"Sky Saw"by Blake Butler
What happened to the good old denial system that leaders like George W. Bush pushed for after 9/11 when he asked us all to get back out there and get shopping again?__M Sarki
Sky Saw by Blake Butler; Paperback, 252 pages; Published 2012 by Tyrant Books; ISBN: 0985023503 (ISBN13: 9780985023508)
The following review was written sometime around the time the book first came out, maybe a bit before, that is if Gian sent me a review copy. And I think he did.
“…Blake Butler crafts a post-Lynchian nightmare where space and family have deformed, leaving the human persons left in the strange wake to struggle after the shapes of both what they loved and who they were.”___Tyrant Books
It seems unlikely that the academic world will eagerly weigh in on Blake Butler’s new book Sky Saw. What in the world could they say about it? It is bad enough to have blurbs that say almost nothing of substance but claim the work is remarkable in itself. Some of us want to know why, and others demand a better explanation than the simple, because I told you so. There is some mention of the book being Lynchian in its dimension. I would suggest a parallel to Cormac McCarthy’s great work titled The Road which in 2007 won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The McCarthy novel is a post-apocalyptic tale of a father and his young son surviving over a period of several months by traveling across a landscape destroyed by an unspecified cataclysm that has left few other survivors and almost no other life on Earth. It is a harsh land frequented by cannibals and a human race that could easily be termed as new criminals. But other than father and son dealing with the day to day affairs of staying hidden and out of harm’s way, there is nothing in the book that offers a glimpse of what really was and how it got that way. We are left feeling almost desperate as victims of a catastrophe perhaps of humanity’s own doing. In Sky Saw Blake Butler provides much more information and back story within his language for anyone interested in looking for the truth in what he says. The trouble with this Butler novel is that one must work much harder than when reading the easily accessible McCarthy offering that came as a welcome surprise for the main stream herd having to read his more difficult works such as Child of God and Blood Meridian.
What is clear to me as I leaf my way through the first pages of this book of Butler’s is that he could be a direct descendant of the Lish School and someone who not only listened to the teacher but understood and put the Gordon Lish lessons to practice in his work. Often I am faced with reading a former Lish student attempting to write something the teacher supposedly would have approved of if Lish had actually read and edited it. Not true at all. Most of the work related these days to Lish, and this same work offering credit to the theories of Lish himself, would not even come close to something Lish would approve of, and the pure facts quite easily presented may prove this truth. Almost anything published today that borrows from the Lish legacy has in actuality never been seen by Lish at all. I expect the main reason for this absence of the teacher’s eye and tyrannical red pen is the fear associated with his likely rejection of it and his offer to destroy the work for you by throwing it in the trash instead of adding more and more paper refuse to our landfills, that is, if it found its way into an actual mass-produced book. There are plenty of names I could drop here of the newly-anointed Lish School writers that so many of our popular little magazines are profligating for no beneficial use other than to be something they are not. It is a posture I myself refuse, though I am an outspoken proponent of the Lish School, Gordon Lish himself, and the many writers he has generously formed through his long years as editor, teacher, and friend; myself included.
While reading Butler’s crazy book here, it becomes clear to me that he has initially followed to the letter Lish’s list on what makes writing something worth reading and ultimately interesting. Loosened association, antic behavior, autism, and morbid ambivalence are key elements to a Lish-led work of art, an artifact immediately deemed uncanny and precisely what the doctor ordered. If the reader of Butler keeps in mind these four elements while reading Sky Saw it might make the presumed brilliance of this work more evident than the typical rampant overlook automatically engaged in due to our training in the schools we were raised and homogeneously educated in. The problem with a work of this kind is the order and raw power of focus needed to maintain the engine of obsession with its object. Early on I am finding Butler’s language both lyrical and incestual, which are both compliments of the highest order. As I write this review I am nowhere near the end of the piece, but wary of Butler’s continued skill in staying hard, hardened enough to meet the greater task at hand. Even if the entire book is a form of play, or a cruel joke on somebody like me taking his words too seriously, I am prepared for the consequences, just as Blake Butler must be when the final word has been set in stone on this work of fiction he has chosen for the world to see.
For those of us concerned with book sales and putting our best foot forward, Blake Butler seems indifferent to our plight and even a little, shall we say, too forward in his thinking about just how bad it is out here today. What happened to the good old denial system that leaders like George W. Bush pushed for after 9/11 when he asked us all to get back out there and get shopping again? Well there is no beating back the terrorists with this kind of thinking in Sky Saw. It appears Blake Butler has had his eyes open more than most when it comes to dictating what he has seen for years littering the American landscape. McMansions galore and growing. Or perfectly fine old clapboard structures covered with vinyl siding instead of homeowners performing the proper maintenance and care needed to preserve and protect these beautiful examples of our nation's architectural past. Of course, I am reading more into Butler than the casual observer would. I may even be in a little over my head.
The narrator states that the book takes place in the now and it must be now for those of us interested in old houses covered with vinyl siding. The place must be our beloved America, the U. S. of A. So many structures covered with the plastic stuff that dreams were somehow made from. “No maintenance homes” for everyone who can afford them. Even people with new money are covering up their new super-fast-growth southern pine studs with Tyvek® and vinyl. No more solid masonry construction except for the cheap masonry veneer they call a brick home of today. Masonry today is more air than clay, and even less clay than previously advertised. I am not at all surprised that the homes in Sky Saw are falling down and apart. Who would be expected to maintain a home that is supposedly maintenance free? These home buyers never intended to do the maintenance necessary when they bought the P.O.S. in the first place. During my forty years in the building business I called these houses “disposable homes”, and trust me it is true even if you cannot believe Blake Butler’s words near the opening of this book. Nobody takes care of these shelters we call homes. That is why their construction is called no maintenance.
