That Asshole, Monahan

DEAR HENRY, An obscenity has come to my attention. William Monahan’s Light House: A Trifle has gone into trade paperback. After all the work I did–all the letters I wrote, telling Riverhead Books what an unreliable, ridiculous clown and megalomaniac viper they had taken to their multinational breast–after all the lack-of-character-demonstrating e-mails many mediums have received from various "hotmail" addresses, as well as the mindspring account Monahan claimed dubiously was password-hacked a few years ago (Monahan, usually indisposed in other states, as well as rather various, personality-wise, is unusually open to calumny)–I cannot believe that this book has again been put into print. Yet indeed it is in print. Not only is it in print, Henry, it is absolutely plastered with baselessly positive reviews: "Delightful echoes," it says on the cover, "of Vladimir Nabokov, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Flann O’Brien, and other modern masters of drollery. But mostly there’s the original, very funny voice of William Monahan. More, please." On the cover: "Hilarious," "Brilliant," etc. Opening the packed "front sales" section (as we call it in the trade, or as we call it if one’s book ever actually makes it to paperback), one may read, "Monahan is a latter day ‘English bad boy’ author, a worthy successor to Kingsley Amis."

At this point, unable to help myself–after a bleak, piteous look over at Mr. McEnery, a "quad" smoking a Pall Mall through a kind of wheelchair-attached hookah–I vomited all over the "tv lounge." Reaching for a newspaper to clean up the unpleasantness (though excrements are no stranger to the tv lounge, which gets only the Springfield UHF station), I discovered in my hand, as if by evil magic, a copy of the Hartford Courant dated July 15, 2001, which identified Monahan (among other enemies of Claude La Badarian) as an heir to Pynchon, Barth, Joyce, Beckett, Swift, Sterne & etc. The effect was terrible: I walked as if zombified to my room. At exactly the point at which things could not get worse (the "hyperconsciousness" coming on pretty good), "Ed," the moron concierge, pounded on my door like, as usual, the police department, and when I opened the portal of horror handed the shattered Claude La Badarian a package containing the offending novel in German ("Wie bitte?" fragte Tim), sent me as a "kindness" (it was like a fucking brain operation with a hedge-trimmer) by a Kraut "friend" at Wittenberg, who included an essay on how fucking good the novel was. Had I seen this "exciting work of art in the Amerikanischen"? Well yes, Herr Doktor, you cunt, I have seen this masterpiece in the "Amerikanischen," and in fact tried to torpedo it on sight in one of the less-influential trades, through assigning to the auctorial voice the opinions of the protagonist, a juvenile sociopath. A base trick, yet an effective one, and unusually useful in a literary culture where it is utterly unknown (especially, alas, at the moment of composition) that author and protagonist are, or can be, different people.

Well there I was, anyway, holding the book in German. I took to my bed, Henry, hyperconsciousness in full hideous bloom, clutching the admittedly excellent Ulrike Seeberger translation of Light House. (Of course I can read it: I know all modern languages.) I began to think auctorial thoughts of the most cosmic magnitude. Do you know that fucking huge cemetery you see in Queens on the way to JFK? It always gives me the "library fidgets." No author alive does not know what the library fidgets are, but since you are not an author I must explain that the library fidgets are, or result in, the vertiginous, dreadful sensation of nonentity that comes from looking through endless library stacks of horrible, dead, forgotten novels, by horrible, dead, forgotten egomaniacs. Whenever I pass the Queens deathyards, I imagine that each of those untended, untendable, uncountable graves contains a novelist–most of them NYC-based "coming of agers" but many of them once on Oprah’s list. None of them contains Monahan at the moment, and I’m getting a little worried. He’s like Dracula who (we shall weather the Freudian complication: the world did) eluded my Van Helsing’s stake, possibly because he doesn’t give a shit. He sent me an e-mail once, saying that public life was an afterlife.

