Improvidence by David Herod
Confident, competent genre fiction
In the taxonomic hierarchy of fiction, most of the action is happening at the species level; think: “cozy mystery,” “romantic suspense,” “LitRPG,” and so on, and we should expect subgenres to continue to merge and mutate: “African American Urban fiction,” “Latinx SciFi,” “Queer Historical Fiction,” and so on. This process of specificity is the process of modernization. The past felt simpler because it was simpler, and that is roughly bad: we should look forward to increased specificity.
Since I’m persuaded by this theory of the future, I am comfortable thinking about literature at the species and subspecies levels. But, I’m rightwing, so I’m interested in the largely self-published literature appearing among authors associated with the New Right, as delineated by
.“Tradcaths, Nietzschean vitalists, Dimes Square art hoes, based semites, tradwives, Christian nationalists, pagan LARPers, race realists, eco-fascists, apocalyptic evangelicals, schizophrenic shut-ins, model minorities, BAPist bodybuilders, obese NEETs — all united under little more than an antipathy toward the grand liberal project, the Regime, the Cathedral, the Machine that wants to turn us all into drugged up, immiserated, tired, passive, deracinated, mindkilled, impotent, spiritually inert, atomized, gray goo’d, pod-dwelling, bug-eating, childless, individual consumers with no community from which to draw enough strength to oppose its inexorable march.”
I’d love to read “Contemporary Urban Race-Realism” or “Upmarket Commercial BAPist Murder Mystery” or “Eco-Fascist National Security Drama” or “Far Future Schizophrenic Shut-In Thriller” and so on. The problem is not that publishing is under the spell of woke employees, but woke consumers.
We don’t have a huge audience.
Still, we do have an audience and a number of authors, and I think we’ve approached a point where there is enough diversity to begin our own system of categorization. With this task in mind, part of me wishes we could consider at least one category that I think is missing from mass market classification: prose style. Which books contain, in B.R. Myers’s categorization, “evocative” prose? –“muscular” prose? –“edgy” prose? –“spare” prose? –or William Gass’s “baroque” prose?
Within the domain of prose style, I think there are at least two evaluative criteria: euphony and definition (or “resolution” or something like this). Euphony is, I think, obvious in theory, but there will necessarily be a degree of quasi-mystical connoisseurship involved in discriminating good from bad sounding prose, and I discussed euphony a little bit in my review of Honor Levy’s My First Book.
Definition is, I think, a more straightforward quality. By “definition,” I mean its secondary meaning, according to my macbook’s dictionary app: “the degree of distinctness in outline of an object, image, or sound, especially of an image in a photograph or on a screen.” In order to explain how “degree of distinctness” exists in prose, I’ll give an example from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
“For Hans Castorp understood that this living body, in the mysterious symmetry of its blood-nourished structure, penetrated throughout by nerves, veins, arteries, and capillaries; with its inner framework of bones — marrow-filled tubular bones, blade-bones, vertebrae — which with the addition of lime had developed out of the original gelatinous tissue and grown strong enough to support the body weight, with the capsules and well-oiled cavities, ligaments and cartilages of its joints, its more than two hundred muscles, its central organs that served for nutrition and respiration, for registering and transmitting stimuli, its protective membranes, serous cavities, its glands rich in secretions; with the system of vessels and fissures of its highly complicated interior surface, communicating through the body-openings with the outer world — he understood that this ego was a living unit of a very high order, remote indeed from those very simple forms of life which breathed, took in nourishment, even thought, with the entire surface of their bodies.” (Mann, 276-277)
This writing displays a high definition understanding of biological reality and the patience and tendency to describe it. Mann does not remain on the surface; he is able to zoom in and render a high definition description of biological structure or process because he understands the body on the microscopic scale. If the text were an image, you could pinch to expand to a microscopic scale and still see distinctness and outlines of hidden or microscopic objects; you would describe this kind of photo as high definition. I think prose like this, when done correctly, achieves depth.
In our space, we already have at least one author who writes high definition prose:
.But, not everyone is Han or Mann. This style can be self-indulgent or didactic. Part of Mann’s virtuosity is his use of words with mostly clinical, scientific connotations while maintaining a kind of literary, even poetic sense within the syntax and flow. He goes under the skin, touching organs and secretions, and returns–rhythmically–to the more literary field of the ego, which he describes with similar precision.
