The Shimmering Go-Between

by Lee Klein

This imaginatively unhinged yet formally controlled contemporary fable would set the record if Willful Suspension of Disbelief were an Olympic event. If this OMG exploration of WTF were edible, it would be an inside-out eel roll served atop a Russian doll. Set at the dawn of the Internet age, this semi-perverted post-YA novel dramatizes the struggle between impulsiveness and restraint. Never has a semi-illustrated story about longing, loss, and love been so good-natured, inventive, and insane.

+++

"The novel’s title, taken from a Nabokov quote, gives us some insight into what Klein is doing here: Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall tale, there is a shimmering go-between. The 'go-between' is the art of literature or the place where belief and disbelief overlap. Being asked to believe the unbelievable, in the words of Wilson, is 'like being told you’re a werewolf when you’ve never once awoken with a mouthful of chicken feathers.' It’s almost like being told you can Wile E. Coyote to the bottom of the canyon, hit the ground at 100 mph and crawl out of the Wile E.-shaped crater with only the slightest of headaches. Klein leads the reader to a ledge of unbelievability and dares the reader to believe. Isn’t this exactly what magic realism should do? Klein does it so well . . . and then he pushes you off that ledge. Giggling."

--- Christopher Allen, Word Riot

"The Shimmering Go-Between will appeal to fans of Kafka and Nabakov as readily as it will to fans of Chuck Palahniuk and Etgar Keret. With impeccable prose, Klein juggles a variety of extreme personalities and viewpoints, switching narrative perspective with ease, always leaving the reader with unforgettable images, as in the opening scene of a prepubescent Dolores who’s decided to place a cooled light bulb in her mouth, wondering what it’d feel like if she bit down."

--- Brittany Harmon, The Philadelphia Review of Books

Genres: Fiction, Novels

270 pages, Paperback

First published August 19, 2014

About the author

Lee Klein is the author of Like It Matters, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), JRZDVLZ, The Shimmering Go-Between, Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox, and Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World. His translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya's Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador received a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award and was recognized by the New Yorker's James Wood as one of four favorites of 2016. From 1999 to 2014 he edited Eyeshot.net, one of the first weird little lit sites, and in May 2007 he started using Goodreads. He lives in the Philadelphia area with his daughter and wife.

Reviews

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Send $7 via PayPal and I’ll send one to you if you live in the US. Also available for a dollar more via Amazon.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall tale, there is a shimmering go-between..."
Vladimir Nabokov

Take a walk on the wild side.
Take a walk inside the wilderness of inner lives.
Take a walk alongside Murakami's parallel worlds, Wes Anderson's humor and radical elegance, Franz Kafka's metaphorical ventures and Charlie Kaufman's radiant melancholy.
Lee Klein's "The Shimmering Go-Between" is a dark and joyous exploration of how we deal with our particularities, how we deal with grief, how we deal with unthinkable thoughts and unexpressed urges.
A phantasmagoric novel that will cover your eyes, spin you around a few times and throw you for a loop at every turn.
An audacious work that will challenge you, baffle you, move you and shatter you all at once.
A multi-layered story that goes around in circles, a perfect ellipse of lunacy.
Welcome to the shimmering go-between.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

You don't have to be an auto=fellator to enjoy this book. You don't have to be an auto=fellator to identify with the characters. I don't even think it would aid in the least if you simply aspired to be an auto=fellator. You don't even have to be the least bit curious about auto=fellation or even know what it is. The novel will inform you about auto=fellation and then (spoiler) will let you in on the fact that auto=fellators are just like everyone else. They too fall in love.

Lee Klein is a gr=Friend of mine. So what I say here is a lie.

Lee Klein sent me a copy of this (and his recent translation :: Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador) gratis via the mails. So everything I say here is a lie.

Lee Klein is a nice guy. So everything I say here is a lie.

I don't write 'balanced' R/reviews. So everything I say here is a lie.

I don't think it necessary to identify a 'flaw' in every work of art you encounter. So everything written here is a lie.

I don't think it's bad to just let stuff slip unspoken under the carpet. So everything here is a lie.

Which is not to say that Lee Klein's book isn't perfect. It is perfect. Why not? You want perfection? Heck, just let the sewer gases build up under your feet under your city and wait for lightning to ignite it then take all the ensuing rubble and push it all together up and up and higher and higher until you've built a mountian of it a mountain of junk and debris and plant grass and trees on it and climb that mountain with a picnic basket and just check out that panorama. Is that perfection? (I dunno, but it is one of the things that happens here in this novel).

Leyner Klein is not. Why not? Well, (haply) he doesn't have the fireworks kit that Leyner has. Which might be a relief. It's definitely not a flaw. But he does have that that sparkle of wit you'll want to admire. Let Leyner be Leyner and Klein be Klein. Which is exactly what you said. You just said that if you've read Leyner you'll also wanna read Klein. And you are irrepressibly correct! It's the attraction and affinity of reading is what it is.

