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Three Takes on Kevin Kilroy’s

The Chicago Window

Richard Blevins

 

The reader might choose to consider “Moby Grape,” the title Kevin Kilroy selects for one of the two novellas in his new novel, to best appreciate the architecture that is The Chicago Window.  Architecture, here meaning both looking out of and in through the window frames.  Novel writing can be as big as urban planning or just moving the furniture around.  Kilroy’s architecture does not fall back on Collage Novel formulas, but more resembles Stravinsky’s impulse, upon entering a room, to rearrange things into their order.  For example, the novella “Moby Grape” will show up as a numbered section in “In the Penal Colony.”  A narrator informs the reader: “It is only in this room that you see me, but this room isn’t the only one I exist in,” claiming to be gifted, like a madman or a certain kind of novelist, with “the power to locate trap doors and utilize them to enter and exit rooms.”   Kilroy can make his contemporaries sound like the humorless instructor who cannot see the humor in the tasteful room’s windows in “The Philosophy of Furniture” by Poe.  Kilroy is a maestro of uncanny placement, story in story, window opening onto window.  Also, akin to the impact generated by the triple narratives in Chicago Window, ‘60s band Moby Grape’s energy was a barely controllable fusion:  individual members were happily credited for songwriting and lead singing, and everybody wrote and sang—but for more than two inspired minutes of “crosstalk” in the song “Omaha,” three guitarists trade solos, working off and against each other, bringing together unstable elements and unleashing a chain reaction of sound.  Moby Grape breaks up after band member Skip Spence on acid (the kind of guy who could be mistaken in a lineup for the narrator who opens the “In the Penal Colony” section) uses a fire axe on fellow band member Don Stevenson’s hotel door and is subsequently removed for six months in Bellevue (the narrator may be an escapee from The Fortress of Bethulia, a halfway house Kilroy names after the city Judith saves from Holofernes).

 

 The reader might choose to consider “In the Penal Colony,” the title Kevin Kilroy selects for the novel within his new novel, to best appreciate the architecture that is The Chicago Window.  Even after repeatedly viewing Andrey Rublov until I could hold it in my head well enough to know what’s coming next, and reading sometime afterwards the statement Tarkovsky makes in an essay that “Time is a state:  the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul,” I remained undecided about what to think about souls in general and especially how character development necessarily warps the evolution of the film—until I read “In the Penal Colony” in The Chicago Window.  Kilroy’s lost soul narrator believes he converses with the voice of Charles Darwin on “the evolution of cunning.”  Kafka’s original story “The Penal Colony” is about the protagonist’s eventual response to a machine used for the cunning execution of a condemned prisoner, who experiences a mystical epiphany in his final six hours of life.

 

The reader might choose to consider “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” the title Kevin Kilroy selects for one of the two novellas in his new novel, to best appreciate the architecture that is The Chicago Window.  Kilroy, himself the sacker of Collage Novel grids, He portrays Holofernes, the notorious threat to Judith’s city, as a powerful “urban planner.”  Is Kilroy calling attention to the incongruity of his own vision of architectural beauty and the Chicago grid--he is, after all, the sacker of the planned Collage Novel—when he writes, as if seduced by a Judith of his own creation:  “But their juxtaposition—I do love how they look next to each other, this elsewhere…and this here, what we occupy now”?  A walk along The Fortress of Bethulia clears the narrator’s head before he loses it:  “[T]here are more ways than one to exit a building…It was as if the map had initially been accurate, and then corroded into this carnival of deformed imagination which I stared at now.”  In Metcalf’s Genoa, in the time before the corrosion, the apogee for the great Collage Novel is on record along with Judith’s biblical addresses.  For decades, writers inspired by the monumental architecture of Cortázar and Perec have worked at making a cultural industry of drawing up architectonic blueprint novels with trap doors and no windows.  Alas, after Cortázar and Perec, most of the writers tear down the structures of collage only to erect their own elaborate puzzles (mirroring Hopscotch) or tricks (retro-Life:  A User’s Manual); some of the newest high-rises are built to fall apart, fractal by fractal, style by style (Mallo’s Nocillo Trilogy, Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas).  Vines, graphic novels, digital humanities, and flash fiction—like a working Gutenberg printing machine created by a 3D printer—are not revolutionary.  Kilroy can make his contemporaries sound like the humorless instructor who cannot see Zeno’s paradoxes for exacting parodies of logic taken to the extreme.  I realize reading Chicago Window gave me a sensation I’d felt before, always aware of the unseen ocean, on first encountering Sebald’s Vertigo—here is a writer who has never abandoned the ambition to write the novel.

 

Richard Blevins.

 

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