Frederick Reuss

HENRY OF ATLANTIC CITY

1. Reuss’ saint-boy is never not assessing his relation to the evident world by way of an endless loop of the Gnostic Gospels, and is situated within the prose fiction in such a way that a reader may always be on the verge of realizing that the cops returning him to one of the few stable waves with which he is familiar, may not quite be the imperial guards his expressionist (Reuss) allows us to briefly suppose they might be, in full, to Henry.
2. Excepting Berkeleyan Henry, all the character figures in the novel effectively simulate both characters in a novel, and the sorts of personality-forms among whom readers will spend their day. But Henry’s voice is confined (almost entirely) within the good and affectionate Reuss, and dwells there cupped in the warm hands of our faith.
3. Longue durée has been excused from the breadth of Henry’s acuity; there are no invisible elisions, and he appears before and regards each of his subsequent idiomatic set-pieces in a state of free autism that is moderated only by the kindnesses and needs of those who are presented to us in such a way that they appear to be regarding him as being a breathing boy.
4. Those readers who injudiciously regard Atlantic City casinos and culture as depraved and morbid may have difficulty participating in Henry’s apperception that theirs is a holiness equivalent to all others, including warm naps in a hammock in the fiercely lovely Fairmount, Indiana, or squatting in a dumpster that might put us in mind of a penetrating vile heartlessness.
5. The McMurray&Beck production of the book is most pleasing. Shall we not remember that we read hundreds of books by dozens of publishers who imagine that we are only grimy and wallet-mongering monkeys, who do not respond with gladsome hearts to fine binding, exquisite typeface, and excellent clarity? Lose not thy most human of convictions, our noble Greg Michalson!
6. The arrangement I have made with Frederick Reuss allows the confection (mine own) of a few hundred pages of manuscript draft situated somewhere in the middle of the book, in which Henry’s cosmology is unfolded (context is everything) and flowers like ten thousand pink peony bushes. Perhaps there are typescripts or diskettes lying fallow in a desk, stacked under magazines or in the vertical arrearage of plastic cases, rejected or never considered, which I can pretend would have allowed the Henry construct a native semantic being unmediated by Reuss or me.
7. There is the noting that no transubstantiating doggy canine dog renders Henry peaceably extra-literate, though perhaps the author allows this in other books, which I’m eager to read, for this story told round the campfire gave me much delight and satisfaction.
8. I should very probably have preferred not to be brusquely touched upon my brow that Henry discovers Buddhist conciliation when the author and I break off our engagement, as I always am puzzled and dismayed by the convention that prose fictions shall ere have denouements, but it is hard to shuck off the delights that usually obtain from stories in which descriptions of young people learning the ways of the world illumine the insecure margins and ever-shifting boundaries of both our strongest and most faint confidences.