A Naked Singularity

It was actually quite nice here yesterday. The trouble to enjoying such was that it was the Third. Today is the Fourth and we are off on holiday. It is also infernal outdoors. Despite such I went out this a.m. and walked for hour while listening to Morrissey and Shine On You Crazy Diamond. I returned all a-soak and lobsterized by the maltreatment. It was decided then and there as I rehydrated that I would finish A Naked Singularity. The final 200 pages were clipped and episodic, losing the torque achieved in the previous 550. It does work and compel as a novel, an interrogation of our cozy humanity and our sense of fairness.

My director at work has a son employed as a public defender. I told her about the novel and she in turn bought it for her son. I am hopeful for the best, there. I was gripped by the far-flung elements and have found little energy for weighing them in tandem. There are arcs of function and decay throughout the myriad situations. At least today, I find it redundant to reconcile such.

Symbolism is often ephemeral. It is fitting that A Naked Singularity is listed as my 1000th book completed, though in typing such, i think it would be better illustrated as the next.

Amazing narrative. A little like Fear and Loathing without the tripping. Reminds me of a more intense Tom Wolf, and Joseph Heller type characters (Dane).

A little uneven, but mostly brilliant.

Casi is a public defender in NYC. His stories about the inside workings of criminal justice system--the types of clients he gets and their crimes, the back and forth with prosecutors, his droll musings on the differences (and sometimes similarities) between what the law states and how it works out in real life, and the the frequent inequities in the law as applied--are always entertaining, but never lose sight of the fact that these are serious matters. To this extent, the book sometimes feels like non-fiction, albeit humorous and very readable non-fiction. For example, his explanation of how criminal defendants have been given, and why they need their Miranda rights is told in such a tongue-in-cheek way that even non-attorneys will get a kick out of reading his musings. As a retired attorney, (albeit one in a field with far, far less trial practice and with more affluent clients) I very much identified with Casi's descriptions. For example, this description of what it feels like to know you have a case that is going to trial instead of settling really spoke to me:"...a case that goes to trial is a hideously deformed corporal appendage that forces you to hunch down in deference to its weight. Always on your mind despite your best efforts, but you don't dare kill it for fear that you, the host, will join in its demise..."and at trial:"...{there is a} legitimate response to observers who question a trial attorney's particular decision or action during trial. The response in distilled form is that things happen a lot faster in the well than they do for someone sitting on the fat ass in the audience."However, the book is also a compelling work of fiction. Casi is driven and ambitious; he has never lost a case, and wants to carry the largest case load in the office. Then Dane, another obsessively competitive attorney in the office, proposes, at first in theory only, the idea of a perfect crime--if you knew you could never get caught, would become immensely wealthy as a result of your crime, and would hurt no one (other than perhaps drug dealers) would you commit that crime? It's not long before Dane proposes the commission of an specific crime, and soon Dane and a reluctant Casi (who still sees the idea in theoretical terms only) are working out the details.The book is full of pop culture references which I had fun working out (i.e. "Come and knock on our door"--does anyone recognize that? Or how about "To the moon, Alice, to the moon"? And do you remember Father Mulcahey?) It's also a very leisurely, in a manic sort of way, book, and some might think it needs some brutal editing. I'm one who enoyed the Robin Williams like riffs on a wide variety of subjects with one exception. In the second half of the book, there are long digressions about boxing, and particularly the life and times of a particular boxer, Wilfred Benitez. (Is he real?) My personal view is that these boxing passages felt out of place and added nothing to the book.

A huge unruly mess of a novel. I stuck with it to the end (although I started skipping bits) because there is some very good writing. The story is slight to non-existent and the main event doesn't get going until three quarters of the way through. Otherwise, it's an overdetailed list of very authentic-sounding New York court cases written by an ex-public defense lawyer. This might be ok for a non-fiction description of a public defender's life but it doesn't make a novel. In between all this, there's some very lengthy tortuous dialogue that could have come from Seinfeld except that it's not very funny and a lengthy history of world champion boxers of the 1970s and 80s. It's a mess (a nearly 900 page mess).

Enjoyed being dumped headfirst into the opening pages. For me the book had only one voice. The various characters were well described but once they had to argue a point their voice was an echo of Casi. I soon ceased to read any of the discussions. because it was Casi in stereo. Philosophical discussions do not make for great story telling. Pity there was so much of it. Congrats to Casi for being so well educated and having so many well educated friends,And as for the boxer - this was great blocks of filler, more showing off as to how detailed the research was. There again maybe he made it all up, who knows? How many people can name a single PR boxer? Unless you are really into boxing all of the boxing tales are simply in the way of the narrative.Did I enjoy it - yes. Did I finish it - yes, but only because I flicked over numerous pages of digression. The end? What choice did the author leave himself? Boredom, or lack of imagination, had Casi put down as a mad dog. Kept thinking of Alice Through The Looking Glass.

Definitely for fans of DFW and the like. I really enjoyed it, great turns of phrase, even the tangents were interesting. The end was a little much for me but I can see why he did it.

