The Exquisite
(East Village Noir)
(Mr. Kindt. Henry. Tulip. Cornelius.)
(The Contortionists. The Knockout. The Horror. The Herring.)
A novel from Coffee House Press
!!!Click the drummer (above) for a visual tour of The Exquisite's East Village environs, with photographs by Chris Narozny!!!
Click here to see the cover.
To request review copies, etc., please contact Publicist Lauren Snyder at Lauren@coffeehousepress.org.
Comment:
Laird Hunt is an extraordinary writer,
and here he has made an unnerving and beautiful world with nothing but
some scraps of the familiar and fresh language. The Exquisite
lingers like a dream you wish you could have again and again, and you
can, because it's not a dream, it's an entrancing and highly exacting
piece of fiction.
-- Sam Lipsyte
“As fun to read as Chandler, but spookier. A noir koan,
in a New York designed by Escher.”
--Shelley Jackson
Hunt’s novels shimmer and shift like reflections
on wind-stirred water. His third haunting, nonlinear tale is set in post-9/11
New York City. Henry has lost his girlfriend, his cats, and his apartment.
A beautiful woman he calls Tulip sends him to Aris Kindt, an eccentric
old gent fond of herring and esoteric subjects who may be the mastermind
behind a mock murder service — people pay strangers to pretend to
kill them. But Henry may actually be a murderer. Perhaps he’s a
patient in a mental ward. Aris Kindt just so happens to be the name of
the thief whose body is the subject of Rembrandt’s famous autopsy
painting, The Anatomy Lesson. Hunt cites W. G. Sebald as the inspiration
for what he calls ghost noir, although Paul Auster seems more apt. Either
way, Hunt performs a bravura solo variation on the exquisite corpse––a
collaborative approach much loved by the surrealists in which artists
contribute to a composition without seeing it whole. The result is an
edgy and labyrinthine tale of longing, madness, and death.––Donna
Seaman
––Booklist
In Hunt's (Indiana, Indiana) latest, Henry is down on his luck when a new opportunity arises: committing mock murders for the mysterious Aris Kindt and his beautiful associate, Tulip. Is this the same Aris Kindt as the hanged criminal being operated on in Rembrandt's famous painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp? Or are Henry and Kindt both patients in a mental hospital, and is Tulip really Dr. Tulp? Which of either of these never-quite-intersecting narratives are we to believe, or should we believe anything at all? Does the final chapter resolve either or both scenarios? Maybe. The only thing of which we can be sure is that Kindt loves creamed herring on crackers and that Henry develops a taste for it. But can you get creamed herring in a mental hospital? Hmmm. Is this a new postmodern classic? Maybe. Should you buy it for your library? Maybe, if you are a medium-to-large academic or public library. In fact, probably so, which is more probability than you will find in Hunt's novel. Bring your suspension of disbelief and negative capability on this wild literary trip.
--Library Journal
Shiftless and broke, thieving drifter Henry gets involved with a gang of faux assassins in Hunt's intensely cerebral third novel. Written in an intentionally mystifying fashion ("Falsification," says one character, "sits at the center of everything"), the novel, set in a shell-shocked post 9/11 Manhattan, alternates between two narratives: in one, Henry joins a group, led by the mysterious Mr. Kindt, that stages fake murders for money; in the other, Henry resides in a psychiatric hospital, where Mr. Kindt visits him daily and encourages him to earn money by stealing pharmaceuticals. In both story lines, Henry tries unsuccessfully to sort through layers of deception to learn about Kindt's past. It is possible that Henry's life as a fake hired gun is imagined during his hospital stay; it is equally possible that both lives are occurring simultaneously, as Hunt makes obfuscation one of his chief objectives. A wan love interest develops with tattoo artist Tulip (an echo of the hospital's Dr. Tulp), but it is mostly motivated by Henry's desire to discover why Tulip would want to "tussle" with him. This noir labyrinth captures the post-9/11 gestalt of anxiety and hopelessness.
--Publisher's Weekly
If you liked Charlie Kaufman's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind" or Alejandro Amenábar's "Open Your Eyes (remade
as Vanilla Sky), then I'd bet you'll like Laird Hunt's latest novel The
Exquisite. I know I'm getting off cheap by putting a novel in a category
with a couple of films, but those two exceptional movies came to mind
when reading the book. Like those films, The Exquisite is a quirky 'don't-know-exactly-where-reality-begins-and-ends'
type of story, which is quite appealing to a mindset that's open to the
"improbable," as Hunt aptly characterizes his book.