I pretty much just type what falls into my head at any moment. What is a R/review for? Express my opinion? I can do that with a quick non-lingual thumbs up/down. Which is what I do lots of times. I could tell you about the plot because it is via familiarity with plot (often) that we first become familiar with a novel but all we really need for that is a single sentence, not even a paragraph. And properly summarizing a plot is a skill I don't possess because, well, I like to let what happens happen and not try to capture it. I could quote you a bunch of stuff so you can get a taste of the 'prose' but I always skim or skip quotations in R/reviews on goodreads because they are so out of context (usually) as to be on Pluto. I could critically engage in what the novel is saying and equally with questions of how it is saying it, but that would require reading the novel at least twice because I believe it is unethical to review a novel unless one has read it at least twice. "R"eviewing a novel having read it only once (or not at all) is totally fine. We do it all the time. And should not suffer any kind of guilt=feelings for doing so.

At any rate, Lee Klein is awesome.

But you should know, Lee Klein went to that Iowa Workshop once. So but if you want to dive into that whole MFA/NYC soup, please do so. Klein's will be proof positive that Workshops won't kill your talent. (Marguerite Young taught that same Workshop in its very beginnings. Marguerite Young is great too and you should definitely read her).

There are many reasons to say that this Review is a lie from start to finish. There are many reasons to impugn my character.

There are many reasons to not read this novel. But one reason should not be that reason for not reading this novel -- that you have never heard of it. That is the largest blight upon our literary culture. You all know of Margaret Atwood but knot Lee Klein. Or Ms Young. It's a crime I tell ya. I mean, isn't the whole purpose of gr to obliterate the BURIAL of books, the BURIAL of books both past and present and to come. And shouldn't we understand this mission (should we choose to accept it) in a religiously dutified manner? Why not.

Read Lee Klein. He's selling this book right now at the wallet gouging price of SEVEN U$ on amazone ::
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listi...
[his is the Lit Fun Forever store]

full=DISclosure :: I take an 80% cut of all sales. Plus an extra line on my academical c.v. which should get me to tenure by about 2047. Yes, I'm an inveterate shill. Why not.

My schmidtianism is starting to show. Sorry about that. Will restrain that impulse throughout the remainder of this Review (I have ~15089 characters left--how can I use them all up short of some superfluous schmidtian punctuation?)

oh yeah right. The auto=fellation thing. You'll be reminded of that one Metalocalypse episode ::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq11v...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPZEE...
And you'll want to see the whole thing to hear the way Pickles says "I did it".

I'm sure the novel is about love. But it's not sappy. You'll want to read it. You know you will.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has taken me a criminally long time to read Klein’s OMG exploration of WTF, a crime for which no period of public flogging will ever be sufficient atonement. A period of quiet ignorance left me unprepared for the sheer delirious surrealism of this novel—a work characteristically unlike Klein’s other characteristically unalike works—as I encountered an imaginative whirligig of autofellating on late 90s no-frills HTML websites, little women emerging from beards and scurrying around terrariums, an intestinal afterlife with a cockpit of competing consciousnesses, and the lost art of email correspondence between a grieving widower and a deceased ex prematurely ageing within the world inside his innards. A berserk bonanza of brilliance, whose weirdness is tempered by a straight-faced prose style, never leaning into whimsical winks at the reader, that rings a note of sadness amid the comedy with the same consummate ease as Colonel George Saunders.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://msarki.tumblr.com/post/160124...

Yes, to be forewarned is correct. A shocking and delightful debut that will beguile you at every turn. Ah yes, but do the pages turn due to the gifted writer’s employ of skillful deceit and charm? Lee Klein, in his relaxed and confident voice, always draws me into the world of his making, whether initially my really wanting to, or not. The words he chooses always seem to be just the right ones, and well-thought out. When at first tackling the concept of reading his latest work I wasn’t expecting much plot, but right out of the gate it seemed like story to me and I was surprised as well as comfortable with this development. But, honestly, the beginning fucking scared me. Little worms resembling voluptuous females also somewhat frighten me. But you have to trust Lee Klein in order to read him because he writes all over you.

By page sixty I was completely engaged. A nonsensical work, yes, but extremely intelligent. A sophistication always expected of Lee Klein, but completely absurd within his novel rendition. I quite understand that it takes one to know one, but his main character Delores is unlike any woman I have ever met. And until now, I hadn’t noticed she might indeed exist among us. A clue for me to be better aware of people, and to inform myself of every incrimination, if possible. A reality Klein suggests as ludicrous to the world I am accustomed to.

