the full details will only be disclosed pages later — is Rick’s successful rival for his girlfriend Alex, yet he never forces the moment to its crisis (“when Alex came home, I innocently referred to that day in the forest and how little drama had ensued”). Uncharacteristically, Rick devises a scheme to set up Gerhardt with another woman, Hannah, his own ex-lover and accomplice, so that he can tail them like a private dick, take photographs to embarrass Gerhardt, and thereby spoil his relationship with Alex. But the scheme, though executed, never really bears narrative fruit; we never learn of its outcome.
Other exceptions likewise prove the rule. While playing the board game Therapy with the truncated family group, plus friends, that goes on vacation after his father’s suicide, Rick draws a card that asks: “Freud said the central event in a man’s life was: a. His first sexual experience; b. His father’s death.” Rick instinctively recoils from reading this passage out loud (“At least I knew not to ask such a bunker buster as this”). He does show the card later on, in private, to his brother Clayton, prompting a tense exchange in which they finally have it out with each other, albeit in a way that again reserves moral superiority to Rick, who will not let himself be goaded into saying the most hurtful words.
Though not prudish, Rick frequently insists on his sexlessness, on the non-libidinal quality of his interest in others, whether in a recalled same-sex encounter as a teenager — “I had no attraction to Doug’s attired or unattired body . . . only for the inner energy that didn’t judge or attempt redress but welcomed” — or in the reserve with which he interacts with a young woman he hikes with in France: “She could trust me, and though I’d never left a diary opened to my most carnal secrets, she understood I wouldn’t try to bed her.” Seeking solitude, Rick makes his disinclination to participate an aspect of his vocation, of his ever-deepening, ever more ascetic investment in the self and its projects. The emblematic scene comes early on in the book, when Rick recalls being invited to a sleepover at the house of a childhood friend, the son of one of his mother’s friends, then abruptly deciding to go home — an act of turning a cold shoulder that he will repeat over and over in his life (and a useful reminder that he is not merely some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.) No less emblematic is the book’s title. Canto XVII is a poem of paradisal rebirth and miraculous flowering. Gerke’s allusion to it captures well two major aspects of the book’s temperament: vaginal enfolding and sweetness, but attributed to what is, after all, rock — the inhuman world rather than human connection.
Rick’s principal failures are those of tact — of the man too preoccupied by it. We get allusions later on to some fault or crime or infraction of his doing. (On his final drive across the country, Rick engages strangers in conversation at bed and breakfasts and finds that “They didn’t approve of what I’d done.”) But it is not clear that he has in fact done anything, apart from how he has lived. At times Rick seems to face a choice between being a writer and a good father, but the nature of this conflict, in practical terms, never really comes into focus, apart from as an aspect of other failures. “Go finish your book at your friend’s house this summer,” Rick’s soon-to-be-estranged-wife tells him. “I couldn’t do that and miss a month of her life, but I did and the novel came to nothing — weak-willed and heartless like its creator.” He fears: “That I was not, in fact, a writer after all.” (Though, then again: “Gerhardt and Alex’s relationship was my creation, subconsciously willed to make the pain of lost love linger.”)
Like many failed artists, Rick has a conviction of having that within which passes show that “There was always something holding me back . . . . Nothing I could ever do would answer to the immensity of what’s holding me back.” At the end, his immersion is not in his art but in the medium of the sea, into which he gives his estranged wife the strong impression he means to drown himself, though the ending is left ambiguous. The final ascent and descent at Heceta Head thus mark the ironic and simultaneous fulfilment of Rick’s wish for ever greater isolation and to no longer hold himself back, which in his case means finally surrendering himself not to art as such but to pure immersion in nature — somewhere between Emerson’s transparent eyeball and Empedocles’ leap into the volcano.
Rick’s failure, however, is Gerke’s strength, and the final pages of In the Suavity of the Rock mark a return to all that is most thrilling in his prose. The route that takes us there from the opening pages has many switchbacks and perhaps a few wrong turns. Gerke’s prose is ornate, rhythmical, risky; it is not always equal to its strongest passages. Highly styled but somehow not stylish (it does not aim to be chic), it can be carried away by its own wish to load every rift with ore. At its weakest, it falls into a kind of euphuism, a prolix sing-song: “I went home to be solitary and have my showdown with the page while still reserving a pity-wanting stance for my pains.” Descriptions of the inner life are the most challenging. Mixed metaphors abound (“I did my arm-cutting in round-about ways, fleecing our connection of a vitality and spontaneity needed to speed it out of it is valleys”), but so too does a curious tic that recalls therapeutic language. Actions without outputs affect the quality of the verbs — visible in their tendency to be used as intransitives, as if actions were reduced to gestures, as if they received their meaning not from their effect upon a world of objects, but as aspects of the monadic soul. “I did boggle about these three people and the degree of umbrage and disqualifying behavior rising to the fore because, though near, I couldn’t discern.”
The novel’s best sections come early — the early scenes of Rick on the farm in Haute Provence, southeastern France, where he goes, as so often, with “thoughts of more deep seclusion,” burned out from a failed relationship in Heidelberg, to work on a biodynamic farm — that is, following Steinerian methods and eschewing the use of mechanical tools. These chapters are absorbing and intense, fraught with implications, like the roads that extend in a network of veins into the uplands above the farm. (Perhaps not coincidentally, these early chapters are largely speechless; the first quoted dialogue in the book is from Paul Malix, an expatriate American novelist to whom Rick pays court as devotee, tracking him from Aix to Arles, before Malix is promptly struck dumb by stroke.)
In these chapters one finds moments where, less at the level of the sentence than of the paragraph, Gerke shows his ability to take you by the hand and lead you on a forbidding and exhilarating ascent:
Outside, the weather has shifted. With a warm rush of wind came the cold rains, spawn of the small mountains. I didn’t know the hour — it could have been three or six, given the clouds. After chopping wood, I changed into a slicker I’d found in another caravan, and walked uphill to the pipes connected to the filtration system, which reverse-osmosed the uphill runoff. There had been some problems with a valve, and Andre wanted me to check it once a day on the weekends. After this, I continued higher up to the public lands, and in a little under an hour I sat in a field of spry wildflowers with a grand easterly vista — beyond it, low clouds where the Alps would be, and below, foothills lured by mist and pockets of sundowning light. Wisps of my breath preceded my intention to live in what I saw. Above the jagged line of those new coppery hills, the ziggurats below melted away, becoming dissimilar scenery a few thousand feet beyond. Then two low-flying fighter jets passed soundlessly in the direction of the Mediterranean. I waited for the reverberation, but none came. Soon the rain stopped, though the sky darkened. I backtracked. Near a copse of pines were three deer. Their eyes were almond-shaped, unlike any other deer I’d seen. The rain briefly started, then ceased. The deer moved on.
Neither the first nor the last time the novel recalls The Waste Land (“In the mountains, there you pee freely,” the narrator observes earlier on, in a choice example of Gerke’s earthy wit), these images, tense with undelivered power, give a different illustration of that waiting for the other shoe to drop that characterizes the novel generally. And yet, Gerke’s strength is to make you realize that in the waiting itself — in its heightening of the senses and something beyond them — the power in fact resides. It is the debut of a significant writer. Let us hope that his next novel is not so long “undelivered.”
Paul Franz is a poet, fiction writer, and critic. He is the editor of Literary Imagination and a co-editor of Romanticon. He writes the Substack Ashes and Sparks and hosts regular reading groups on literary subjects for Interintellect.
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A truly good reading, a critical tour de force, whether or not you make time for the book in question. Exemplary.
Very good review. I've had this one on my shelf for a while and have been meaning to read it.