All Intensive Purposes

Although Ron Loewinsohn's Magnetic Field(s) was first published in the early 1980s, I had never heard of him or it until it mysteriously jumped off the bookstore shelf at me last week. (Insert a title-related pun here.) The book has been published by the Dalkey Archive Press, which appears to be in the business -- surely not a profitable one -- of reissuing good books gone out of print. They also publish several novels by Stanley Elkin, including the one mentioned recently by Ron Rosenbaum. Plate of Shrimp.

But about the book. I really liked the book. It starts from the viewpoint of the burglar, relating his thoughts about intruding in other people's houses -- how he does it, what he sees. There is an image of particular violence at the start, but it is not characteristic of what follows. The middle third of the novel transitions to the story of one of his victims, initially when they meet, but then that character spends the summer on the other side of the country, and we leave the burglar for his story, and that of the people from whom he is subletting. And yet we don't leave the first third of the novel behind, for images and themes recur. The third part finds character envisioning the secret life of one of his friends, and again there are resonances and ties to what has come before.

I can't quite say what this all reminds me of. In my experience, it's largely sui generis, although the tone and interests of the author sometimes remind me of Haruki Murakami, perhaps.

Since I finished the book, I keep asking people whether they've read it, and I have yet to find anyone who has. Alas, for I want to talk about. Please, someone, read it and tell me what you think in the comments.

I liked this passage when I read it enough to reproduce it here (although I hasten to warn that it hardly seems characteristic of the book):

After they had been expanding the train layout for a couple of years, the boy began staging elaborately planned collisions of the trains, at first involving only freight and tanker cars, but later including passenger trains like the silver Amtrak replica twenty cars long. He even designed and put together an engine that came apart in modules so that it could be "destroyed" in a crash and then reassembled. His father, who always watched the performance of the trains without any expression whatever, observed these crashes in the same way. Eventually, the boy stopped staging them, until Francois began coming up to the attic room. Mr. Mortimer had told his wife all about the wrecks, which were accompanied by all the appropriate sound effects, including the screams of the victims. They disturbed him, he said, and when she relayed this to the boy he said, "I thought so. Adult people are apt to be disturbed by representations of death."

His mother looked at him.

Magnetic Field(s) 110 (Dalkey Archive 2002).

Here's an interview with the author, from the summer of 2002, when Magnetic Field(s) was republished.