In many ways, this is a great novel, but it just gets too bogged down in tangents, only some of which are interesting. A stiff run with a good editor (who can keep the spirit of the book alive), would have been very welcome. I am an attorney and I have to say, this is the best book about the legal system (especially the criminal end of things) I have ever read. I felt like someone was watching over my shoulder. So the parts that were the most impressive for me were any of the legal parts, courtroom scenes, dialog with the defendants, judges, prosecutors, fellow public defenders, etc. That is where it really shined - some of the funniest and most perceptive conversations in contemporary fiction. I also loved anything having to do with Casi's family, who were awesome, hilarious and so incredibly real. The novel is steeped in machismo, so the female characters are all rather lame or objects of sexual desire or ridicule. That is where I felt it fell flat, or well, uninspired. That combined with tedious diatribes from some truly repugnant male characters who "like to smell their own farts" (for lack of a better description) made the book drag in many spots. And the ending (literally the last few pages) is terrible. But overall, it was creative, in some ways brilliant and I just always give authors a LOT of credit for using intelligence to come up with new ways of looking at fiction and ideas. Despite how comical the interactions were with the defendants, there is an underlying respect and kindness to those who have those rough roads in life. There is little question this book is not for everyone, but if you get into the first 20 pages or so, you will be hooked. Give it a try, enjoy the ride and hang in there during the boring parts.

It’s not every day that you encounter a book that pulls you under for hours at a time, submerges you in a world that’s surreal and real at the same time, one that’s eerie precisely because it’s so familiar. You don’t even notice that you’ve been holding your breath the entire time until you surface from the book, so dazzled by what you’ve experienced that you have a hard time processing what just happened. That’s how I felt the entire time that I read all 678 pages of this behemoth of a story by Sergio de la Pava. Each time that I tried to marshal my thoughts on this book into writing, tried to capture the experience of this book, my words just scattered everywhere. It’s difficult to describe a book that is about so many things.

A Naked Singularity will appeal to those readers who love overstuffed, ambitious books, full of ideas, seemingly random tangents, action and non-action, grittiness, whimsy, philosophy, absurdity, fairness, injustice, winners, losers, characters who are wise, characters who break your heart, and characters who are bullshitters; readers who can put their trust in the author and just go along for the ride, even when you don’t know where the fuck he’s taking you.

Right from the start, A Naked Singularity gets up in your face, pushing and prodding you to pay attention, to keep up. You end up in the middle of some conversation and you don’t know where the hell you are, but you just go with it. Soon, you come to realize that you’ll be experiencing this world through Casi, a young, talented public defender, as he navigates the criminal justice system in New York. He introduces us to the myriad people he’s defending (those accused of selling drugs and murder, those who are truly guilty, the innocent, the mentally-impaired); his encounters with a weird, high-strung guy who convinces him to take part in a heist to steal drug money; and his interactions with his strange neighbors conducting a silly TV experiment. Also woven throughout are continuous glimpses of the rise and fall of a famous Puerto Rican boxer.

You get meditations/digressions on how the law enforcement system isn’t just some disinterested party arresting powerless people, morality, the war on drugs, the death penalty, ideas about genius and talent, perfection, self-perception, the power of television and advertising, and those are just the obvious ones.

Even as all of these things are jam-packed into the book, never did it feel like a chore to read and that’s a credit to the strong narrative voice we have. De la Pava just has a way with dialogue and monologue, where the language just feels alive and authentic; it holds your attention, regardless of what the subject is. My four-star rating is a nod to this energetic prose.

I left off one star because there were a few misteps for me. There were one or two too many absurd situations for my taste. Once Ralph Kramden showed up (or did he?), it was just too much for me. But even then, I might’ve been able to overlook them had there been more emotional depth in the story. While I gulped down the story, I never felt any emotional pull, never understood Casi, never truly empathized with the characters. The only times in which the book seemed to get at some emotional truth were found in the stories of the mentally-impaired murderer on death row whom Casi defended and the story of the boxer. They evoked some sense of pathos, but they were tiny ripples of emotion, barely breaking through.

A shorthand way for a lot of people who tried to capture the appeal of this book is to compare it to Infinite Jest. And this comparison holds in a few ways, I agree. However, where the two diverge most distinctly for me is the effective expression of emotion. Infinite Jest had it, but A Naked Singularity didn't.

That being said, I still really liked the story. So the book had a few misses in the midst of the hits; that’s just the risk any author takes in plunking something this huge and ambitious onto the laps of readers, and that the readers take in agreeing to the challenge of reading it. By the end, you just hope that in the final tally the hits outweigh the misses. Good thing that this is the case with A Naked Singularity.