Creative visualization, most likely dismissed by other readers of this book but noticed by me immediately, is addressed early on. But Klein employs it for self-pleasuring instead of a spiritual exercise that might typically be used to reinvent oneself, in respect to transcending from a reluctant and unconfident person with low self esteem to being realized as a whole person rewarded by all things imagined and wished for. Shakti Gawain actually started this movement forty years ago when she wrote a book under the same name. Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life was the path I also chose years ago during the darkest days of my life while in the throes of recovering from a fifteen-year active alcohol addiction. Hours I spent recovering alone, soaking in a claw-foot tub listening to the cassette player with Gawain’s soft and gentle voice leading me to visualize my life as something it could alternatively be with diligent and religious practice. In Klein’s shimmering go-between creativity becomes reality for his character Wilson, to a degree, for me at least, previously unattainable. Never able to contort or stretch myself so far as Wilson does, or go so public in my efforts, my genie remains for me somewhat bottled and uncapped.

But being a gifted writer such as Klein is, with something to say and having a voice and personality engaging enough for a serious reader to attach himself to, is rare in literature. The sheer numbers of unskilled, uninteresting, unlikeable writers publishing these days is astounding and more often discomfiting to the ear. Through the years, Lee Klein has done his best as editor of his online lit mag eyeshot and his collection titled Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox to limit these wannabes and perhaps dissuade them in his own way from additional attempts to further their dismal efforts. However, a much greater working staff than just himself would be needed to achieve this momentous task. And as far as personality goes, Lee Klein, at least on the page, seems to be somebody I would definitely want to know on a more personal level than his fiction allows.

There isn’t anything easy about this book other than the voice of Lee Klein. He makes his world seem possible in light of absurdities unheard of prior to this novel. I have been seeking truth in fiction the vast majority of my life, but there are times I thought this book might be too far out of reach for me. Lee Klein does ask a lot of his reader. He insists I go out on a limb of his design. So I scoot my ass out slowly and hold on for dear life.

Early each morning, no matter how distracted I become in my thinking, Klein holds court over me. A crazy chapter here and there implores me to pay stricter attention or he will lose me permanently. He unerringly suggests I suspend more than just reality, or in other words, the most recent escape from life I might be currently constructing. Reading used to be a good enough exercise. But today I am thinking instead about how old I feel and to what degree aging and wrinkles will affect the lust I have maintained over forty-five years now for my wife Beverly who is still in bed sleeping. She is also old like me. And I confess it feels as if our sexual fantasies have lost their hold on us as collaborators. I am afraid this morning for what our future holds. And unfortunately this fear has become my new and present reality. I just finished the book Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape by Adam Phillips when I was beginning to read Lee Klein’s offering. Phillips said, among other things, that the absence of desire and real death, of which the death of desire is a foreshadowing, are the two great hauntings. But Lee Klein, thankfully, has the power to spin me off my axis. In my reading of him he is building worlds inside of worlds. Confusing is barely an adequate word for his constructions on the page. Absurd comes not even close. The key operative word here is inside. And that is deeply where we are presumably headed. I wonder if Wilson and Delores will eventually become secondary characters? Trust, as I previously mentioned, is the one obvious requirement to reading Lee Klein. And that asks a lot of most people. Perhaps too much. But I plod on, continually immersing myself in more of what feels like slime, and I am wondering if it will one day wash off me, or if I even will survive. But this morning I was struck again by just what a great title alone his The Shimmering Go-Between really is.

I cannot imagine being Lee Klein, or what played on in his head as he crafted this novel. The discipline required to maintain insanity to a degree I have never shared as experience before. A frenzied and parallel world of lunacy emerging on each ripening page. Nearing the end of this work I feel less eager to open the book and continue to enter the fury. Klein’s idea of epidemic hysertia is proving too taxing for a lightweight like me. I am frightened to go on. But will I will. And with only nine pages left to read in this insanely rich novel of obtrusion I am impelled to take responsibility for my own confusion. I did this to myself. But it’s really not so bad as I have made it.

For years, as a young boy and then as a grown man, I believed, instead of Christianity, or something similar to it, that we were relegated to being little people caught in a miniature world of some gigantic stranger’s design. Who this powerful person was forever escaped me, but I knew that we were nothing more than puppets or little playthings he, or she, might hold in the palm of one hand. I reckoned the plastic figurines I treasured as a kid were nothing more than mere replicas of ourselves and how we were also being played. And just as we determined the fate of each plastic figure, the puppet master enacted the same for us in our small world down here. Through this fantastical novel Lee Klein manages to rekindle those old memories of endless days and pointless belief. And perhaps have another look inside.