Alternatively, there are examples of more low definition prose in widely-admired literature. Here is an example of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil…” (54)
These are barbarians, and McCarthy issues the scene in striking language: “a legion of horribles, half naked”; they wear contrasting materials: roughly, “the skins of animals and silk finery,” but McCarthy adds imaginative flourish: “a stovepipe hat,” “an umbrella,” and “one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil.” The difference in the depth of the description affects the humanity of the story. Mann shows you the body, mind, and soul of his characters: the veins and ligaments, the thinking, and the mix of material and immaterial sensations; in contrast, McCarthy delivers only exteriority; we see material signifiers placed atop stick-figures: “one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil,” (my emphasis).
It might seem obvious that high definition is better than low definition prose, but the problem becomes how to describe complexity at speed. On a battlefield, the mind can process a number of facts in a fraction of a second: I can see that a rider in a bloodstained wedding veil is moving fast, that his horse is brown, his jaw is taught, his eyes are wide, his saber is smeared with blood; I can smell the smoke in the air; I can hear a man screaming and see that my rifle barrel is listing, and so on. But, the mind processes text one word at a time; therefore, text as a medium slows the experience of sensory complexity at speed: it took me 15 seconds to read those descriptions. If every .3 second of experience takes 15 or more seconds to absorb through text, how do you achieve frenzy?
The author has a few options: (a.) he can figure out how to solve this problem with high definition prose–by, say, describing flashes of frenzy in high definition, maybe from different perspectives; (b.) he can toggle between high and low definition prose to accommodate changing pace within the narrative, or (c.) he can develop and remain in a low definition prose style.
Option (c.) is the hallmark of low investment writing. The low definition prose style is invariably the style that enables authors to produce, say, 60 or more works over the course of a single career: Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, Dan Brown, Colleen Hoover, Stephen King, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, etc. It is the style that ChatGPT has mastered, and it is, in my view, one of the major ways to distinguish between “high” literary fiction and “low” genre fiction.
Based on what I’ve read of Cormac McCarthy–Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, Child of God, and The Road–his prose style is low definition: he is a genre fiction author.
Still, as mentioned in my review of The Novelist: A Novel, the few readers interested in gritty, masculine literary fiction are parched and desperate. McCarthy’s admittedly art house style of genre fiction appears as a mirage of “high” masculine literary fiction within an endless desert. But, I think we have to be honest with ourselves: Cormac McCarthy’s prose style precludes depth, which is the indirect way of saying: his writing is shallow. It camouflages its shallowness in obscure–sometimes ridiculous–vocabulary items (especially adjectives, which shoulder a lot of burden in his books), syntax that draws attention to itself, and the absence of standard English conventions (commas, quotation marks, etc.). These are illusions. If there is depth in McCarthy’s writing, it is in the infrequent and subtle–but, if I recall correctly, mostly scientistic–editorial intrusions that appear within his narratives. Otherwise, he’s mostly a kind of masculine Andy Warhol: obsessed with appearance.
I say all of these things as a way of introducing David Herod’s (
) Improvidence, a book that strikes me as influenced by Cormac McCarthy, among others (Ambrose Bierce, maybe). It has a stylized and antiquated low definition prose style, and the setting is an apparently post-apocalyptic American frontier populated by violent savages. The perspective is strongly masculine, and while I am skeptical of the intensity of fanfare around McCarthy, I liked this book because of its (a.) confident, image-oriented prose and (b.) compelling concepts.Confident, image-oriented prose
Herod’s prose style is low definition, which means that he almost never lingers for more than a sentence over description. But by sacrificing depth, he is able to achieve and maintain a brisk pace, and I enjoyed the experience of the momentum, which created a sense of readability: every time I picked the book up, I felt absorbed. Further, in spite of the leanness of the prose, there are a number of nice, image-oriented sentences that are worth talking about.
On page 13, for instance, he writes, “With only the hushed clack of hooves on pine needled stone, we circumvented the sheer steel cliff of a fan blade where it lay embedded in the earth.” While I think this sentence tends towards euphony (“hushed clack of hooves”), it is actually nice because of the images: the “pine needled stone,” the hushed hooves, and the “sheer steel cliff of a fan blade” that “lay embedded in the earth.” These images contrast a kind of poetic concern with quiet and nature (hush and pine needles) with a blockbuster cinematic landscape (post-apocalyptic ruin of a wind turbine), and this compelling contrast is delivered in concise imagery. To me, this is the mark of a mature author. My only quibble is with the word “circumvent,” which isn’t concrete to the same standard as the other words in the sentence. We can easily see “pine needled stone” or a “sheer steel cliff”; we can easily hear horse hooves clacking, but what do you imagine when you read the word “circumvent”? It’s a word–like many latinate words–without figurative content, which means it is suited for efferent, rather than aesthetic, transactions.
