The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Splitting by Brian Clark
Trevor Dodge

Brian Clark. Splitting. Wordcraft of Oregon, 1999. 174 pp. Paper: $9.00.

Brian Clark’s romp through a world of static television screens and desert landscapes sends science crashing headlong into fiction with its highbeams on. The resulting wreckage, Splitting, is a jagged collage of high-energy prose broadcast directly from the cerebral cortex of a bisexual potassium terrorist struggling to resist the telepathic colonization of earth by hyperlingual aliens.

Using a host of agents, neurotic doctors, and psychoactive drugs, our narrator realizes that aliens are replacing our fractured, amnesiac reality with a gel-coated, easy-to-swallow, linear one: “that night, time burned away, ceased, though for a long while I thought it had gotten accidentally looped. . . . Upon introspection, I discovered the aliens, a life form that eats consciousness. . . . I started to recognize the robots who look human but transmit the medial carrier wave beat frequency that has brainwashed us—for millennia. . . . When I awoke, I was locked up, charged with creating a temporal disturbance.”

Alien thoughts infiltrate the rational via image and dream, exposing a world accessible only through “play-talk”—language devoid of vowels yet full of sound—where “speech rattles around like bees on the psi-band.”

Clark indulges us with a snaking narrative reminiscent of Kerouac’s Doctor Sax that shreds convention, genre, gender, and expectation. While Clark’s novel is more engaged than the sometimes overripened fruits of Kerouac’s trips into spontaneous prose, Splitting does bend a knee to the Dharma Bum in its scatological assemblage of poetics, prosody, and pop culture: “With bombful intent I threw a pure potassium baseball into a chlorinated swimming pool. It was a cigarette breakthrough. It was a pillow fight with my mother. . . . It was better than hurling video monitors from the tops of tall buildings . . . better than sitting in county jail rolling the Bible for smoke and playing cards with the air.” [Trevor Dodge]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Splitting by Brian Clark Trevor Dodge Brian Clark. Splitting. Wordcraft of Oregon, 1999. 174 pp. Paper: $9.00. Brian Clark’s romp through a world of static television screens and desert landscapes sends science crashing headlong into fiction with its highbeams on. The resulting wreckage, Splitting, is a jagged collage of high-energy prose broadcast directly from the cerebral cortex of a bisexual potassium terrorist struggling to resist the telepathic colonization of earth by hyperlingual aliens. Using a host of agents, neurotic doctors, and psychoactive drugs, our narrator realizes that aliens are replacing our fractured, amnesiac reality with a gel-coated, easy-to-swallow, linear one: “that night, time burned away, ceased, though for a long while I thought it had gotten accidentally looped. . . . Upon introspection, I discovered the aliens, a life form that eats consciousness. . . . I started to recognize the robots who look human but transmit the medial carrier wave beat frequency that has brainwashed us—for millennia. . . . When I awoke, I was locked up, charged with creating a temporal disturbance.” Alien thoughts infiltrate the rational via image and dream, exposing a world accessible only through “play-talk”—language devoid of vowels yet full of sound—where “speech rattles around like bees on the psi-band.” Clark indulges us with a snaking narrative reminiscent of Kerouac’s Doctor Sax that shreds convention, genre, gender, and expectation. While Clark’s novel is more engaged than the sometimes overripened fruits of Kerouac’s trips into spontaneous prose, Splitting does bend a knee to the Dharma Bum in its scatological assemblage of poetics, prosody, and pop culture: “With bombful intent I threw a pure potassium baseball into a chlorinated swimming pool. It was a cigarette breakthrough. It was a pillow fight with my mother. . . . It was better than hurling video monitors from the tops of tall buildings . . . better than sitting in county jail rolling the Bible for smoke and playing cards with the air.” [Trevor Dodge]

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