Review: The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor
The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel by Justin Taylor
Recommended
I, too, knew Gainesville.
I went to Gainesville because I was ISO a change: at 22, I’d been living in New Jersey my entire life, and living in my mother’s house since my senior year of college and though I liked the money I saved, I wanted more. And so I applied to graduate school, and in every case sought out the kind of crunchy little college town I’d always dreamed about, places with exotic, foreign names. Eugene. Madison. Gainesville.
I thought I might stop wearing deodorant there. I thought I might drop acid at last or maybe stay up until dawn talking about poetry with poets. I thought I might write long, cryptic letters to my long-distance boyfriend and be the kind of person I’d hoped I’d grown into when I was sixteen.
What did I find in Gainesville? Some of that, and none of that. Gainesville was Spanish moss, sure, and termite swarms and burritos and dancing to Laid by James in a house with a name. Gainesville was Blue Highway Pizza and Payne’s Prairie and bottle rockets. Gainesville was babysitting a baby named Bug and many, many coffee klatches.
But it was also awkwardness. All those nights I did not dance. Realizing I wasn’t a true poet, whatever that was. Feeling shy and out of my skin.
And eventually Gainesville was a job where I wore clothes I hated, where I felt just as numb as I did when I lived at my mom’s house. Eventually, Gainesville was calling the cops on the kids downstairs who played their accordions at 3 a.m. on a weeknight, damn it. Gainesville, for everything it was, was also getting older.
Sometimes I think I should have gone to Gainesville, or a place like Gainesville, when I was younger—just out of high school, maybe, when I was filled with magic and light and potential, when I had not yet hardened.
And Justin Taylor’s The Gospel of Anarchy makes me think I might be right.
I found in his pages Gainesville—my Gainesville, the very specific, very strange geography (it’s like an island, really. An island in a sea of mosquitos and deep south), the colors and the smells. The churches on University. The houses that are always, for some reason, named after fish. He talks of a Fishgut; I knew a Screaming Marlin and a Shrimpfest. This was my Gainesville, too.
But Taylor’s Gainesville is also a place I never knew. A place of transcendental threesomes. A place of dropping out. A place where the consciousness is nearly collective, because even in Taylor’s prose it jumps from person to person but this makes utter sense, even though I never knew this to happen in my Gainesville because I was still, utterly, irrevocably myself.
His book made me miss Gainesville. But it made me miss a Gainesville I never knew.
His book is also not my kind of book, not anymore, and I have Gainesville to thank for that, too, in a way. In Gainesville people asked me what I was reading and I got nervous (the truth? Licensed novels and books about aliens). Now I’m a literary hedonist; I read what thrills me and make no excuses. And Taylor’s book is the kind of storytelling that frustrates me. I mean, I get it. These kids start a cult and wait for the messiah, and you’d be a fool if you thought the messiah ever showed or, worse, if you thought you’d get to see the climax. That is the climax. The not seeing. I get that.
And usually, I’d be gruff about it. Do not want, I’d say. Give me satisfaction; give me story. Give me that thing I never found in Gainesville. But the truth is that here, I’d be sad if the story went any other way. This book is the quintessential Gainesville novel, and to be quintessentially Gainesville, it can’t give us what we want. Because for some people places like Gainesville are like the Jerusalem we speak of at Passover. Though we always say we’ll get there next year, when we finally do, it kind of has to leave you wanting.
I suspect this book will be important. I hope this book will be important to seniors in high school in the way that, say, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X was once to me. Because, in the same way that I wanted to go find myself in the desert, I think they might pack it up and decide to go find Gainesville. And they’ll be young and full of hope, poised to find something—maybe meaning—in a place where it eluded me.
Of course, they probably won’t. It is Gainesville, after all.
Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher and netgalley.com
Phoebe
Phoebe is a 20-something writer who lives in New York State with her husband and cat. She is a dork, not a geek or a nerd.
Her debut novel, Starglass, will be released from Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers in Summer 2013.
2 comments
Zack just asked me about this, and when I googled it your blog was the first thing I clicked off the search results. I saw your face and got very startled.
Ha! It’s good. Tell Zack to read it.