The Human Laboratory (2006)

The Human Laboratory Lance Olsen Letter to Lamont William Gillespie Spineless Books http://www.spinelessbooks.com 84 pages; paper, $10.00 "Writers are a glum lot," Ann Beattie commented in a Poets & Writers interview. "They usually expect the worst—but now that it's here, now that corporations control from afar, and money is the bottom line, and editors are almost as expendable as writers, what are we to do but make trouble by persisting as long as we can?" All too true, and in sad spades. Yet I suspect the princess of suburban mimesis could never, even in her most unsettling dreams, envision the sort of remarkable trouble William Gillespie is up to in his flash novel, Letter to Lamont. Framed by a half-page prescript and two-anda -half-page postscript, the mad, rambling, desperate, self-reflexive eighty-page epistle that comprises the bulk of this book evinces few paragraph breaks and even less plot. It is addressed to Lamont Perkins, a young woman living in Florida, by an intensely unreliable and unglued narrator (prone to believing he is, alternately, other people, other species, and a subatomic particle) named William Gillespie, who lives with his roommate in Illinois. Apparently, there have been many other letters from William to Lamont, and, apparently, Lamont (if she actually exists at all) has never answered one. We follow William's digressions, at once funny, quirky, and wildly inspired, about his grade-school traumas, including the time Lamont allegedly detonated radio-controlled firecrackers in his desk. About his McJob at a local restaurant, and his reveries of opening his own—perhaps one based on a Daliesque theme, where waiters are besieged by such complaints from the clientele as "there's no gravity at this table" or "My knife is spinning and I'm afraid to get near it." About William's Utopian vision for the town university, in which hierarchy collapses, and once a week professors sweep the floors while the janitors deliver the lectures. About the Big Bang itself, in a disquisition heavily influenced by Calvino's Cosmicomics (1965): "That was before I was an electron. As soon as someone decided they were a separate particle and tried to leave everything just blew up and now there is time...." William-aselectron longs for Detailfrom covera prelapsarian momentlessness "when there was no plurality, only singularity," but readers of Letter experience precisely the opposite: a maximum multiplicity ofcharacter, situation, chronology. Events and meaning are held in suspension. The textual polyverse spins in a sort ofexistential blur. It is as if one were witnessing in the narrator the reification of Baudrillard's postmodern schizo—the human -as-switching-center "open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion." What characterizes such a techno-being, Baudrillard writes, is "the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defense, no retreat." We meet less a constructed world, then, than a cloud of manic voice-driven energy whose sole purpose seems to be to announce its own iffy being, a fiction ofcognitive dissonance privileging sensation and speed over substance, the literary equivalent of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Your parachute opens and smoking calmly you are surrounded by machinegun wielding helicopters who order you to surrender as black robed martialartsexperts leap from the helicopters onto your parachute and shimmy down the strings toward you, triple bladed knives in their teeth, you phone your producer to make sure that the musician you hire to write the soundtrack plagiarizes from female composers in significant proportion and call for more coffee but I have fallen asleep on the couch with the television set on and, to my oblivion, the President had, in the middle of the speech I fell asleep during , looked directly into the camera and, seeing that I had fallen asleep, gestured to the assembled audience of journalists bodyguards and bartenders to be quiet, and climbed directly into the camera and out through my television screen into my livingroom where he looked around and saw what the honest average taxpaying, hardworking-if-at-all, Democratic-voting -if-at-all, college graduate had that he could steal in a hurry and resume his speech before...