Paul McComas UNPLUGGED

Dayna Clay slowly becomes aware of her responsibility as the arranging sensibility in Paul McComas’ novel UNPLUGGED, but has been afforded, let us say, perhaps a slight insufficiency of tools, for she otherwise possesses the wit to realize that the single significant sweep of equanimity toward which she aspires can be achieved only by integrating far-flung genres and dissimilar media; but she must for the moment be coaxed like a beef cattle along the single corral gates of story. It is her loss, as a character-entity, that the book’s resolution follows the last page of text with the white page of the face of the good Paul McComas; yet this is not at all deleterious effect, since McComas’s goal has been advanced and achieved, and he has had much to say. The argillaceous prose-fiction Dayna-entity is unfortunately deprived of her own afterflowering, and is severed from McComas’ subsequent night-thoughts. Still, one will wonder why Dayna was given a savant’s precision and wisdom, if she was only going to take two steps across the room, when she might have sailed to Byzantium, and wandered cross Patagonia, rusticated in a Venice café, and encouraged Matisse to use a little more white pigment.
One step across the room is doubtless the primary necessary expedient if it prevents the principal from trembling the trigger bar that alerts the bullet meant for one’s head, but the broad life promised her is stunted by her believing that the rest of her life - when she could be appreciating that memory is a process – is a monkey replacing one story with another.
To his great credit and in fulfillment of the promise he has made to us to unleash in the form of a novel the James within him, McComas has made Dayna Clay an artist, whereas the sniggling Paul Auster has simply and nominally declared that some character or other is an artist and by means of that endorsement, he expects us to jump on his fucking smelly trolley of a novel.
Auster arranges sentences in exactly the same way I would suppose he has violently swung a razor-sharp, mountainman’s axe to cut in half a Milky Way: with thundering declaration that the meaning of a sentence can be no more than the sum of the meaning of its words. Build a model of the Taj Mahal with uncooked spaghetti. At age fifteen, he stuffed a green pepper with ground beef, onion, tomatoes, rice and cheese, in just the way he had, the night before, for the first time, approximated coitus. This is a world without color or people of color. What do boxes in a closed warehouse do when no one is around? They defy their own destiny and besmirch the glory of their far-bound treasures, by having convinced themselves that everything will be okay as long as Regent Auster comes along and makes of themselves smug little piles and other similar, consequential, and bloodless boxes. Auster’s redemption is always only effected by paraphrase, which is not the land of wisdom, art, love, health, multiplicity, the human senses, assurance, courage, rebellion, the glories, the graces, intuition, or metaphor. Paraphrase is some old shit-chestnut you got from one of your credentialed elders. Result: Flaubert, Mailer, and Faulkner fling themselves hand-in-hand off a high cliff, supplying by picture a joke that hath ne’er been before told.
As aspects of the whole of his work, these campfire tales, McComas’ DUBLINERS, will have the warmth we locate in our family members, which we have held close to our hearts prior to our having set our own course for Yoknapatawpha, Paris, or Ramsdale. These are the places where englysshe swirls clouds and thunder into song and rhapsody-waltzes. Sincere independence of spirit is always detectable only in the implications and the digressions, as it must be, and its means reside in semiotic, implicit harmonies. McComas’ real (and next?) work is Molly’s ULYSSES, the popular music starlet who matured her accessions by means of the most austere privacy, and was perceived generally by many people as an artist who invented a field.