Jonathan Carroll is an evil bastard

There's a lot of things I hate, and right now one of them is reviewers who compare authors to other authors. The cover blurb on Jonathan Carroll's White Apples says, "Reading Jonathan Carroll is like watching The X-Files or The Twilight Zone if the episodes were written by Dostoyevsky or Italo Calvino." The quote is from Pat Conroy, author of The Lords of Discipline and The Great Santini,(fine books I'll never get around to reading, I'm sure) so he should know better. The amount of useful information in the blurb is close to zero. For reading it to be worthwhile, you have to have seen the Twilight Zone and/or The X-Files and read Dostoyevsky and/or Italo Calvino. Further, you must like all those things, and be intelligent and imaginitive enough to do a mashup in your head of the various styles of those shows and writers. What's more, it forces you to do a qualitative comparison. Dostoyevsky becomes a standard, and Carroll is either "better" or "worse" than him, and that's not particularly useful. Dostoyevsky is historically significant and worth reading in high school & college lit classes, but by contemporary standards he's overly wordy and boring to all but a niche segment of intellectuals (and they're probably just pretending to like him just to make themselves seem more intellectual). 98% of the time when a reviewer compares one author to another, you're learning more about the reviewer than the reviewed. It is a way of saying, "Look at how well read and culturally diverse I am! Plus, I aced those comparison/contrast short answer essay exam questions back in college!"

Comparing Jonathan Carroll to any other writer is useless, and it is taking the easy way out. I can see the impulse to compare him to other's, but that is more an instinctive reaction than anything else. When confronted with something completely unfamiliar, we put try to reframe it in familiar terms. If you can say, "this thing is like that thing I'm familiar with" then it is understandable and controllable and comfortable. But Jonathan Carroll is unique. One might say he's like a fantasy writer gone bad. Not bad in the sense of lacking quality, but bad as in misbehaving. There's rules, written and unwritten, for fantasy writing. For instance Carroll might go a hundred pages into a novel without anything happening that is outside the paramaters of what we recognize as within the realms of everyday possibility. In a fantasy novel, there are characters who are supposed to be alive and others who should die by the end of the novel. If it doesn't happen that way, it should be obvious, so we feel either cathartic release over the tragedy, or a sense of outrage at the unpunished villian, but still be able to leave with our sense of "rightness" unchallenged. With Carroll you really have no idea who'll live and who'll die. There's no predictability. There's not even predicatable unpredictability. You can be half a page from the end of a novel, and still have no idea how it is going to end.

But then, saying Carroll breaks the rules is still wrong, because that implies that he's some sort of reactionary or radical. He's more like, well the new darlings of the artsy elite are the "naive" or "outsider" artists. These are artists who either have some sort of mental disorder, or are so far outside of standard culture that their artwork isn't influenced by any other artist, and their work is truly original, or something. Their work "breaks the rules" but then it doesn't because they never knew, or are incapable of knowing the rules in the first place. Carroll writes fantasy like a "naive" or "outsider," like he's never been exposed to fantasy before and never knew there were rules. But that's still wrong, because fantasy written by someone who isn't well-read in fantasy tends to be awful because they don't know what is cliché and what is worth emulating, and Carroll knows very well what makes good fantasy.

Maybe Carroll's indescribability is what keeps him labeled as a "cult writer," a condescending term he's been stuck with for more than twenty years now. I'm not sure what that means, exactly. Perhaps it means a writer with a small but rabid fan base who never makes it "big." His books are guaranteed to sell enough to be worth publishing, but don't sell enough to be considered "best-sellers." Meanwhile, it is too intellectual and unconventional to be popular with the mainstream, but has that fantasy label keeping his work from recieving the critical attention it deserves.

Screw it. Don't read any reviews. Forget everything I've said here. Just read his books with an open mind, and know that you're cooler than anyone who hasn't read him before. You can find a number his books at Book Closeouts. I picked up 5 of his novels there for about $20, total. Go read him now.