Monahan is not staying entirely "under the radar" as I had hoped. According to Mortlake (Eugenio, not Max) over at Mediaslag.com, Light House turned a royalty despite less–far less than ferocious–or even appropriate–promotion. I got my breathing problem, followed by an attack of diarrhea, as I usually do when a contemporary gets public notice, or a check in any amount. You witnessed what happened to me at Scythian Bar, or was it "Jade of Asia," when X got the "genius grant." It is not enough to succeed, Vidal said, famously: others must fail. God knows how true that is: viz his relation to the Devil. Monahan is not failing. He’s not exactly like that fucking rabbit on tv, but no matter what I do (and I never stop short of defamation unless paid), the son of a bitch keeps ticking. If I don’t do something, obviously, he’s going to end up with a readership. He may even be on Charlie Rose, quietly correcting misapprehensions about Fiction. I almost got diarrhea even thinking about it.

Naturally, I have tried, and several times, to put Monahan into Fiction. That is the classic way to consume and neutralize the competition. Yet he is not pissed. I met Monahan at the Haymarket Cafe the other day, and instead of smashing me to the ground with a chair he complimented me cordially on Second Novel, and told me that he was so impressed with the title that he was using it as a "working" title (dare he use it in reality? titles may not be copyrighted) for his next piece of shit, which confronts the "second novel" issue head-on–something I forgot to do. He seemed to have no idea that Second Novel contained a potshot, or seven, at him. I chuckled for a while, thinking how true it is that Satire is a Glass & etc. (Swift, Henry), in which we see every face but our own. Then afterwards I got worried that maybe he had detected that an attempt had been made at his lineaments but considered–or had decided to pretend–that the La Badarian attempt at "contemporaricide" (I really thought this, Henry, and must say what I feel) to be too pathetic or clumsy to even mention, as if the thunderbolt had been seen a mile off and he had been standing somewhere else when it struck...or, say, it had been less than Jovian. His manner with me when discussing Second Novel was, in fact, the manner of a man who distantly (and honestly, compassionately) regrets that circumstances do not allow him to take you tactfully aside to point out that your fly is open. A hot flush of shame came over me: I was purple to the roots of my hair. He knows I tried to fuck him, I thought, and he doesn’t care. I was immediately translated to the insect-world. Obviously, I felt the hyperconsciousness coming on. To my horror, Monahan said that his next plan was to do a blackmailed dining column written by a delusional media scumbag. It would be a small yet integral part of what, with apologies to me, he was calling Second Novel. He gave me a wry smile, complimented me on having moved out of Manhattan and getting out of "media" (he did me the courtesy of pretending that the first was volitional and the second to be desired), and then left the establishment, remarking that it smelt of hippies.

Honestly, Henry, I don’t know if any of this happened, including the plan to get a drink at Monahan’s "office" in Easthampton two evenings hence. As I said, I have the hyperconsciousness pretty bad today: I don’t know whether to shit or wind my watch, and drinking two pots of coffee on top of three straight days of insomnia was not the best idea. Things could be a lot more metafictional than they are. Fortunately, Mr. Murphy, a "veteran" with post-traumatic stress disorder dating from the terrible three months he spent as a salad chef in Vietnam, has a tremendous supply of tranquilizers. Beside his snoring form, I crammed half a bottle into my mouth. As they take effect I am almost convinced that I never met Monahan at all except in an hallucination and, also, that he never said, in parting, "Hit what you aim at." Obviously, obviously. (I leave out the prefatory remark: If you have to aim at someone other than yourself: I’m sick of his theory that a writer is all his characters and none of them.) This is such an important part of Satire-writing that I must have thought of it personally. Eureka. Or whatever it was that Marat said in the bath.

Sincerely, Claude La Badarian Restaurant Critic The Aristocrat Magazine Next Week: In Which William Monahan Disappears Entirely from the Narrative and Claude Has an Interview at a Very Major University.