“Naked singularity” is a dense, 689-page self-published novel with no endorsements and, as far as I can see, only three reviews on the internet.A tremendously perplexing novel. The first four hundred pages are, more or less, out to match "Infinite Jest." They are written at De La Pava’s best pitch of cleverness and complexity, with asides, chapter-long irrelevant distractions (sometimes insouciantly declared, by the author, as irrelevant), philosophical interruptions, and compulsively micromanaged descriptions, all in the service, apparently, of a vast and continuously enlarging cast of characters and situations that can just barely be remembered by the ideal assiduous reader. This is done with the help of sharply written courtroom slang, strongly reminiscent of, and probably competitive with, The Wire or Richard Price himself.A reader who stops after four hundred pages might do so because she is exhausted by the prospect of another David Foster Wallace, even if that prospect is spiced by bleeding-edge contemporary urban conversation, larded with solecisms, misspellings, travesties against grammar, and “em” and “ums” and “...s.” (That is: ellipses marking where the interlocutor doesn’t speak: an invention, I think, of DWF’s.)In next hundred pages things tighten up, and a reader will realize that there is a single plot after all, and that the novel might in fact even be driven by this plot. At that point—somewhere in those roughly one hundred pages—my interest peaked, because then I thought De La Pava was trying to pull off a new hybrid form of fiction, mingling the overspilling and intentionally excessive plays with language that mark the DFW mode with the plot-driven intricacies of, say, Law and Order. But I became perplexed when I began to see that despite De La Pava’s characters’ unremitting, hypertrophied self-awareness, which involves mandatory long chapters discussing fate, causality, and freedom, with examples drawn from Wittgenstein, Hume, and other staples of the undergraduate college curriculum, he (the author) was entirely unaware that a large part of the appeal of his book would, in fact, be the suspense generated not by the turn to a policier plot, but by the possibility that he might pull of this new fusion of genres. He seems to have written the book in the grip of the commonplace feverish admiration and ambition generated by DFW and McSweeny’s, and he seems to have thought he could unproblematically use those fictional techniques to write a truly great crime story. But that, to me, is a misunderstanding of the stakes of the entire DFW project, and the author’s obliviousness to those stakes made me rethink the reasons for his attachment to perfectly pitched, hyper-eloquent minimalist dialogue and perversely overstuffed maximalist description.The last two hundred pages plunge into crime and courtroom drama. There are exactly three concurrent plots: the narrator, a public defender, is under investigation; he has participated in a robbery; and he is trying to get a stay of execution for a death row inmate. Each of these is treated with a maximum of drama. When the narrator talks to his death row client, the prose is suddenly, frighteningly maudlin, Oprah style, including a tearful scene in the jail. (“Your eyes are funny now,” the simple-minded inmate says to the narrator, implying that the narrator, and potentially also we readers, have been crying listening to the inmate’s pathetic story; p. 491.) Then, when the narrator robs some drug dealers, the scene is edge-of-your seat exciting for a good thirty pages (starting abruptly on p. 516). That kind of writing has absolutely nothing in common with the prose experiments of the preceding four hundred pages, and the fact that the author does not notice the significance of that mismatch—he certainly understands that there is a mismatch, but not what it means in terms of the self-understanding of genres and writing projects—made me intensely disappointed.So: given that the novel is a hybrid, in the pejorative sense of that word, meaning that it is an attempt at mixture where mixing remains the principal issue, what can be said about the writing itself? When the narrator and his legal colleagues talk, their speech is relentless in its cleverness, and when the perps talk, their speech is consistently surprisingly realistic and entertaining. Blending those two modes is the novel’s real accomplishment. But when the educated characters and think or speak, then it’s DFW territory, and that part is problematic. There’s a line to be drawn between writing that is tortured in order to be expressive,and writing that is tortured because the author is a compulsive torturer of language. Here are some lines I experience as compulsive, non-expressive cleverness. They might redouble my admiration for the author, but they don’t add to the scene, the characters, the mood, or the story.1. From the recounting of a corner store robbery caught on videotape. Two men, Rane and Cruz, have been stalking the store. “Now Rane signals Cruz with his chin and they rhyme toward the counter, and the near-future decedent.” (p. 77) “Rhyming” to the counter is clever and visually effective, but “the near-future decedent” is a needless complication of “the man they were about to kill,” intended, presumably, to keep us in mind of the legalistic context, and to foreshadow the mangled language that would be used at the trial. But here it’s supernumerary, distracting because it points for the hundredth, or thousandth, time back to the author’s wit.2. “I recently began my thirtieth ellipse around our sun, an anniversary that as you can imagine barks louder than the usual ones.” (p. 95) Again, “my thirtieth ellipse” is clever, and expresses the speaker’s resistance to acknowledging his age too directly; but “barks” distracts by bringing me back to the author and his wit.Overall, too much of the writing is of this sort, and that is, I think, the novel’s real failure. Sentence sparkle is not the unproblematic virtue the author hopes it appears to be: it’s a symptom, a sign of anxiety about straightforwardness, a sort of fear of the plain style, a tic, a compulsive complication with a life and logic of its own. In “A Naked Singularity” wit is intense: not so much intensely expressive as intensely compulsive. The issue is whether that compulsion is experienced as such by the author, thematized, explained by context and purpose, pondered, used for expressive purpose—or simply expressed the way a patient expresses a sign of illness. Wit, as DFW realized very deeply, sincerely, and ineffectually, is a problem as well as an accomplishment.