I knew I would like The Exquisite when I saw the epigraph quoting Fernando
Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet: "I fainted during a bit of my life.
I regain consciousness without any memory of what I was, and the memory
of who I was suffers for having been interrupted. There is in me a confused
notion of an unknown interval, a futile effort on the part of my memory
to want to find that other memory. I don't connect myself with myself.
If I've lived, I forget having known it." Epigraphs often mean more
to the author than to the reader, but once you've read The Exquisite you
realize just how well this quote fits, so much so that you can imagine
the narrator speaking those words himself. "Once upon a time I was
someone then that stopped," he begins.
Henry, our unlikable unreliable narrator lives in the East Village in
New York City. He's something of a ne'er-do-well who slips into a seedy
existence after his girlfriend leaves him and he falls in with an odd
gang of fake murderers. Now, when I say fake murderers I may mean that
they did fake murders, or they were fake murderers, or their fake murders
were fake, or something like that, but I'll leave that for you to decide
when you read the book. Much of the story centers around one of those
fake murderers whose murder doesn't seem to be so fake, who happens to
be the namesake of a petty thief immortalized - maybe literally - in the
Rembrandt painting The Anatomy Lesson as the subject of a public dissection.
Aris Kindt, this namesake of the man dissected for posterity, enters Henry's
life with a tinge of risk and eroticism that he finds at once perplexing
and comfortable:
"It was this deep enjoyment of orchestrated experiences in which
pain and pleasure lay tightly coiled that had prompted Mr. Kindt, I presumed,
to take out a membership at the Eleventh Street Russian baths, a venerable
mobster-frequented establishment where what I took to be blast furnaces
filled with boiling, beet-red lumps of flesh coexisted with sinister massage
cabinets and a deep icy pool...It was Mr. Kindt's rule, one that Tulip
and I were both happy to comply with, that if we came with him we did
all of it. So it was that, to my surprising delight, I had a huge guy
sit on my back, soap me up, whack me with oak branches, and time and again
pour near-frozen water on me..."
When we meet Mr. Kindt, he is sitting in the dark, naked, strapped to
a heart monitor as Henry is burglarizing him. He doesn't get any less
strange as the story goes on, not in any of his incarnations, and neither
do any of his equally odd colleagues, all of whom seem to have stepped
out of a Quentin Tarantino movie (this is my last movie mention, I swear);
like Cornelius, who wears a hunting cape, or the "contortionist twins,"
or Tulip the beautiful tattoo artist, and finally a bartender enigmatically
named Job - I imagine after Job in the Bible or perhaps of the Robert
Heinlein book, Job: a Comedy of Justice, or maybe just job, like an act
of crime - who also seems to appear with different names.
In fact, many people show up with different names or as different people
in The Exquisite. The main thread of the book consists of Henry's hospital
experience where he chronicles the time that makes up the rest of the
book - the events, we find, that have led him there - and generally hallucinates
(maybe hallucinates) a set of characters who parallel others in the other
story. It's not as confusing as I make it sound, not, that is, if you
don't try too hard to make sense of it.
I don't believe Hunt ever used the word exquisite in the text, but the
title is a well earned compliment as the book is indeed "ingeniously
devised" as the name suggests and Hunts writing fits the bill as
well. I was struck - this is a small but telling thing - by his use of
the word "truffle" as a verb at the end of the book in the acknowledgment
section (which section, by the way, holds a key to the story that is alluded
to about half-way through, but cryptically). By all accounts truffle is
a noun - suggesting to me Hunt's joie des mots and playfulness with language.
It's clear that Hunt likes to explore the various meanings a word can
take on, just like the names people take or the way they change themselves
with or without their clothes or tattoos etched into their skin. This
manifests itself in words like the aforementioned "Job" or "swell"
or "fleck" that he uses repeatedly, or the way he channels meaning
with things like fish (as a friend, a food, a subject of a dream and a
symbol) and cigars - Kindt smokes Dutch Masters (think Rembrandt).
Any complaints I have are trifling compared to the overall experience
here, but Hunt seems to have had a few set-pieces on New York City in
his head that felt slightly out of place as I read, and there is a seemingly
obligatory or compulsive placement of a 9/11 placemark that seemed to
me to have little purpose. Ultimately though, The Exquisite is full of
deliciously bad characters (Aunt Lulu, who might have been a cat murderer,
is a particular favorite) rich allusions and an uncertain reality that,
if you're comfortable with that sort of thing, is a lot of fun.
--Bud Parr (Chekhov's Mistress)