There are more nice sentences like this one because the story includes a lot of travel over open country. Here are two other examples.
“We waded through a slope overrun with cattail husks, brown tails slapping our faces and smearing dry puffs of white seed onto our horses’ flanks.” (18-19)
“After an hour spent crossing the depths of the valley over slate stones blackened by babbling streams, we began our ascent and I looked up to see a man watching me astride a painted horse within a tributary gulch.” (40)
To be sure, there are more nice images throughout this short book, but there are also a few misfires; for instance, this line strikes me as a little purple: “Wind was a memory as the air’s freshness became instead a humid breath-fog” (51). On the next page, I’m scratching my head over this one: “my horse bayed horribly in the black, a toothy death wail” (52).
Still, these miniscule problems indicate an author who is conscious of word choice, which I respect and admire. Here’s another set of sentences that I think indicates Herod’s ambition.
“The air moved again as I approached the outside, rich with the incredible sweetness of leaves decaying in sunshine. Emerging into a silent grove, the evening brightness was incredible, blinding from both my injury and having endured the eternal midnight of the deep earth, a light so brilliant in fact that I had to lean farther to vomit over the side of the horse.” (55)
There is a lot of sensory information here: “sweetness of leaves decaying in sunshine,” “silent grove,” “evening brightness,” “eternal midnight of the deep earth,” and so on. Imagine those phrases placed into their own word cloud: they’re almost a nice sounding poem already. That said, there are some minor problems with syntax. First, I think Herod wants to say that the air is “rich with…incredible sweetness,” not the outside. To clarify that, he should move that modifying phrase after the word “air”–or rephrase. Second, there is a dangling modifier in the next sentence: when you begin a sentence with a participle phrase like “emerging into a silent grove,” the words that follow the comma need to perform the action of the phrase. In this case, the evening brightness did not emerge into the silent grove: the protagonist did; therefore, Herod needs to rephrase so that the subject follows the first comma. Finally, the second sentence contains, in my opinion, too many ideas: there is the emergence, the evening brightness, the blinding, the “eternal midnight,” and the leaning to vomit. This sentence—I think—should be broken up or shortened.
Relative to the strength of the overall narrative, these are nit-picks by a tedious reader, but I thought that I’d include them because Herod might appreciate this kind of feedback.
Compelling concepts
To borrow from Michael Anton’s Flight 93 Election analogy: imagine the rightwing ideal of America as a commercial airliner hijacked by Ezra Klein and Pete Buttigieg. Rightwing alarms are flashing; passengers are panicking. Some passengers–like Alex Jones–are intentionally trying to inflame and confuse people. Others, like Rod Dreher, are terrified to the point of ululating ecstasy. Some passengers have become reconciled to whatever happens; some are oblivious. A lunatic tabloid celebrity–and all of his attendant complications–appears as the only public person apparently willing to charge the cockpit, and we are now eight years into that protracted fight.
The chaos of this fight has created an unusual market situation on the right: more than ever, consumers are seeing intrusive visions of death; more than ever, there is a preoccupation with dystopia; more than ever, our people are compelled to speak in apocalyptic terms.
The quality of these terms is worth evaluating: is the author hysterical? Is the author sermonizing? Is the author a moron? Is the author a neocon cashing in? Herod–probably at the cost of sales–is none of these things: he maintains admirable sobriety in his vision of apocalypse, and in this way, he writes for elites, not the market.
To show you what I mean, I’ll quote Herod, who in the following section describes a treasure trove of plastic refuse.
“We were surrounded on three sides by sheer walls of dyed red earth that cascaded with long trails of ancient plastic that waved stiffly in the breeze. About the hollow’s floor several dozen bottles of plastic and aluminum rattled in each passing gale, spiraling fruitlessly about the riverbed of erosion.
“‘Dear God,’ whispered Jeremy beside me, ‘it’s a fortune.’”
Later on that same page, he says,
“Jeremy came up to me with arms overflowing with clear plastic furred by dirt. He puffed. ‘Maybe two minutes of digging and look at all this.’
“I smiled. ‘This would be a good location for your estate, don’t you think?...’” (30).
