Dhalgren [Hardcover]

There is a lot going on in the book, but for me, the central conceit seemed very clear (SPOILERS FOLLOW), although brilliantly unorthodox:

The disaster that creates Bellona (a post-apocalyptic city) is the coming together of two equal and opposite forces - a black man (George) and a white girl (not a woman-- June). Each has an stereotypical aspect: George is the sexually insatiatiable rampaging black rapist, June the helplessly vulnerable innocent white victim. But each has a more hidden aspect that runs counter-stereotype. George is a hero who saves children from a burning building, while June is a hypocrite who murders her own brother to cover over her appetites.

They come together in an act that appears to be rape, but which may actually be an piece of playacting created for the pleasure of the participants. This transgression is what warps time and space in Bellona, setting off a series of events in which a white sniper kills black children, the black residents riot and burn the city, anarchy sets in and people flee, armed gangs take over the streets, middle-class residents take refuge in fortresses of delusion, June stalks George in a combination of attraction and repulsion and the entire cycle repeats over and over, endlessly.

In this way the book is a psychological portrait, not only of the Kid --a racially and sexually ambigious artist --but also of the American city --a racially and sexually-obsessed powder keg --during a certain moment in history.

This book has a lot to say, if you've got the stomach for it, read this book. Just don't expect to understand it while you read it. Understanding only comes after finishing the book, reflecting on it, tripping on it, sleeping on it, then re-reading it only to discover you got it all wrong.

Don't expect to know what is going on all the time (or even most of the time). As in Catch-22, the scenes aren't always chronological, they are not organized by theme, nor will one necessarily explain the next. Consider: imagine yourself with several college buddies with one or two you knew from high school, and another you meet at work last month. Will the telling of tales be ordered - chronologically or thematically? Or will one tale remind one person of something which he blurts out and starts to tell, leaving someone else with a tale she was reminded of but will wait until she gets a chance to tell? Will the tale of the high school prom necessarily be told before the tale of the panty raid, or the party during finals week? Yet, once all the stories are told, the new guy still comes away with some understanding of who these people were, what they were like, and the kind of world they came from. Analogy over.

I would give this book 6 out of 5 stars if (I could). It is the experience of a lifetime. A completely self-contained universe that parallels ours closely enough to frighten. Other reviewers have compared it (both favorably and unfavorably) to Herbert's Dune. Themes of coping in hostile environments is the only similarity. Delany's world actively seeks to screw with the heads of the readers and the inhabitants alike.

The nature of the disaster that has crippled communication and stripped the city's population down to about a thousand is never articulated although there are intimations aplenty. Once inside, Kid discovers the city ... or whatever has wreaked devastation upon it--is capricious: a building in pristine condition might stand next to one tilted on its foundation and gutted by fire. During what is supposed to be day, the light is gray, the sky and the tops of buildings are hidden by cloud and by smoke that drifts lethargically like fine mist. Ensconced in a perpetual twilight, Bellona is evasive, presenting not the straight edges and clean lines of Euclidean geometry, but the hazy flux at the heart of quantum mechanics.

In a notebook that he picks up on his first night in Bellona, Kid (presumably) writes: 'There is no articulate resonance ... That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source.'

Delany's mostly abandoned, half-wrecked city is meticulously laid out, detailed down to the rivets holding up street signs ... hard to pin down Bellona may be, but arbitrary it is not. As Delany once explained in a long letter, 'Our landscape, entirely true for any urban environment ... is made up totally of emblems of former human actions. From the sky (overcast because of the industrial effect or the greenhouse phenomenon), to each tree or glass blade in the city parks (the trees are there because someone put them there, or because someone left them there while clearing away others), the landscape is a dense interlocked web of the detritus of haphazard human action and/or intentional human undertaking.'

By the time you get used to living in Bellona, to the two moons that appear in its sky, you are no longer the same person. Reverend Amy, the only church leader left in the city, states in one of her typically concept-loaded sermons, 'Oh my poor, inaccurate hands and eyes! Don't you know that once you have transgressed that boundary, every atom, the interior of every point of reality, has shifted its relation to every other you've left behind, shaken and jangled within the field of time, so that if you cross back, you return to a very different space than the one you left? You have crossed the river to come to this city? Do you really think you can cross back to world where a blue sky goes violet in the evening, buttered over with the light of a single, silver moon?'

'Dhalgren' is, along with William Gaddis's 'The Recognitions' and Julio Cortazar's 'Hopscotch,' one of the few contemporary works of genuine genius. I've read it three times now and yes, it literally changed my life ... I have never crossed back over. Needless to say, I can't recommend it highly enough. However, readers ... 'Dhalgren' fans especially---should also be aware of Delany's '1984', a collection of letters in which some fascinating details about the construction of 'Dhalgren' come to light ... locations in San Francisco and New York on which Delany based descriptions as well as answers to some of the numerous enigmas enshrouded in the narrative. Your bookshelf shouldn't be without either one.