Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s Suicide by Language explores a contemporary “wasteland,” but one with far more daring, humor, and raw nerve than found in the denizens of Eliot’s “unreal city.”  

There is no conventional plot, but we wander through this linguistically constructed landscape with a world-wearied and beleaguered pilgrim who nonetheless maintains a wry and often humorous cynicism.  Following the advice of the fabled fox, this narrator follows a crooked path in an attempt to elude his devils: “In the morning we recalled the exhilaration we felt when we were running away.”  There is a sense of exhilaration as we move from fragment to fragment, as the effect of it is more akin to hypertext, or the beautifully dis-jointed editing of Godard, who St. Thomasino credits as the inspiration behind his novel.  As we explore the humor, absurdity, and sometimes agonies of isolation and fragmentation, other possibilities for meaning emerge—dandelions “but no daisy,” a crystallization and dispersion of desire, like seeds in wind, or a Deleuzian rhizome.  

 

This brilliant, provocative novel is also a manifesto for poetry in the age of “post-truth,” “relativity,” and a pop-cultural landscape where taste seems pre-supposed as “manners,” and our imagined superheroes utilize “sneakiness” and “dirty looks.”  As with Godard, St. Thomasino’s response is innuendo, style, suggestion, and an always “cool” command of language that flickers across the page in a kind of dream logic: “Dreams are in the body.  The mind just reflects.  And like a mirror, everything is backwards.”  The sequences in his novel have bodily heft and psychological depth.  Godard’s characters are often doomed to failure in the conventional sense of story and plot.  But, as St. Thomasino recognizes, they are able to mine far richer ore in the aesthetics of spirt and the imaginary.  

 

St. Thomasino’s Suicide by Language is brilliant, daring, and necessary.  

 

—Jonathan Minton

Coming soon. . . .