This idea roughly tracks the literary (read: leftist) fixation with the “Anthropocene” over the last decade. In theory, this is bad juju for an author targeting a rightwing audience. Herod pursues this idea anyway because it's a fine idea–even in spite of its association with so many “American” literary reviews. It is to their credit that the left prioritizes the environment, and it is embarrassing that so many rightwingers do not.
But Herod adds further complexity. Nearby this motherlode of plastic refuse, the protagonist and his companion find the following site.
“There were human skulls among the deer ribs and heaps of fruit rinds dried into paper. Not the large skulls of men but the frail birdlike skulls of infants. I knelt beside, mindful of my footing and uncomfortable at the crunching twigs under me. I counted a dozen children’s skulls picked clean of flesh so that they stood like animal bones on display as part of some collector’s curiosity.
“I turned to Jeremy. ‘Could these be old…from the dig site? Did the Abortionists put dead infants in such places?’
“His lip curled. ‘No, they’re recent. That one especially hasn’t been out for more than three months.’”
Herod’s commitment to brisk pacing manifests as respect for the reader’s intelligence: he assumes you are mature and intelligent enough to live with ambiguity. There aren’t pages of lore or info-dumping. You are left to infer that plastic refuse and the skeletons of aborted fetuses are a part of how future peoples understand ancients–that is, us. You also infer that dangerous “tribals” lurking in the shadows still practice abortion. In Improvidence, abortion distinguishes civilized people from savages: there is no relativism.
It’s an inspired choice. In spite of its putative popularity, abortion shocks the conscience. In Bernard Nathanson’s memoir The Hand of God, he recounts that the advent of ultrasound technology–not religious conviction–ended his “faith” in the procedure. This experience led to the film The Silent Scream, which “depicted a twelve-week-old fetus being torn to pieces in utero by the combination of suction and crushing instrumentation” (146). The right appropriately sees this practice as barbarian; the left shrouds it in the absurd language of “freedom” and “autonomy.”
These two political concepts–environment and abortion–strike me as symptoms of the terminal sickness at the heart of value-neutral liberalism: hedonistic consumption–of plastics, of sex–is coded as “individual choice.” Herod touches on this reality without sermonizing, without hammering the reader over the head à la Ayn Rand or George Orwell. He simply delivers brisk, confident genre fiction in aristocratic terms as if there were a market to receive such a book.
The task now is to build one.
Great review. You would make a better line editor with your attention to detail than most people I’ve seen charge to make line edits.
One thing I’ll push back on is your assessment of McCarthy as a low definition writer, and especially your conflation of high definition with high interiority. “If the text were an image, you could pinch to expand to a microscopic scale and still see distinctness and outlines of hidden or microscopic objects; you would describe this kind of photo as high definition.” Read the first couple sentences of the first chapter of Suttree and you are “Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun.” That is a ton of microscopic objects described for a man just looking over a lake on a boat. You can’t get more high definition than that, and McCarthy’s early work is full of this level of detail.
Now the famous “legion of horribles” passage you quoted does zoom out rather than in and for good reason. Much of Blood Meridian is written in the Homeric/epic style which eschews interiority for scale. McCarthy isn’t trying to make anyone more human here, but rather mythologize to grotesque proportions. Yes, you have material signifiers atop stick figures but it’s what they symbolize that is important here: what does a group of barbarians wearing stovepipe hats and wedding dresses as war apparell right before they go raping and ripping someone’s guts out (I think thats the same scene, it’s been a while since I’ve read it) tell you about humanity? You have man at his basest signifying polite society. A complete refutation of history as progress. Or for a more gnostic reading (as seems common lately with a lot of McCarthy’s work), you have the demiurge itself mocking humanity with its material notions of civilization. Theres probably hundreds of interpretations of that passage by now but none of it would have been given more meaning had McCarthy zoomed in on the shredded sleeve of the calvalry jacket, or the or the crusted silk of the bloodshot wedding veil, or the thin clavicle bones of the barbarians. Those things would have just distracted from what McCarthy was trying to achieve here.
Thomas Mann is of course a masterful writer as well, and that is an excellent passage, but he zooms out for much of The Magic Mountain. Both Mann and McCarthy at their best knew when to zoom in and when to zoom out.
I have a great deal of respect for authors (like David) who will push their prose, being willing to fall flat in pursuit of interesting or beautiful sentences. Nice review, I liked Improvidence a lot.