Marigold
by James Weaver
King Shot Press ($9.99)
Kafka once wrote “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Brecht concurred, “Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.” The twentieth century may have been the century of “offensive” literature; if so, Troy James Weaver’s book Marigold inaugurated the twenty-first as defensive. It is brutal in its honesty, honest in its brutality, and boils a generation’s worth of irony poisoning into a sloughed-off skin of burned-out feelings. The book also fits comfortably in a breast pocket and could probably stop a bullet.
In a series of connected flash fictions, intercut with asides and short (non)sequiturs, Marigold is narrated by a doomed worker at a flower shop. He fights with his wife. He trades morbid jokes with his coworkers that contain a hint of real vulnerability. He calls suicide hotlines, a lot. He talks about Antonin Artaud and Édouard Levé and Breece D’J Pancake. He helps a homeless woman. He writes poems for his wife. He makes up with his wife.
The tone is similar to one a contemporary reader is familiar with. Our narrator wakes up with: “before I scratch myself and roll out of bed, I stare at the glowing red numbers on the clock/radio and wonder where all the time has gone. Eight hours asleep every night for twenty-nine years. I’m only two-thirds alive. Not to mention all the napping that gets done on the weekends.”
Reminds one of that Generation X brand of literary cynicism, at its most useful in American Psycho, at its most neutered and lame in Douglas Copeland’s era-naming debut. If only in the style of this excerpt, Marigold would be an admirable exercise in gallows humor. But Weaver pushes forward past all-consuming jaded nihilism to include a depth of pity and raw grace. Maybe the central recurring episode in the books involves the narrator’s relationship with “This hair-twirling kid I work with.” The kid is irritating in his youthful naivete; “He reminds me so much of myself at his age it makes me want to kill him.” Later on, the narrator’s self-affiliation is vindicated, and they share their problems in an incredibly beautiful and tender episode.
Neither does Weaver fall into the trap of New Sincerity or whatever you would call it.
The world of Marigold does not have a silver lining, only denser clouds. There is no solution offered, moral, political, philosophical, or otherwise because who can claim one? The book starts with another quotation from Kafka: “The meaning of life is that it stops.” Meaning, there is no meaning. This is an aesthetic experience. It answers only for itself; yet, it reaches out and provides the solace, however fleeting, that pat bromides could never. Marigold is of that rare, sublime form of pessimism, like the work of Schopenhauer, that is the only ladder that reaches to those already at the bottom. It is the hurt that heals the wound. And it is the most beautiful and powerful one hundred and fourteen pages I think you could be reading now.
