Gad’s Book
Dylan Bassett
Outpost19, October 2023

I’m inventing a machine
for concealing my desire.
And I’m inventing another
machine for concealing the
machine. It’s a two-machine
system, and it sounded like
laughter. And I’m inventing
a machine for concealing
the sound.

—Aaron Kunin, The Sore Throat

I

n the center of Dylan Bassett’s novel Gad’s Book, the narrator, an unnamed novelist who never writes anything, describes a novel he is (not) working on. The novel (not) within the novel centers around another novelist who is having a hard time completing his novel and whose name is Gad, which is not a name I know how to pronounce. I know the acronym GAD, which stands for Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and I know a man named Gadi, who goes by Gad for short, which is pronounced “God.” In the Abrahamic tradition, God is not so much a name as it is a pseudonym for the deity, like a pen name. Gad “has not been able to write because, as he puts it, he wants to write something original, to imagine or invent something out of thin air. He wants to tell an old story in a new way, or a new story in an old way. Old—as old as the Greeks and Children of Israel and older, as old as war, as grand as mythology.”

This is a familiar conundrum. Gad is stuck between the past and the future: he wants to write something new, or novel, but he wants to invest it with the holy canonicity of tradition, in this case in the form of the novel, which is old. Eclipsed by this tense tearing between the past and the future is of course the present, and Gad rejects his present: “Eventually, Gad decides that he must simply tell his own story and no one else’s—the only story he’s allowed to tell. Not an invention, but a confession. But the problem is this. He has no story of his own—nothing to confess. His life, so far, is boring, mostly, or at least uneventful. So far.” Throughout the story Gad calls his project a novel, but it more closely resembles nonfiction, or even autofiction. Less a genre and more an element of all fiction, autofiction also represents an impossible (but familiar) conundrum that hinges on a tension between invention and documentation. Autobiography’s pact with the reader is that the author invents nothing; fiction’s is that it invents everything.

Some of the oldest and best western literature (literally literature you could find at a Best Western) employ autofiction. Chapter 9 of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, arguably the first modern novel, features Cervantes “himself” roaming the streets of Toledo, and then happening upon a pamphlet written in Arabic that contains the entire story of Don Quixote, authored by an Arab historian named Cid Hamete Benengeli. This autofictional move frames the novel as a work of history, and the novelist as a scribe or secondary historian—a move that is itself fictive—while also bringing into ontological question whether History is itself a work of fiction. Add to that the plot of the Quixote—a man who wants to resurrect the Christian chivalric tradition two hundred years after its death, and who does so by hallucinating past fictions over present realities—and not only is time suddenly Janus-faced, oscillating between an imagined past and a historical present, but even Western literature’s “own story” is posited as belonging to Arabic culture. The founding gesture of the modern novel, then, radiates an autofictional core that infects notions of Invention and Truth with a kind of generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD. Bassett’s Gad’s Book references the Quixote frequently, as one of its anxieties of influence.

The narrator—similarly Janus-faced and stuck with writer’s block—is being interrogated about his non-novel by his love interest and confessor, “Janice”:

Is it one of those lit bro novels?

What’s a lit bro novel?

Is it about a sad man who feels sorry for himself? Is it one of the huge books that wants to impose a phallic vision onto the world? Are you one of those dude writers who only describes women’s tits?

I hope not.

The narrator describes Gad as “a large man [who] has cultivated what he considers to be a historically masculine look,” whose literary crisis begins when his wife writes a successful novel describing a protagonist that has all Gad’s characteristics, except for his penis, which in his wife’s literary treatment is, well, hilarious: “A short, stalky motherfucker, weirdly compressed, flattened even—a condensed baguette, a smashed-down soda can [. . . ] and it was of no use to me.” Literally literarily emasculated, Gad withdraws into himself and the marriage dissolves, and then he seeks to write a “revenge novel” that tells the true story of himself as the victim, seeking to correct the impression his wife’s vision of his phallus has left on the world. Janice, in other words, is an accurate observer of the narrator’s life; the only thing she doesn’t know is that his novel is not only non-existent, it’s actually a fictionalized confession, an inadvertent autofiction. Here is their exchange after Janice presses the narrator for the synopsis:

It’s long, I said, trying to avoid summarizing another novel I wasn’t writing. I glanced down at my wristwatch as if to suggest we didn’t have time for me to tell it.

