Sun Eye Moon Eye
Vincent Czyz
Spuyten Duyvil, March 2023

I

n the afterword of this book, and with admirable coolness, Vincent Czyz recounts the novel’s thirty-two-year Odyssey, from pen to published. He tells of the hundreds of pages gutted from the text, the decades of encouraging rejections, the frustrated disappearance of agents. When his publication deal finally arrives, it sits unseen in his spam folder for a fortnight before being found by accident. In the face of this, one can only speculate on what Vincent Czyz did to anger the gods, what it was he thrust hubristically into their faces, and how he had the resilience to continue. Odysseus, remember, was safely returned home and casually murdering his wife’s suitors in a third of the time.

A flower that blooms every three decades is a rare one indeed, and this is an Agave Americana of a novel: big, insistent, fibrous and with prickly marginalia.

The novel places us in the elemental world of Logan Blackfeather, a musician of mixed Hopi descent, dealing with the suspected murder of his father by his troll-like uncle, Cal. Cal is described as from the moon and made of it. Dull, grey, inert, he is a crushing, silent weight on the couch, his face blue and unblinking under cathode rays, as beer cans sweat between his enormous fingers. Worse, he has taken Logan’s father’s place in the family home, which he rules with a fist of granite. Logan dreams of killing him.

Years later, after a mescal epiphany in the desert, and the efficient killing of a racist trucker, Logan finds himself in a hospital with a cast of comic psychiatric patients, under the care of an 80’s smooth physician, Aristotle Manolokas. Logan escapes, heads to Manhattan, cutting his long hair as a symbolic break with the past. Here he meets punks and yuppies—both openly mocked—and several women who find him incredibly attractive. He favours Shawna, a successful advertising executive, and drifts into her glitzy, bohemian milieu, sneering at the people he meets there.

This is a novel of parts. Logan searches for his identity in the desert, feeling distant from and alienated by his native heritage. He is desperate for rapture, to surrender to the earth, to be accepted by his ancestors, but he’s sloughed off, discarded, found unworthy. Conversely, this country boy walks city streets with total confidence. Nothing fazes him. The city is not worthy of him. He sees its vapidity, its empty constructs, its lack of truth. The people are pitiful too. The punks aping native costume are laughable, the soft-handed, coke-addled money-brokers, objects of scorn. Yet it’s here, in these cement canyons, his father’s ghost appears: companionable, shorter than Logan remembers, a good guy. It’s one of the stranger moments in the book. In this story, the sun eye shows detail, exactitude, colour and logic, all the Apollonian virtues. The moon eye reveals murky, liminal places, a hypnogogic Etch A Sketch, readily re-written. There’s rarely balance, but it’s there when Logan meets his father’s ghost for the second time. The first time he was unknowable, mute, a freakish projection, utterly moon-eyed. This time he’s a buddy. They share a beer. There’s even some slight closure. For a book that blazes with visionary fire—Logan’s world can be brutal, as can he—it’s a quiet moment, a cool afternoon.

Czyz excels at the gritty verity of eighties New York, and the rapturous language of euphoria and both these things melt into the transcendent final chapters of the book, as Logan—falling upwards—becomes an accidental rock star, ferried around a high-end New York art party as though by Virgil, through concentric circles, gaudy and tight as a coiled serpent, an ouroboros lustily consuming itself with the powdery vigour of Patrick Bateman in a mirrored toilet cubicle. The scene becomes hazy, nebulous, the writing heightened and dazzling. It’s an astonishing denouement, the narrative melting away, until we’re left in another kind of desert, populated by phantoms, by tricksters, by the dead, where language is mere symbols smeared on a crumbling wall, and the fallen arches of Ozymandias are consumed by sands, and Logan is finally home.

This book was worth the wait. In gold.