The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Instant Karma, by Mark Swartz
reviewed by T. J. Gerlach

Mark Swartz. Instant Karma. City Lights, 2002. 136 pp. Paper: $11.95.

Among the many ailments suffered by David Felsenstein, the narrator of Mark Swartz’s Instant Karma, are paranoia, hallucinatory tinnitus, and a “directional deficiency” for which he wears a magnet taped to the top of his head. The novel is structured in short, tightly constructed journal entries in which we follow Felsenstein and his plans to blow up the Harold Washington branch of the Chicago Public Library. As a self-proclaimed anarchist, Felsenstein sees his plans to destroy the library as a kind of dadaist masterpiece, making terrorism an artistic act once he frees it from the chains of politics and purpose. He starts small, burning American flags à la Jimi Hendrix torching the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock before literally setting the flames to his own instrument at Monterey. And indeed, the library is Felsenstein’s instrument, his medium. He haunts the shelves, pining after the librarian at the main desk and recording in his notebooks the gems he finds from his obsessive and eclectic reading. To these tidbits he adds his own thoughts on subjects from art and anarchy to bells and Buddhism, as well as ephemera such as notes on the movie 1941, or as Felsenstein calls it, “Spielberg’s other World War II farce.” The secret to successfully rendered unreliable narrators is not that we are fooled by them but that we want to believe them. Such is the case with Swartz’s Felsenstein. Instant Karma is a smart and funny book, and what emerges from its pages is a worldview that is at times absurd, at times insightful, and at its best a beautiful blur between the two.