Give me the pitch, she said. Go.

Okay. I decided to take this as an opportunity to impress Janice, maybe, so I made something up. A story. A long one. The longest yet. It took half an hour to tell. It went something like this:

There’s this guy, Gad is his name, who, when the novel begins [. . . ]

Throughout Gad’s Book, the narrator is asked about the novel he is working on, and invariably the narrator fabricates a fiction about his fiction. Each protagonist seems to be a surrogate for our narrator: there’s Gad, of course, but there’s also an unnamed clown who’s alternately viewed by the public as an artist or as an incel troller; there’s Vernon, a novelist who cannot write past the first sentence of his novel, and who either accidentally or purposefully walks into traffic; there’s Jed, a failed writer who is addicted to masochism; and there’s Franz who, in a sort of meta-narrative of self-harm, murders the aforementioned Vernon, but no one will believe his confession, and so he commits suicide. The narrator reveals himself to be a storyteller more than he is a novelist, and under duress, under conditions of extraction, the narrator does precisely what his characters (especially Gad) cannot: he improvises, he creates, he tells an old story in a new way. By creating surrogates through which to confess, the narrator discloses through the protective cloak of fiction, or even autofiction, the fact that he cannot write, that he does not believe in himself or in his life, and that he fears as much as he desires self-destruction. He is safe because it is his characters who cannot write, while his interlocutors—unknowing confessors—have no idea.

Except that they do. Like the ancient tragic heroes who are blind to their inevitable fate, the narrator seems unaware that his novel summaries are autobiographical disclosures. He seems unaware of a lot of things, actually: “I decided to take this as an opportunity to impress Janice, maybe, so I made something up,” reveals that the narrator does not even know why he is making it up. He is instead acting out. He is hoping to impress others instead of impressing words upon paper. After telling Gad’s story to Janice, Janice tells the narrator she understands his story:

It’s an allegory, she said. Gad is an observer in his own life. A tourist or a consumer inside it. And what he consumes is experience. But he wants a bigger narrative.

Maybe.

But the problem is that narratives are dead, she said. That’s what Gad’s book is about, isn’t it? The existential fatigue of stories. Gad tries to turn his life into a story—he lives out a plot of adventure. A quest narrative.

Now Janice paused and looked at me, as if suddenly recognizing a stranger. Her face lit up. Big eyes.

Now, she said, I know why you joined our community. This is why you’re here [. . . ] to reclaim the narrative. She laughed.

I wanted to tell her that I didn’t know anything about her community, but I was afraid of how she might react; and I wanted to tell that I had pulled Gad’s Book out of my ass, that it meant—as far as I could say—nothing to me.

When Janice sees that her synopsis of the narrator’s fake synopsis is being denied, she says, “It’s true what they say. The poet does not know from whence he speaks, dude. You cannot hear what your own story is saying.”

There is a strange irony in Janice’s diagnosis-judgment, and it is two-pronged along the same hyphenated lines: the diagnosis is correct, and therefore the judgment is partial and erroneous. Janice has diagnosed the narrator as a poet; in other words, she has called him a writer. This is the strangeness inherent in almost any 1st-person literary narrative, which is that the narrator is both character and writer. Of course, the actual writer is Dylan Bassett, but the fictional conceit is that the narrator is narrating these words which he has written. Thus, as character, the narrator is as ignorant as Janice judges him to be—he cannot hear what his own story is saying—but as poet, or writer, the narrator is reading what he has in fact written about his own story. So the question for me becomes, What do we find in Gad’s Book that we do not find in Gad’s book, for example, or in the works of any of the other surrogates of the narrator?

The answer is illness, or sickness, particularly epilepsy, from which the narrator suffers and at which point the book begins. But even to say the book “begins” at the narrator having suffered a seizure is anathema to the experience of epilepsy, which disrupts linear time, physical orientation, and the situation of the self. In the middle of Gad’s Book the narrator likens the experience of a seizure to Dante’s opening stanzas of The Inferno—another seminal work of autofiction, whereby Dante is the book’s protagonist, both narrator and character—“In the middle of my life / I found myself lost in a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” But the narrator of Gad’s Book goes further:

This is what it feels like, except worse. Worse because momentarily, after a seizure, you have no concept of yourself—you cannot say, myself. You cannot say lost because you do not know what it means. Cannot say in a forest because you have no concept of being somewhere that is not somewhere else.

