The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Impossibly by Laird HuntJeffrey DeShell
Laird Hunt. The Impossibly. Coffee House, 2001. 205 pp. $23.95
One of the joys of book reviewing is the delight of coming across a brilliant book one might not normally read; one of the difficulties is trying to convey one’s enthusiasm without sounding too much the devotee. Put simply, Laird Hunt’s The Impossibly is one of the most exciting debut novels I have ever read. The prose is a byzantine maze of qualifications, retractions, gaps, and contradictions, detailing the life and loves of some sort of operative (spy or criminal) in some type of organization, in a number of unnamed, presumably European locales. As the character moves from thin to fat to thin again, from young to old(er), from assignment to assignment, from daylight to darkness, the book acquires an absurd but precise energy all its own: like the shelves of the narrator’s girlfriend, full of objects that gradually become less knowable, the novel develops with a negative momentum, where the accretion of detail and language detracts from concrete knowledge. As the narrator writes, “To say anything is to complicate it.” In The Impossibly the ambiguities are meticulously constructed, the ambivalences rigorously maintained. All of this is done with the lightest touch, the surest eye. While most Kafka comparisons are specious and overstated, Hunt’s subtle humor, sophisticated intelligence and the graceful timbre of his prose place this novel firmly in the tradition of The Castle, as well as Nabokov’s The Eye and Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser. This is high praise indeed, but The Impossibly is a marvelous, wonderful novel. [Jeffrey DeShell]