I’m sure Dave Kress would laugh at me if I
called him uncompromising or applied other such adjectives to his body of work.
After all, Kress is something of a maverick, delighting at poking
convention—and its wisdom and rules—in the eye. This comes across in his
fiction. Since his debut novel Counting Zero, released in 1999, Kress
has consistently written inventive and thorny work which demands a reader’s
full attention (and wit). His previous one, Hush, was a beast of a book,
in which the protagonist allegedly met the creator of the universe and wrote
her own version of a sacred text, casting her life as parable. In Bubble
Chamber, Kress spins two novellas, but the relatively short lengths belie
their depth.
In Buda and Pest, Kress uses a first person plural narration to detail
the lives of a ragtag group of Hungarians struggling to live their lives in a
warzone occupied by Nazis in 1945. The narrative style, a sort of chorus of
lost souls, spends time doting on each of the group’s characters, unfolding
aspects of each personality as they navigate the dilemmas that war—and
love—bring. Each sentence here is laboriously crafted, loaded with gags as the
plurality uses, and draws attention to colloquialisms (and get ready to never
hear the word “Wichita” the same again!). The structure and impact here both remind me
of Locos, the metafictional novel by Felipe Alfau.
In Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, Kress goes full
postmodern, casting a wide, willfully fractured web in the form of a murder
mystery involving a lab technician using an assumed name. Here, Kress mixes up
the storytelling: handwritten notes, annotated bibliographies, news stories,
fortunes from cookies, and fridge magnet poetry all swirl and—if you do it
right—coalesce. Remember that book House of Leaves that everyone was so
high on a few years back? Kress’s stuff is in the bus to that ballpark. Like
Kinbote maybe (or maybe not) being an alter ego for someone else in Nabakov’s Pale
Fire, there might be something else lurking under the surface in Fads
and Fallacies. Or maybe not. Kress is a master of form, and part of mastery is mockery,
making readers re-evaluate priorities and assumptions. Just because the work is
serious and effective doesn’t mean that the reader (or the author) has to take
things seriously all the time, like Black Flag said on the radio tapes on the
CD version of the unreleased five-piece demos. Kress’s fiction demands that you
ask questions about why and when you’re both being serious.
If you like your fiction challenging and intelligent, Bubble Chamber is
a great introduction to a body of work by an underrated American novelist.
Check out Dave Kress’s stuff to find one of the freshest, funniest voices in
fiction. –Michael T. Fournier (Mammoth Books, 7 Juanita St., DuBois, PA 15801,
mammothbooks.org)