What does it mean that an unnamed narrator who invents surrogates to conceal from others—and from himself—the truth of his experience, would liken the experience of epilepsy to a seminal work of literature whereby an author writes himself into a character that is fundamentally and spiritually lost? In his essay “Literature + Illness = Illness,” from the collection The Insufferable Gaucho, Roberto Bolaño defines illness societally, as a modern communal affliction. Speaking of a line from a poem by Baudelaire, Bolaño elaborates:

In that line alone there is more than enough. In the middle of a desert of ennui, an oasis of fear, or horror. There is no more lucid diagnosis of the illness of modern humanity. To break out of ennui, to escape from boredom, all we have at our disposal—and it’s not even automatically at our disposal, again we have to make an effort—is horror, in other words, evil.

Baudelaire’s line—“an oasis of horror in a desert of ennui”—is also the epigraph of Roberto Bolaño’s final novel, 2666, which Gad’s Book references several times. Bolaño’s 1100+ page book also follows the story of a missing author, but the hole in its center is not a synopsis of that author’s work; rather, it is “The Part About the Crimes,” a brutal 300 pages of forensic descriptions of women who are the victims of sexual homicide in Santa Teresa in the late 1990s, a fictionalized account of real ongoing horrors in Ciudad Juárez. The killers are never discovered, and what is made manifest instead is the complicity of a misogynistic culture and a viciously corrupt police force. In other words, horror. In other words, evil.

Reading “The Part About the Crimes” is incredibly distressing; getting through it is like passing through hell or, worse, passing through history or, even worse, passing through the hell that is the present, staring the horror in the face. For this reason, in another side-story that we could call “Jed’s Book,” Bassett gives us another surrogate for the narrator named Jed, a failed writer who is traveling in Barcelona, where Bolaño lived out the rest of his life. Jed comes across a woman reading 2666 at a café, and asks her if she’s read “The Part About the Crimes”:

I’m dead in the middle of it, she says. She drops the book on the table. Bolaño is a terrible writer, she says. He’s all bad sentences. No style. And he’s too academic. She flicks the cover of the book with her middle finger. One, two. Insufferable, she says.

“Insufferable” is an endearingly insufferable wink by Bassett regarding Bolaño’s short story collection, The Insufferable Gaucho and, obliquely, the essay “Literature + Illness = Illness.” It is perhaps Bassett’s most autobiographical disclosure. “I’m dead in the middle of it” is to be in the middle of the book, where many women are dead: another wink. The woman’s response to the Part About the Crimes, in other words, is not horror, but boredom. This then is the moral challenge of Bolaño’s novel: will 300 pages of absolute horror bore you? Will the “literature” part of the equation do nothing to change the sum of “illness”? While I do think it’s somewhat tone-deaf to write a female character who is pretentiously blasé about this part of Bolaño’s book, her critique is noteworthy: the violence isn’t aestheticized enough. It doesn’t cover up reality sufficiently with art; it is too real, or, as Jed says, it is too much like a book:

A book, [Jed] thinks, is a vast field of objects under which have been buried an untold number of dead bodies. I must dig them up. I must cleanse the field of them.

While Jed is here referring to the job of text-editing and grammar correction, the passage also reminds directly of the murdered women in The Part About the Crimes, which is “boring,” which is not aesthetic enough. A more aestheticized and classical example would be the Persian 1001 Nights—often also known as The Arabian Nights, a frame tale that strongly influenced Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The framing of the 1001 Nights is that each story is a tale spun by Sheherezade. A despotic king threatens to kill her every night, and the one way she can survive is to tell the king fantastic tales that last until dawn, and while these tales are what make up the vast majority and the popular memory of the 1001 Nights—the movie Aladdin, for example, is not presented as one of many stories told by Sheherezade, because that would not sell—they are nonetheless framed and undergirded by the threat of death. 1001 Nights is about a woman scared to death every night for nearly three years. The aesthetics of it save her: they are oases of entertainment in a desert of horror.

