The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Silver by Matthew RemskiRobert L. McLaughlin
Matthew Remski. Silver. Insomniac Press, 1998. 395 pp. Paper: $14.99.
Like David Foster Wallace, Matthew Remski seems to be struggling with the aesthetic legacy of the high postmodernists: How is the young contemporary writer to make the lessons of the masters his own and then move beyond them? Silver, Remski’s response to this dilemma, is nothing less than a parody of Gravity’s Rainbow, but it’s also something more: he has the style down and also the weird imagination and encyclopedic knowledge; but where rocket-obsessed GR is, some would claim, phallocentric, Silver explores the insidious fallout of phallocentrism.
The plot, which the following can only suggest, begins with investigative reporter Tyrone Pynchon scuffling through prewar Germany, uncovering the dangers behind the ascendant Nazis and pursuing a fascination with the Shroud of Turin. The novel then turns its attention to postwar America, where the Nazis, though defeated, have managed to perpetuate their fascist worldview. The desire to objectify others, most evident in Germany in the Holocaust, is manifested in North America in a male chauvinism that has been internalized by men and women. The Barbie doll, with its impossible image of female beauty and its dangerous lessons about commodification, was created, it turns out, by Klaus Barbie. Playgoy magazine is the brainchild of Nazi Hans Hugo Heffner. The climax of the novel is the inevitable coming together of events that result in the murder of Playmate Dorothy Stratten. (There’s also a wonderful digression about Jesus Christ’s post-Resurrection roamings, searching for meaning. Did you know He was the first Ronald McDonald?)
Silver is a work of incredible imagination, combining the comic and tragic in purposes aesthetic and ideological. Starting as an in-joke, it becomes an intelligent and challenging novel in its own right. [Robert L. McLaughlin]