I would also surmise that these people in this story have not been eating right and are busy having very odd and deformed babies, as well as the many strange sexual partners making them absent of any need for having safe sex. I don’t blame them. In this same world I too would be having unprotected sex as well just so I could die sooner. In the beginning of my reading I felt this book was science fiction, but how quickly I discovered it was not. This is the life I envisioned for my children as I participated in the world’s destruction beginning with the squandering of my own country’s assets and its vital resources, including its once-healthy citizens previously raised on working farms out on the prairie. Instead, today, we have Chem Lawn® treatments polluting our ground water as they green our grass and make our babies and animals sick. No telling what cancers exist because of all the pollution due to the no-maintenance tone we have set in this country. Of course, Butler does not come out and say these things as I am stating them. He is a fiction writer and not a spokesperson for the greening of America. There is clearly no agenda at work in Blake Butler’s prose. It is definitely morbid ambivalence at play here. Butler states the bleakly obvious and it is up to the reader to fill in the pieces as it applies to the present world we live in. It can be taken as a prediction of sorts of where we will be sooner rather than later in regards to air and water pollution, disease, deconstruction, and medicine-addled minds unwilling to cope with a life not worth living for most of us, globally.
The language spoken in this book must be English, at least in this book it is the only language I am familiar with. And the words in the book that Person 1180 was ordered to read aloud to her child (named 811) were unrecognizable to her, but her voice somehow made the syntax ease out of her vocal chords and for hours kept her and the child occupied. Sort of like my poetry if I may be be a little self-aggrandizing, though I doubt that would hardly be a compliment to many people other than myself, and now perhaps, Blake Butler. I do my syntax for just a few lines. Butler seems to go on like this for pages. We’ll see if he can keep his sentences this hard for so long as he needs to, which by my figures will be a total of 252 pages. Few writers can keep their efforts so pure and hard as this, and Butler will be forgiven if he falls off his glory wagon with me. The instances are plenty when a noun is thrown about as if it came from nowhere naming things autistically as do the kids I have known in special education. Having a word in their world so foreign to us regular people that it still means a tree even if it isn’t even remotely close to being one. But what a sounding one can do when working from a position of autism.
The kids in Blake Butler's Sky Saw could have been some of my wife’s former troubled middle-school students from what I have gathered from both she and Butler. Similar behaviors and now the same kind of things are happening today with some of our so-called normal students. Some of our more well-adjusted school children. A learning disability does not deter a prior behavior problem from using shears of any type to tear away a person’s skin. The user simply figures out a way to get the job done. There seems to be a bit of sickness in this Blake Butler world.
I am now on page 89 of this novel and Sky Saw has bogged down on me. I feel pressure to finish even though I am being urged by my higher self to abandon this book immediately. I am so sorry this is happening. What am I to do? This Blake Butler person is a rising star of our new literary pop culture! The blurbs alone mark this person as an important offering to the experimental world of literature. But I will be hated if I fail in this assignment for an honest review. Hell, I will be also hated otherwise. I am in a quandary. I am a quandary. I did enjoy a partial sentence back a couple of pages ago where it said to me “…—in mason jars slick with men’s spit,…” and I recognized the poetry in this sentence and wondered why Blake Butler did not use it more, the poetry? Previous to this nice fragment I mention here I had suffered through several pages of one liners that were page killers, or fillers, whichever works best for you, my reader, that is if you are still hanging with me and haven’t determined already that I am nowhere near qualified to speak on this subject of Sky Saw. I believe the gods are with me when I say this man Butler is not Adam in the morning to me any longer. He has no new names for things I do not understand. The work has turned gibberish to me and I feel I am wasting my time. But I will attempt a few more pages before I throw the proverbial team towel into the weekly trash.
Persons 1180, 2030, and 811 basically fill the pages of this so-called experimental novel. Adam’s names for mother, son, and absent father would hardly change anything. Great and lasting architecture could never matter here. Clean air and water a forgetful fact of the past. Classic literature too eagerly thrown into the landfills. There is no story in the fold and creases of this ugly Butlerian universe. There is merely spit and sweat and sludge of which to drink from. There is nothing of any rousing flavors tempting the nostrils to engage the drifting winds of healthy and engaging appetites. The work has become a bore.
Page 148 and I have to quit this. There is little more I want to read. The last several pages I have been skimming, looking for something worth continuing on with. This is a new literature these people are determined to call experimental. I am not interested in this new form, or vested. I have read already too much of Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, Samuel Beckett, Raymond Carver, and even Gilles Deleuze to constantly compare this reading to. Even present day writers such as Jason Schwartz and Jenny Erpenbeck have knocked me out so many times I cannot muster the will to read most other drivel I am faced with on the pages of these new literary magazines. Is it the fault at all of a seemingly nice young man going by the name of Blake Butler? Not at all. It is obviously the fault of the pseudo Lish School and those who would have us believe they are members of the original and still in good standing. Where is the teacher in all of this? I must have missed his thoughtful and encouraging blurb. It is doubtful to me that this new literary form will last. I liken this type of writing to The Beats which was more about who was sleeping with whom than the quality of their literature. There are plenty of place-setters in this present midst of new American writing, but I am not to be one of them. For the record, I wanted to like this book, and for a few brief pages I did. But the pressure did not last. The hardness was not justified. The stiffest prick could never prevail. It is very hard to write a novel, and something I will likely, if I ever tried, never be capable of doing. But too many writers think they are the real deal these days, and certain others have also told them so. I am growing ever further distanced from their ilk. Gordon Lish recently remarked to me that “Great art is beautiful.” Now you be your own judge as I am now finished with this, and that.