Our narrator, on the other hand, tells tales to those who pressure him in his social life, such as new acquaintances that want him to prove his mettle as a novelist, to Janice who asks for “a pitch” and from whom the narrator wants to ask for love, to his therapist to whom the narrator constantly lies, wanting to prove his normalcy. In other words, our narrator is an anxious person; unlike Sheherazade, his confession is not coerced. But this anxiety is also diagnosed as a social problem, whereby his selfhood, his “i,” is disrupted by and replaced by his iPhone, an important character of Gad’s Book. In a super-condensed, clickable form, it tells Sheherazadean stories throughout the novel, interrupting the principal narrative, and effecting a decentralized dissemination of crimes as communicated by the iPhone’s incessant buzzing text reminders of all the horrors of the world, rendered throughout the book in italics:

Multiple dead in a bombing of a shopping center in Florida. A state of emergency has been declared in Southern California as the region continues to experience aftereffects of multiple earthquakes. Cockroaches are developing cross-resistance to insecticides that can be passed on to their offspring.

If Bolaño offers one oasis of horror in a desert of boredom, Bassett offers several oases of horror, but so many that the boredom and the horror become indistinguishable. This mutual irruption, or fusing of landscapes, is enacted in Gad’s Book through orthography, in a fusing of textscapes:

All morning I watched YouTube videos. Ten misconceptions about polyamory. The underbelly of refugee camps. How eleven people control the world. The videos kept playing, one after the other. I didn’t have to click anything. I watched a video about the Denver International Airport, New Coke, Deepwater Horizon, Alternative Therapy suppression, collapsing media conglomerates, the porn industry, and the rise of Satanism in western governments.

The main fictional narrative fuses into the nonfictional “real” iPhone headlines, in the same way news media fuses into entertainment on the iPhone. Rather than desensitization, it seems to cause a great anxiety in the narrator, robbing him of his autonomy, sense of reality, and well-being:

My imagination had become real. I felt it. I felt awkward even then, in total isolation, cut off from the social sphere. I was all foggy in the head, and I had to sit down to gather my thoughts. What thoughts? Who put those thoughts there?

You’re sick.

Here we see the boundaries of the private and the public crumble, while simultaneously the fictive and the real wear away at one another. The narrator’s brain becomes a sort of operating system whereby his thoughts seem to have been downloaded from somewhere/one else. In keeping, “You’re sick” is written in the second person, making a stranger of the heretofore 1st person narrator, a perspectival manner of self-alienation whereby “I” talk to “myself” by calling myself “you” or, in a metafictional twist, there really is the voice of that someone “[w]ho put those thoughts there,” i.e. the author calling the narrator or the reader sick. The narrator is reporting a profoundly disorienting experience while simultaneously performing a decentering push against his own subjectivity. That, or, in a very canny schism-fusion, Bassett suddenly eclipses the narrator, but uses the narrator’s “own” voice, tells the narrator that nothing is his own.

There is an obvious social media commentary here regarding the zombification of the modern citizen, or social media user, whose agency has become replaced by the algorithm, whose thoughts begin to resemble advertisements, etc. Throughout the book there are trenchant arguments in the same vein, regarding the privatization of privacy, and a wariness of therapy that resembles the narrator’s wariness towards our spectatorial culture of the confessional mode. This excerpt of a monologue by Zeke, whom the narrator hilariously idolizes as a leader of Antifa (which he clearly is not), very well encapsulates this critique:

And I realize, he said, that the source of my shame. Frustration wasn’t inside of me. It’s out there, in the culture of machines and men—in cheap architecture and environmental collapse and addictive politics. It’s a goofy thing about depression. Everyone says depression is a chemical imbalance in our brains, in our whole bodies. Something is wrong with us, they say. They use words like disorder, disease, sickness. They give us pills that make us complacent or passive. Neh. But they’ve got it wrong. We’re not sick. Neh. The world is sick.

This reads like a fictionalized version of a main argument in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?—a very successful title insofar as it contains its own definition. Capitalist realists are people who believe there is no alternative to capitalism; people who believe otherwise are naïve. Fisher argues that in the realm of Capitalist Realism—a global realm—mental health issues are treated as a natural occurrence that needs to be treated medicinally and pharmaceutically and via individualized therapies, instead of as societal and systemic problems that need to be treated communally, via an alternative ideological, financial and political system. Fisher argues that we must stop naturalizing pathology and start politicizing it: that instead of saying “You’re sick,” we say, “The world is sick.”

