The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Unreal City by Thomas E. Kennedy
Lance Olsen

Thomas E. Kennedy. Unreal City. Wordcraft of Oregon (P.O. Box 3235, La Grande, OR 97850), 1996. 192 pp. Paper: $11.95.

Those who have had the good fortune and literary savvy to tune in early to Thomas E. Kennedy’s extraordinary channel, broadcasting now for more than a decade out of Copenhagen where he moved from his home in America during the seventies, know what others are missing: his refreshingly bent short stories in the pages of such prominent venues as New Letters, Crosscurrents, and the O. Henry and Pushcart anthologies; his lyrical, melancholy, spiritually haunted Prufrockian novels, Crossing Borders (1990) and A Weather of the Eye (1996); four volumes of criticism, including a recent intelligent study of Robert Coover (1992); and scads of essays, poems, interviews, translations (including co-editing the Review of Contemporary Fiction’s New Danish Fiction issue), and reviews.

Reading his accomplished collection, Unreal City, handsomely published by the ever-expanding and always laudable Wordcraft of Oregon (responsible for bringing forth some eccentrically excellent work by such slipstreamers as Misha and Don Webb), one is reminded continually of Donald Barthelme’s wonderful line from his short story “A Shower of Gold”: “You may not be interested in absurdity, but absurdity is interested in you.” Among the best of Kennedy’s ten tight pieces are “The Great Master,” celebratory antimatter of Kafka’s hopeless “A Hunger Artist,” in which a postmodern man of excess takes it upon himself to eat all the food in his house, “a pure act in an impure world”; “A Berlin of the Mind,” about an existentially adrift American, gone to Germany to rest his nerves, who comes to contemplate abandoning his identity, his family, and his history; “Murphy’s Angel,” which revolves around the foul-mouthed de-winged dying angel a businessman keeps down in his basement while he fights with his wife, mambo-dancing daughter, and autoerotic son upstairs; “The Heat Death,” a near-novella about a German physicist intent on saving the universe from the inevitable second law of thermodynamics, despite the logical challenges posed by his young partner, who turns out to be artist Paul Klee’s father; and “Gasparini’s Organ,” which involves an Italian musician and inventor who for his life work sets about creating a huge semirobotic Rube Goldberg contraption of a music maker bristling with grand piano, trumpets, violins, and percussion.

In many ways, these glassy-prosed pieces are the textual offspring of a magical realism committed to tinseling the quotidian with imaginative flash and mystery. They are surprising fictions, blackly comic cultivated philosophical investigations into where the dreary ends and invention’s geography takes over, how sanity always waits, ready to become something else, how every moment—if one just looks hard enough and from the right perspective—holds within itself a blink of bewitchment. Beneath them run religious undercurrents and riptides, sometimes parodic, disturbing the place where spirituality might or might not exist in a seedy despiritualized late-twentieth-century cosmos of claustrophobic mental interiors, cramped hallucinatory cities, off-kilter suburbs, and sad, mean-spirited relationships between obsessive underground men and their wives, fathers and sons, drivers and pedestrians, mentors and protegees, everything fallen, everything split, everything—as the title of that story about the existentially adrift American in Germany has it—a Berlin of the mind. [Lance Olsen]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Unreal City by Thomas E. Kennedy Lance Olsen Thomas E. Kennedy. Unreal City. Wordcraft of Oregon (P.O. Box 3235, La Grande, OR 97850), 1996. 192 pp. Paper: $11.95. Those who have had the good fortune and literary savvy to tune in early to Thomas E. Kennedy’s extraordinary channel, broadcasting now for more than a decade out of Copenhagen where he moved from his home in America during the seventies, know what others are missing: his refreshingly bent short stories in the pages of such prominent venues as New Letters, Crosscurrents, and the O. Henry and Pushcart anthologies; his lyrical, melancholy, spiritually haunted Prufrockian novels, Crossing Borders (1990) and A Weather of the Eye (1996); four volumes of criticism, including a recent intelligent study of Robert Coover (1992); and scads of essays, poems, interviews, translations (including co-editing the Review of Contemporary Fiction’s New Danish Fiction issue), and reviews. Reading his accomplished collection, Unreal City, handsomely published by the ever-expanding and always laudable Wordcraft of Oregon (responsible for bringing forth some eccentrically excellent work by such slipstreamers as Misha and Don Webb), one is reminded continually of Donald Barthelme’s wonderful line from his short story “A Shower of Gold”: “You may not be interested in absurdity, but absurdity is interested in you.” Among the best of Kennedy’s ten tight pieces are “The Great Master,” celebratory antimatter of Kafka’s hopeless “A Hunger Artist,” in which a postmodern man of excess takes it upon himself to eat all the food in his house, “a pure act in an impure world”; “A Berlin of the Mind,” about an existentially adrift American, gone to Germany to rest his nerves, who comes to contemplate abandoning his identity, his family, and his history; “Murphy’s Angel,” which revolves around the foul-mouthed de-winged dying angel a businessman keeps down in his basement while he fights with his wife, mambo-dancing daughter, and autoerotic son upstairs; “The Heat Death,” a near-novella about a German physicist intent on saving the universe from the inevitable second law of thermodynamics, despite the logical challenges posed by his young partner, who turns out to be artist Paul Klee’s father; and “Gasparini’s Organ,” which involves an Italian musician and inventor who for his life work sets about creating a huge semirobotic Rube Goldberg contraption of a music maker bristling with grand piano, trumpets, violins, and percussion. In many ways, these glassy-prosed pieces are the textual offspring of a magical realism committed to tinseling the quotidian with imaginative flash and mystery. They are surprising fictions, blackly comic cultivated philosophical investigations into where the dreary ends and invention’s geography takes over, how sanity always waits, ready to become something else, how every moment—if one just looks hard enough and from the right perspective—holds within itself a blink of bewitchment. Beneath them run religious undercurrents and riptides, sometimes parodic, disturbing the place where spirituality might or might not exist in a seedy despiritualized late-twentieth-century cosmos of claustrophobic mental interiors, cramped hallucinatory cities, off-kilter suburbs, and sad, mean-spirited relationships between obsessive underground men and their wives, fathers and sons, drivers and pedestrians, mentors and protegees, everything fallen, everything split, everything—as the title of that story about the existentially adrift American in Germany has it—a Berlin of the mind. [Lance Olsen]

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