DAAA . . . SnowBiz!
REYoung
TageTage Press, January 2024

I

t’s tough to stick the landing. Ask acrobatic author REYoung as he soars above his endless cinematic circus, so much airtime spiraling alone through all those lights and sounds beneath the big top, pulling double-duty as announcer and bellowing to the crowd in long strings of inventive verbiage that keep it spellbound and salivating. Yet, there is no need to worry anymore. Only recent converts and curious audience-goers drawn in by the barkers outside are still wondering what might happen. The fall. The crash. The scream cut short due to a hand unable to reach that next splintery wooden bar in time, a plummet towards the dirt below. No. No need to worry. We few who have been here before (mostly affording the nosebleeds) know there is no need. He always sticks the landing. And besides, this is Snowbiz baby, and Daaa . . . Snowbiz! is no different.

Those in the know have been following along for a while. REYoung’s writing career began with an initial emergence from his “cave” (check the About the Author blurb on all his books) in 1997 with the O’Brien Era Dalkey Archive Press publication of Unbabbling, a cult hit reviewed somewhat positively by Harvey Pekar (yes, that one) and elsewhere described as “if Beckett were an American monster”. It created some buzz upon release but REYoung, ever-elusive mononym, rather than capitalizing on this, decided to instead disappear back into his cave for twenty years.

At least some of that silent time, if not most of it, appears to have been spent on writing the first book in what would become, upon completion of Daa . . . SnowBiz!, The Snowman Trilogy.

Margarito and The Snowman was released in late 2016 to some excited discussion in internet literary circles and, as usual, crickets from the wider press. Despite the muted response, MATS is without question one of the more linguistically inventive and heartfelt pieces of American writing thus far this century, and a solid contribution to the broader canon of American working-class fiction running from Twain and Melville through Dahlberg and Selby Jr., though with some theatrical and psychedelic twists entirely REYoung’s own. It set the stage for what would come after from this singular artist, and particularly this series. With its surrealist blending of overlapping narrative layers (are we reading a book by REYoung about Margarito and said Snowman or watching a Boone Weller movie—don’t miss that Bunũel reference—about some guy named Snowman played by someone else named Billy Bob Bengay?), a bricolage quality in its referential streams of detail, elements of minstrelsy and vaudeville, blue collar frustrations, and truly heartfelt moments of companionship and lost love, MATS became a calling card of sorts to many who read it and felt seen by its hilariously confused characters and tones of longing.

Between then and now there have been some detours. In quick succession after MATS came InFlATion (2019), The Ironsmith (2020), and Zol (2020), that final title being the second volume of The Snowman Trilogy.

Z. proved that there was still more than enough juice left in the series (our wait for Boone Weller’s sequel to Abominable Snowman of the North was surely well worth it) and that REYoung was capable not only of extending and explaining the many narrative threads left loose at the end of MATS, but also doing a degree of tonal and thematic reimagining of his own material. If MATS is for fans of films such as Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar (1978) and Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1993), then Z., with largely the same cast and continued story, is for fans of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) and Alex Cox’s Walker (1987).

Now, four years since Z., a long enough time to make one concerned we might be looking at another twenty-year gap between books, we have Daaa . . . SnowBiz!, and it feels like a triumphant culmination of all that has been produced in the series prior. And that’s not just because it’s the longest in the series by over a hundred pages. Mark this one for fans of Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) and The Cohen Brothers’ Burn After Reading (2008).

SnowBiz opens with a visually older and more grizzled Snowman than we are used to (this is after the disembodied sleazy showman prologue paragraph, of course), who is emotionally much more angry, cynical, and frustrated than his last incarnation (which seems fair considering the events of Zol ie. everything from loss of loved ones to psychosis to outright physical torture). The Snowman trundles through the streets of Osberg (read: Austin, TX), snarling through waves of people and negative emotions and selling frosted treats out of an ice cream cart he wheels before him. The treats, Po-Po-Pops©, have a magical effect on their consumers, bringing an oceanic feeling of peace and contentment akin in description to a low dose of MDMA. Folks of all ages, races, and classes consume the frozen confection and swirl away in the puffing rainbow cloud released upon pulling the tab of the wrapper. But this is a REYoung novel, and it is not long before something sinister and suspicious makes itself apparent behind even the most benign or happily magical of happenings. The Snowman, continuing his peregrinations as Boone Weller continues, all these years later, filming him, receives a phone call that appears to be about a large-scale business deal (legality left to readers imagination, at first), and then it’s off to the races. We digress through a tour of the homeless population, zoom cinematically outward and into the midst of academic politics at the local university, where we are also introduced to multiple important figures including the mercurial-in-all-manners Dr. Levant and the invisibility maestro Oscar, and it just keeps on expanding, compressing, or rolling from there.

