Barrelhouse Reviews: Doom Town by Gabriel Blackwell
Review by Katharine Coldiron
Zerogram Press / May 2022 / 204 pp
This is a hard book, in multiple senses of the word. Hard like difficult, like indestructible, like painful, like merciless. He was a hard man, an adult might say of his father, a corporal punisher who nevertheless taught him how to live. Doom Town is that kind of book. It’s also hard like a perfectly cut diamond: peerlessly organized at the molecular level, a substance that can be cut only by itself. And it’s extremely fucking hard to read: every sentence is densely layered, a complex equation of parentheses and em dashes and comma phrases.
Reductively, Gabriel Blackwell’s latest book is about a man’s struggle to cope with his young son’s death and his dissolving marriage. Opening the lens a little wider, it’s about language, disaster, and how disastrous language can be for communication. The unnamed narrator is a humanities professor of some kind at a university in the Deep South. After finding language an inadequate tool following his son’s death, the narrator tries to communicate in other ways, and lands on telling parables to illustrate his state of mind: “stories, I found, tended to focus and structure what I had to say in a way I couldn’t manage otherwise.” These derive from folktales, ancient myth, or other sources tested by hundreds or thousands of years of human time.
There was something appealing and even soothing about such a linguistic act; since all language was deceptive anyway, I’d thought, it seemed best, if one couldn’t change the nature of language to instead advertise its deceitfulness up front, and, through doing that, at least partly reduce or attenuate its power to deceive. In fact, I thought of these stories as a kind of double negative; by employing intentionally and admittedly deceptive narrative, I could, I thought, get closer to the truth—by focusing outward instead of inward, by telling the stories of others instead of attempting to confess one’s own story, I could, I thought, very possibly reach the heart of the matter and actually communicate something worthwhile.
Within the world of the book, it doesn’t work. Blackwell never fully finishes any of these parables through the course of the book, indicating that storytelling, too, is an inadequate method of communication, “Darmok” be damned. Everyone is exhausted and annoyed by the narrator’s parables, whether the students subjected to his “story-lectures” or his wife, who comes across as nothing short of monstrous.
In some ways, Doom Town is two hundred pages of a man explaining himself. He defends his thoughts and feelings about a ghastly accident, one for which he is responsible but which isn’t his fault. This accident is the roadblock past which his marriage (and his mind, and his heart, and his speech) cannot go, and his part in it balances out his wife’s henpeckery, passive-aggressiveness, and contempt. One hideous boulder against a mass of ugly pebbles, and the scales hang evenly; still, the marriage can’t be saved, a sorrow no number of complex sentences can obfuscate.
My wife’s glee at my confused speech, I should probably say, was often accompanied by or was later explained as a reaction to what seemed to me to be willful misunderstandings of what I’d said (or at least, what I’d tried to say), interpretations of the way in which my words or my tone might have been understood, for instance, by someone who had really no sympathy for me or my position and who was disinclined to give me or my words the benefit of any doubt whatsoever, which is to say, someone who just plain disliked me, and who wanted to see me fail, rather than someone—like, for instance, my wife, or what might be expected from such a person—who cared for me and who might even, to some limited degree, have depended upon me and my success, and so wished to see me succeed.
The novel lives on a timeline of recursive events, occurrences visited again and again both before and after they are described: “the moment at the Macy’s,” “the suicide,” “the day of the eclipse,” and even, horribly, “where the two babies had been buried.” The additive quality of Blackwell’s sentences (which feel like lake waves, lapping and lapping continuously on a thin shore), along with these ominous metonyms, form a book full of dread. Reading it feels like thunderclouds that don’t break for a whole day, or low-frequency noise in a film’s sound design.
I didn’t comprehend Doom Town’s title until I listened to its author on a podcast, when he explained he was thinking of the replica towns the government built to test nuclear weapons upon in the mid-20th century. I had finished the book by then, and the analogy made sense in a way I wasn’t sure I could explain in this review without giving things away. Certain elements reveal the cheat code of this book (that it’s fiction, a replica of life instead of life itself): the narrator’s placidity in the face of his wife’s scorn, the unlikely litany of terrible things that befall him and his community. However, I believed the title referred, as a nickname, to that litany of disasters all happening in the same place. Cabot Cove = Murderville; this Southern hamlet = Doom Town. But the notion of a whole community built solely to be blown up, constructed so that experts can study its wreckage—the sham of that, the hollow exercise of it, points to the act of writing fiction itself. It also refers to the narrator’s marriage, in a way, and more directly to a project that occupies the narrator in the book’s late chapters. This project is too heartbreaking to share here, but it bears resonance that extends into the oddest and hardest human endeavor (aside from communicating): parenthood.
As the excerpts indicate, Blackwell’s sentences in this, his seventh book, remain stunning: as precise, intricate, and unmistakable as Waterford crystal. Early on, the narrator explains his wife’s belief that he talks to her in his sleep,
asking her questions that seemed, she told me, like challenges to her, questions or challenges that were, besides, just vague enough to keep her mind occupied all night trying to figure out why I was asking them, questions or challenges like What were you doing? in which question or challenge the use of the past tense, she claimed, was more surprising, mysterious, and, ultimately, disturbing than the substance of the question itself, and which past tense alone was enough to keep her from falling back to sleep or getting to sleep in the first place: were?
That final word, italicized, sharpens the 136 prior words in this long sentence. Perhaps I had to reread, sift through the commas for meaning, but the spear at the end points the way.
Blackwell’s influences obviously include Thomas Bernhard, but Blackwell has a heart, and in Doom Town, he wants to break yours. The ring of truth in this book concerned me so much that I researched the author to learn if the book is based on a real failed marriage, a real child death. It does not seem to be. That matters not at all in the book’s execution or presentation, but as a human being, I wanted very much for the person who wrote this book to be more okay, in life, than his creation.
Despite the helplessness and uncertainty language inspires in the narrator, the accumulation of Blackwell’s language does, often, “reach the heart of the matter and actually communicate something worthwhile.” At the midpoint of the book, the narrator confronts an intruder:
While I was mentally scanning the room for something to hit this man with, I realized I’d have to somehow keep him in the house until the police arrived or else get him to leave the house, and this, I remember, seemed unendurable; what I really wanted was for him never to have been there at all.
This rare insight applies to so much of what pains and traumatizes us. The fantasy of rewinding our lives implies we intend to re-live some situation to improve it, not to erase it altogether. Yet some pain is too overwhelming, and some waterways remain unbridgeable, whether by physical construction, love, or language. The riddle at the heart of Doom Town is that we try anyway. We live in a state of catastrophe, but we still procreate, believing our children will survive. Language is minimally useful for communication, but the narrator speaks. And, just as perversely, Blackwell writes a book, communicating to anyone daring enough to read him.
Katharine Coldiron’s book criticism has appeared in the Washington Post, NPR, the Times Literary Supplement, LARB, and many other places. Her books are a novella, Ceremonials; a monograph, Plan 9 from Outer Space; and a forthcoming collection of essays, Junk Film. Find her at kcoldiron.com or on Twitter @ferrifrigida.