The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Dradin, In Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere by Jeff VanderMeer
Lance Olsen

Jeff VanderMeer. Dradin, In Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere. Buzz-city Press (P.O. Box 38190, Tallahassee, FL 32315), 1996. 98 pp. Paper: $9.95.

There I was feeling despondent, in a socioliterary sort of way, having just read this really macabre piece in Newsweek (3 June 1996) about how if you’re the kind of guy who’s written a couple of novels that’ve sold maybe 5,000 copies each you’re pretty well history—wrap it up, turn off the lights, shut the door behind you, your track record’s a shame—while if your name happens to be Jacquelyn Mitchard and your first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, about a kidnapped three-year-old, or Sapphire, just Sapphire, no kidding, like some New Age musician, and your first novel, Push, about growing up dysfunctional in Harlem, then, wham, you’ve got yourself a $500,000 two-book contract and Michelle Pfeiffer and Ron Howard taking turns knocking on your movie rights—when a review copy of Jeff VanderMeer’s debut book, the eccentric novella Dradin, In Love (interspersed with Michael Shore’s gorgeous Boschian collage illustrations of rats, jesters, skeletons, and dapper-suited businessmen with bat heads), elegantly published by the micropress Buzzcity, turned up in my mailbox. It’s the kind of book that makes me happier just knowing it, and books like it, exist in the world.

Like Shore’s weird illustrations, there’s something remotely medieval, remotely Victorian, about its ambience. It commences with Dradin Kashmir, an out-of-work missionary, who’s still possibly carrying a fever bug he contracted back in the jungle, staring three stories up at a nameless woman taking dictation in a window. Suddenly in love, Dradin decides to buy her a book, and this purchase begins his journey into the heart of a meticulously imagined, intricately magic city, not to mention the nature of memory and desire, and the reader’s toward a satisfyingly surprising and engaging conclusion. Stylistically, this novella is involved, two shakes velvet-and-gold-leaf antique, one downright aesthete fabrication, each sentence balanced and cadenced with an austere precision. The overall effect is restoratively out of step with the late merger-and-blockbuster millennium in the same way Bruce Chatwin’s quietly mysterious Utz is out of step, or J. M. Coetzee’s symbolically resonant Waiting for the Barbarians, or even a dream-time Borges story (the bookstore in VanderMeer’s fiction is named, after all, for him). It’s the kind of narratological metropolis inhabited by a dwarf tattooed head-to-foot with river maps, creatures called Mushroom Dwellers you just don’t want to know too much about, a laughable and sad alcoholic father, a geophagist mother, and a masturbating saint. Even though its plot is strangely static (a whole chapter, for instance, is dedicated to Dradin’s walk back to his hostel after buying his new sweetheart that book in question), you’ve got to love the protagonist’s unhurried education into the breach between hope of the spirit and brutality of the flesh, and you’ve got to look forward to Jeff VanderMeer’s next finely tuned unorthodox literary gift. [Lance Olsen]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Dradin, In Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere by Jeff VanderMeer Lance Olsen Jeff VanderMeer. Dradin, In Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere. Buzz-city Press (P.O. Box 38190, Tallahassee, FL 32315), 1996. 98 pp. Paper: $9.95. There I was feeling despondent, in a socioliterary sort of way, having just read this really macabre piece in Newsweek (3 June 1996) about how if you’re the kind of guy who’s written a couple of novels that’ve sold maybe 5,000 copies each you’re pretty well history—wrap it up, turn off the lights, shut the door behind you, your track record’s a shame—while if your name happens to be Jacquelyn Mitchard and your first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, about a kidnapped three-year-old, or Sapphire, just Sapphire, no kidding, like some New Age musician, and your first novel, Push, about growing up dysfunctional in Harlem, then, wham, you’ve got yourself a $500,000 two-book contract and Michelle Pfeiffer and Ron Howard taking turns knocking on your movie rights—when a review copy of Jeff VanderMeer’s debut book, the eccentric novella Dradin, In Love (interspersed with Michael Shore’s gorgeous Boschian collage illustrations of rats, jesters, skeletons, and dapper-suited businessmen with bat heads), elegantly published by the micropress Buzzcity, turned up in my mailbox. It’s the kind of book that makes me happier just knowing it, and books like it, exist in the world. Like Shore’s weird illustrations, there’s something remotely medieval, remotely Victorian, about its ambience. It commences with Dradin Kashmir, an out-of-work missionary, who’s still possibly carrying a fever bug he contracted back in the jungle, staring three stories up at a nameless woman taking dictation in a window. Suddenly in love, Dradin decides to buy her a book, and this purchase begins his journey into the heart of a meticulously imagined, intricately magic city, not to mention the nature of memory and desire, and the reader’s toward a satisfyingly surprising and engaging conclusion. Stylistically, this novella is involved, two shakes velvet-and-gold-leaf antique, one downright aesthete fabrication, each sentence balanced and cadenced with an austere precision. The overall effect is restoratively out of step with the late merger-and-blockbuster millennium in the same way Bruce Chatwin’s quietly mysterious Utz is out of step, or J. M. Coetzee’s symbolically resonant Waiting for the Barbarians, or even a dream-time Borges story (the bookstore in VanderMeer’s fiction is named, after all, for him). It’s the kind of narratological metropolis inhabited by a dwarf tattooed head-to-foot with river maps, creatures called Mushroom Dwellers you just don’t want to know too much about, a laughable and sad alcoholic father, a geophagist mother, and a masturbating saint. Even though its plot is strangely static (a whole chapter, for instance, is dedicated to Dradin’s walk back to his hostel after buying his new sweetheart that book in question), you’ve got to love the protagonist’s unhurried education into the breach between hope of the spirit and brutality of the flesh, and you’ve got to look forward to Jeff VanderMeer’s next finely tuned unorthodox literary gift. [Lance Olsen]

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