Major self-loathing, doubt, guilt. Portrait of the artist as an open bleeding conduit of influences attempting to cauterize via oblation. Diary of critiques, search histories, and borrowed texts. Excavation of a bottomless malady.
I'm trying to make my review more coherent and sequential, but I find that that betrays the substance of the object. This is an intimate version of the author's reality as he tries to wrestle with writing the thing you're reading, as you're reading it. He includes samples of literature, criticisms, and whatnot written by other people. This method is apparently called "ambient nonfiction," a term I had not come across before reading this book. It is interesting, like receiving spurts of oxygen while being drowned. When it works, it nicely breaks up the torrent of intensity that is Maierhofer's id. There are large portions of quoted passages from Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, which I have not read. Maierhofer points to this book as his aspirational ideal for Peripatet.
"If there's a literary work I'd most like to live within it might be Pierre..."
Throughout this exploration of life as a teacher, writer, husband, father, we are mostly with Maierhofer in the Now. Walking side-by-side with his neurosis as he sometimes flashes back to show us the ills of his childhood. The death of his father, which haunts him. His current state screams with malaise and guilt. He's:
"...moneyless and fucked...depressed and anxious and certain you're an evil person."
Maierhofer writes almost pleadingly about the struggle of the writer to want to feel what his idols and inspirations felt. To writhe in blood with Yukio Mishima, or crunch needles under boot in the Cabrini Green projects. He is also a goddamn great crafter of sentences.
"I don't know the extent of the mistakes I've made but they are likely the mistakes you've made and maybe worse I'm not exactly sure. I don't know what to make of them and I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do about mistakes. I want to confess. It's a part of my disorder."
"The process of generating nonfiction is like peeling back a phantom wound."
Maierhofer is an English teacher, I believe, and Peripatet does occasionally feel like reading through articles on the Craft & Criticism section of a literary website (albeit all written by the same self-hating graphomaniac). It offers only questions though, no answers, which opens up possibilities. You can take what you want from his struggles. You can take nothing and simply bask in the miasma.
He tells us numerous times what the work is trying to do, with a different goal each time. He claims the book is about literary praxis here, his own death there... to my mind he never hits any of these scattered targets, but that's probably, definitely, the point. He even acknowledges this (directly after stating yet again what the work is here to do):
"An author's intentions become irrelevant when spread as thin as this."
Then on the next page
"I do not seek or hope to put forth anything like an answer."
I thoroughly enjoyed most of Peripatet, and I think it will mainly appeal to other artists. It is a long book, even though the font changes and pictures make it a much quicker read than the size suggests. I think that some of the perfunctory padding (ambient sampling) could have been cut out. I get the feeling that this is Grant spilling the last of his guts, with the remains not quite filling the hole. But this is the end, he wants to write himself empty. It's a recurring motif:
"I want my next work to be final and then I'll go off and fish with my kids. I want to go to sleep for the next thirty years. I want to spend the days with lifers."
It has the contradictions and pains and manic confusion of most grown artists who still simmer with forms of preteen angst. Being one of them myself, Peripatet often made me feel better and worse from sentence to sentence. This is affecting in a significant way.
Very minor reservations aside, Peripatet is one of the better dives into privileged misery. I have a feeling that anyone under a certain age, or with artistic ambitions, will connect with and appreciate the majority of what's here. Some other's might find it painfully entropic. The deft prose, however, is unquestionable.
http://www.insidethecastle.org/peripatet/
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