This critique is operative in the novel, but primarily on the level of content. Stylistically, something deeper is going on here: the language itself seems sick. Again, the instability of the speaker’s position in “You’re sick” is disorienting for the reader, too. Similarly, Zeke’s speech is guttural, heavy, unaesthetic, fragmented, broken in half: And I realize, he said, that the source of my shame. Frustration wasn’t inside of me. There is an almost hyperrealism at work here, where the punctuation is meant to indicate the pacing of the enunciation in “real time.” They give us pills that make us complacent or passive. Neh. But they’ve got it wrong. We’re not sick. Neh. The world is sick. is not that convincing, because the “Neh” makes him seem sick. It’s not even a word, it’s nonverbal.

On the other hand, most literary dialogue buries the body, the real. In capital L Literature, speech is stylized to fit the genre, it is aestheticized into a set of codes that abjects the body, a body being an unruly thing that makes sounds sometimes like “Neh.” Literature often abjects sickness, which means literature is repressing something. Or, in other words, literature is sick. “You’re sick,” I think, is ultimately an argument about sickness, or illness, or madness in literature. Don Quixote’s delusions are fictive, and thereby purposeful: they are the creative element of the first modern novel. The narrator muses on this when considering a scene in the Quixote, whereby Don Quixote’s fantasies are threatened with a reality check, but his faithful sidekick, Sancho Panza, makes a decisive and successful effort to preserve the fantasy, and thereby preserve Don Quixote’s madness:

What struck me was that Sancho’s intervention is not pathetic or condescending. His intervention is heroic. He intuitively understands that Don Quixote is not insane, but he entertains a useful delusion. A delusion that gives his life a purpose. And although, at the end of the novel, Quixote does eventually lose his fantasy—and although the loss of that fantasy initiates his metaphoric and literal death—Sancho is, in this moment, I thought, the novel’s unironic hero.

Preserving the delusion is tantamount to preserving the fiction: the novel would end prematurely without it. The hero quest’s object is to make the delusion real; when the real demolishes the delusion, only then does he fall sick and die. He transforms the world into something romantic, into a remote past predating the Spanish Inquisition, while living in a contemporaneous world that has politically and lethally repressed the Jews and the Muslims that had built the cultural foundation of “Christian” Spain. Don Quixote is what writer and theorist Rosa Menocal called “A Memory Palace,” an ode to an epoch of cultural and linguistic diversity that flourished under Muslim Iberia. Hence the frame tale conceit of Don Quixote: a Spanish translation of a historical Arabic text.

I don’t know how concerned with this Gad’s Book is, but it still stands that the first modern novel was written by an author who found the world to be sick, and who found that any expression to the contrary would have him considered sick. And so the hero quest of literature begins at sickness and, in tragic form, ends at the hero’s cure.

I do think a lot of this essay begs a certain question: if the protagonists of the stories are all surrogates or mouthpieces for the unknowing narrator—if they’re marionettes he doesn’t know he’s puppeteering, if they’re his subconscious becoming conscious to everyone but himself—who is the narrator in relation to the author, Dylan Bassett?

Here is Bassett’s bio on the book’s back flap:

Originally from Las Vegas, Dylan Bassett has lived many lives: a pastor in Russia, a semi-professional soccer player in Brazil, a translator in Kazakhstan, a local Democratic campaign manager in Utah, and now a professor of literature near Philadelphia. Bassett has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of California-Santa Cruz.

A few months ago I did a reading with Emma Wood and Dylan Bassett, who are married. Emma read poems about being a mother, which were astonishingly funny and brutal and tender and, well, honest? But how do I know when something is honest? What is the literary device of honesty? Conner—I know Dylan Bassett as Conner—read an-in-progress autobiographical cycle about conversations he has had with strangers at airports, about radical disclosures and intimate stories he has told to and has had told to him by strangers. Many of these stories described what it is like to live with epilepsy. And I thought, Who are these people? Who are these people that I am supposed to know already? I’ve attended two different graduate schools with Bassett and, like the anonymous narrator, and like me, he writes under a pseudonym. After the reading I was talking to Conner and Emma, and we talked about Gad’s Book. I said to Conner about the book, “I felt like I wrote it, or recognized it. I’ve loved a lot of books before, but this feeling was different. I felt this thing I’ve never felt from a book before, like I was genetically related to it, like it’s my brother, or something.” And Emma said, “You mean you related to the narrator?” And Conner said, “No, he means to the writing, to the writing itself. I get that. I felt the same about your book.”