Chekhov's Mistress

Laird Hunt’s The Exquisite

by Bud Parr

altimage If you liked Charlie Kaufman’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” or Alejandro Amenábar’s “Open Your Eyes (remade as Vanilla Sky), then I’d bet you’ll like Laird Hunt’s latest novel The Exquisite. I know I’m getting off cheap by putting a novel in a category with a couple of films, but those two exceptional movies came to mind when reading the book. Like those films, The Exquisite is a quirky ‘don’t-know-exactly-where-reality-begins-and-ends’ type of story, which is quite appealing to a mindset that’s open to the “improbable,” as Hunt aptly characterizes his book.

I knew I would like The Exquisite when I saw the epigraph quoting Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet: ”I fainted during a bit of my life. I regain consciousness without any memory of what I was, and the memory of who I was suffers for having been interrupted. There is in me a confused notion of an unknown interval, a futile effort on the part of my memory to want to find that other memory. I don’t connect myself with myself. If I’ve lived, I forget having known it.” Epigraphs often mean more to the author than to the reader, but once you’ve read The Exquisite you realize just how well this quote fits, so much so that you can imagine the narrator speaking those words himself. “Once upon a time I was someone then that stopped,” he begins.

Henry, our unlikable unreliable narrator lives in the East Village in New York City. He’s something of a ne’er-do-well who slips into a seedy existence after his girlfriend leaves him and he falls in with an odd gang of fake murderers. Now, when I say fake murderers I may mean that they did fake murders, or they were fake murderers, or their fake murders were fake, or something like that, but I’ll leave that for you to decide when you read the book. Much of the story centers around one of those fake murderers whose murder doesn’t seem to be so fake, who happens to be the namesake of a petty thief immortalized – maybe literally – in the Rembrandt painting The Anatomy Lesson as the subject of a public dissection.

Aris Kindt, this namesake of the man dissected for posterity, enters Henry’s life with a tinge of risk and eroticism that he finds at once perplexing and comfortable:

“It was this deep enjoyment of orchestrated experiences in which pain and pleasure lay tightly coiled that had prompted Mr. Kindt, I presumed, to take out a membership at the Eleventh Street Russian baths, a venerable mobster-frequented establishment where what I took to be blast furnaces filled with boiling, beet-red lumps of flesh coexisted with sinister massage cabinets and a deep icy pool…It was Mr. Kindt’s rule, one that Tulip and I were both happy to comply with, that if we came with him we did all of it. So it was that, to my surprising delight, I had a huge guy sit on my back, soap me up, whack me with oak branches, and time and again pour near-frozen water on me…”

When we meet Mr. Kindt, he is sitting in the dark, naked, strapped to a heart monitor as Henry is burglarizing him. He doesn’t get any less strange as the story goes on, not in any of his incarnations, and neither do any of his equally odd colleagues, all of whom seem to have stepped out of a Quentin Tarantino movie (this is my last movie mention, I swear); like Cornelius, who wears a hunting cape, or the “contortionist twins,” or Tulip the beautiful tattoo artist, and finally a bartender enigmatically named Job – I imagine after Job in the Bible or perhaps of the Robert Heinlein book, Job: a Comedy of Justice, or maybe just job, like an act of crime – who also seems to appear with different names.

In fact, many people show up with different names or as different people in The Exquisite. The main thread of the book consists of Henry’s hospital experience where he chronicles the time that makes up the rest of the book – the events, we find, that have led him there – and generally hallucinates (maybe hallucinates) a set of characters who parallel others in the other story. It’s not as confusing as I make it sound, not, that is, if you don’t try too hard to make sense of it.

I don’t believe Hunt ever used the word exquisite in the text, but the title is a well earned compliment as the book is indeed “ingeniously devised” as the name suggests and Hunts writing fits the bill as well. I was struck – this is a small but telling thing – by his use of the word “truffle” as a verb at the end of the book in the acknowledgment section (which section, by the way, holds a key to the story that is alluded to about half-way through, but cryptically). By all accounts truffle is a noun – suggesting to me Hunt’s joie des mots and playfulness with language. It’s clear that Hunt likes to explore the various meanings a word can take on, just like the names people take or the way they change themselves with or without their clothes or tattoos etched into their skin. This manifests itself in words like the aforementioned “Job” or “swell” or “fleck” that he uses repeatedly, or the way he channels meaning with things like fish (as a friend, a food, a subject of a dream and a symbol) and cigars – Kindt smokes Dutch Masters (think Rembrandt).

Any complaints I have are trifling compared to the overall experience here, but Hunt seems to have had a few set-pieces on New York City in his head that felt slightly out of place as I read, and there is a seemingly obligatory or compulsive placement of a 9/11 placemark that seemed to me to have little purpose. Ultimately though, The Exquisite is full of deliciously bad characters (Aunt Lulu, who might have been a cat murderer, is a particular favorite) rich allusions and an uncertain reality that, if you’re comfortable with that sort of thing, is a lot of fun.

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Laird Hunt blogs at ”Heart Hammer” and his author site is LairdHunt.net. Other Links: Coffee House Press, Poets & Writers magazine has an excerpt.

posted August 29, 2006

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