“You’re not the first,” I say.
“Not the first what?” Oliver asks.
“Not the first dead person with whom I’ve been having conversations,” I say.
Oliver and I are walking along Greenwich Avenue, and Oliver points to a sushi restaurant where, when he was alive, we often had dinner. It’s a beautiful late spring afternoon, the air crisp, the sky a cloudless pale blue. To celebrate Oliver’s recently published — and posthumous — collection of essays, Everything in Its Place, we’re on our way from Horatio Street, where Oliver lived, to the Cornelia Street Café — which, alas, after 41 years of existence, closed earlier in the year.
Over the course of the story, three incompatible realities occupy the same space — Weimar Germany — at three starkly different points in time. The book has an enticing hook: a van Gogh art-forgery case based on a real scandal. But the depths it achieves have more to do with the ominous convulsions of the society its characters inhabit.
Zed is a novel that takes our strange, hall-of-mirrors times very seriously indeed. It is a work of delirious genius, and a book to turn to the next time GoogleMail suggests you respond to emails by clicking “No thanks!” or “Yes, let’s!” or any other phrase with an exclamation rather than a question mark.
Maizes' admirable achievement in these charmingly offbeat stories is to balance fascination with sympathy and gravitas with humor. The good news: Her debut novel is due next year. But have fun with these first.
It is sometimes held that rationality defines us as human, a claim written into our species name, Homo sapiens. If this is right, it follows from Gordon-Smith’s witty, intelligent book that, like the people she profiles, we do not really know who, or even what, we are.
As is the name of the earth, goes this good one.
As is the name of the molten river.
As is the name, that river goes forth.