By the end of the book the plot encompasses everything from international political conspiracy to asides on etymology and entomology. Disquisitions on silence and disappearance are punctuated by minstrel shows. Hyper-modern thoughts and topicality are layered or woven with seeming centuries worth of filmic reference and art history. Like much of REYoung’s fiction, Snowbiz sits firmly in the vein of the post- (post-post?, meta-? -) modern milieu in which it was born, with scattered influences ranging from Robbe-Grillet to Bradbury to daytime television to monster movies, consistently presented with a healthy dose of humor to keep things appropriately unsentimental.

Similar to REYoung’s very first work, Unbabbling, the Snowman series seems to function on a rule of threes. Though in Unbabbling the tripartite character is on a cyclical trip downward (and this is a good thing leading to a freedom in burrowing, a comfort in caves) here in the Snowman’s frozen world the Snowman finds himself drawn almost conspiratorially upward (and this is a bad thing, leading to a far worse life than any of the Snowman’s many lonely bathtub and beer nights that the MATS days may have amounted to). MATS is a day in the life of a worker this side of the border, bottom rung life of drudgery, but consisting of camaraderie and occasional flashes of fun. ZOL, then becomes a complexification of this, and the Snowman finds himself on the other side of the border, dustily sifting through social stratifications wrought by the capitalism he once worked comfortably inside of. Here, as he enters the Snowbiz, he arrives at the top rung of everything to witness the destruction wrought by the climb. It is a climb the Snowman remembers only slowly over the course of the novel, and what a ride of remembrance it is. One senses that if the trilogy were published as a single omnibus volume, a tome for all time at its 1200 plus pages, that it would be embraced by the American cognoscenti quickly as another genius exercise in the encyclopedic novel lineage of Pynchon, Gaddis, and Wallace.

Because REYoung IS experimental and seems to write with both the scatter approach of a Sufi mystic as well as the furious forward intensity of Thomas Bernhard. REYoung IS challenging and brethren with dense linguists like Hawkes and Gaddis. But REYoung is also fun and funny like Twain or Thompson, and endlessly inventive to boot and nowhere is that more on display than here in Daaa . . . Snowbiz! And hey, if you don’t feel like sticking around for the philosophical asides and movie references then stick around for the dancing insects and one-liners. He’ll be here all week, and hopefully another twenty years after that.

There are many readers that all the shticks and tricks may not be for. But in the context and lineage that REYoung has always seemed to be pulling from, sometimes ironically and other times sincerely, it all falls into place. Think the carnival barker. Think the one-liner comedian shuffling his way through a series of bits in desperation for a cut of the door or the tummler tugging his collar as he breaks out in nervous sweats. Think the death of vaudeville. And we do mean all of this as a good thing. The worlds lengthiest Aristocrats joke that somehow has a heart of gold. There is a Ha-Ha-Ho-Ho nature to much of the presentation in the early scenes, when the veil must remain up to hide OZ, a degree of “please, somebody take my wife” one-linerism, but this has always been in service (and quite effectively) to a quiet anger, simple sadness, and deep longing, that begins to seethe forth from the relentless stream of verbiage always attempting to keep you at arm’s length. A general understanding of the fuckedness of our collective situation, all ways out of the precipice we find our world teetering on. A kind of Pagliacci story for all time.

All said and done, the most effective moment of the whole book, the whole series even, comes at the very end in a section titled ‘Cutting Room Floor’. There is no need to spoil the scene, but one gets the feeling that this inexplicably moving image cooked up somewhere in the fiery middle of REYoung’s imagination, will resonate most with those who cry when HAL is unplugged in Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. The moment is a display of what we can only hope we see more and more of from this writer as long as he will keep producing these delicious treats of text with their weighty centers, a strange hyperreal sympathy set against a surrealist stage, a sort of cosmic understanding as delivered by a stoner Buddha forgetting his place in the meditation. This final section is a moment of writing (as we have seen before from this writer but perhaps never quite so strongly) that will leave one wondering if they are crying by the time the final sentence runs (final reel rolls) and you stumble from the theatre, blinking into the sunlight. But relax, maybe those aren’t tears. Maybe, like the Snowman, you’re finally just melting.