[David Katzman · Rating 4 out of 5]

​
The Shimmering Go-Between is one weird-ass book. Some literary novels are finicky when it comes to genre. Great authors don't care about genre. Genre is an aftereffect, something that the reader or critic uses to categorize what they are reading. I believe great authors don't write for an audience they write for the story itself. As I got into The Shimmering Beyond, I was trying to put it in a category, a genre, to help me wrap my head around what I was reading. Initially, I found several aspects of it disturbing and creepy, so I thought it was close to Bizarro fiction. However, it doesn't have that hyper energy of most Bizarro. It's actually rather relaxed and comfortable in style. After I got deeper into the book, I realized it was more closely related to magical realism such as that by Gabriel García Márquez. Real normal(ish) people living with magical, inexplicable events.

In this case, several key magical elements of the story relate to sexual behavior and sexual habits. A lot revolves around sex. There is strange sex, and strange things result from the sex. There was a degree of tension about sex in the book, symbolic representations of the unexpected or undesirable consequences that can occur as a result. Sex is not always free of entanglements. But sex is complicated and the result can also be happiness or a positive relationship in some form. And fetishes are often an outcome of various unrequited emotional needs, starting in childhood and affected by both family, friends and culture.

It wasn't obvious to me the meaning or purpose of the magical elements of the story, but that didn't detract from the enjoyment of them. These odd occurrences did leave me with some thoughts to ponder. Are there perhaps worlds living within us, that we don't even know are there? Potentialities or personalities? Multiple personalities live inside each of us in our various roles as humans? There is often talk of consciousness as not a coherent singular self, but a multitude of vying impulses that are amalgamated into an illusory identity. Sometimes I wonder if that's not just linguistic gameplay. How is an illusory self any different from an actual self? I mean, not a soul, of course, but every thought is an illusion because it's an abstract representation of electrochemical reactions. From sight to smell to words and ideas, they are all just illusions. So...saying the self is an illusion, I say...sure...as much an illusion as anything in the brain, which includes everything you experience.

The Shimmering Go-Between also made me reflect on how every being we encounter leaves some mark on us, some remnant of themselves, whether it be a wisp or an evolution or a bludgeon. Art itself (and writing) is a form of delayed communication that can interact with numerous individuals and have this same effect on who you are. I think the oddity that is The Shimmering Go-Between will leave a lingering impression on you.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surreal in a melancholy, straight-faced manner reminiscent of Kevin Brockmeier, The Shimmering Go-Between captures the gut-sense of sadness, and the whirlpool of loneliness that churns at the deep heart of life with an energy indifferent and magnetic. This is the kind of novel that would suffer from any attempt at plot description, because it is full of unexpected elements perfect in context but eyebrow-raising outside it — I'm reminded of Walter Benjamin's admonition that reading Kafka as allegorical misses the point as badly as reading Kafka as not allegorical. So you'll have to read the novel for yourself to find out what the story is, and I strongly suggest doing so.

(By way of disclosure, Klein's book and a book of my own share a publisher, but we don't know each other.)

[Nita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cinematic. Very readable and gently moving. Chuckles aplenty. Imagine if the movie Inception was

1. a rom com
2. written by an optimistic Kafka (i.e. the cockroach is beloved, not pelted with apples)
3. turned into a screenplay by the baby of Charlie Kaufman and a mood stabilized Todd Solondz
4. directed by Wes Andersen

= The Shimmering Go-Between. Good, clean fun. (Depending on your definition of "clean.") A+

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Shimmering Go-Between, the debut novel by Lee Klein, published by Atticus Books, takes its title from a quote by Vladimir Nabokov: "Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall tale, there is a shimmering go-between..." That's a telling quote, for it alerts the reader to the possibility that we are on the threshold of something fantastic.

The story begins with Dolores, a precocious young girl who becomes pregnant while still in high school. There's just one problem: "She hadn't been penetrated. No one knew what to say. She swore she hadn't been with anyone. Hadn't even been near anyone. Had never even seen a real live penis."

Dolores' story is regarded with the usual skepticism from her parents and family physician, but it keeps happening. Somehow Dolores seems to be conceiving without the assistance of a sperm donor. In other words, she can fertilize her own eggs.

Traumatized by these experiences, Dolores avoids contact with boys until she enrolls in college. After a night of sex with Max, a fellow student with political ambitions, something really strange happens. His beard fills with nits that grow into "squirmy half-grains of buttered risotto" and turn into a "mini-Amazonian clan" of little women that stop growing when they reach a height of three centimeters.

This bizarre development sets the stage for the rest of the book, which focuses on a love triangle between Dolores, Max and another bearded fellow: Dolores' co-worker Wilson, who possesses a disturbing secret that nests nicely with the theme of self-fertilization.

Set during "the time the internet came into the lives of ordinary citizens," Klein's characters inhabit a bland, featureless landscape that has all the charm of a set from the TV show Friends. Even the author's excellent black-and-white illustrations seem stuck in time—such is their desire to give the reader a glimpse into the world the author has created.

But in the weeds lurks another world, a world within Wilson that looks a bit like Colonial Williamsburg and is populated by—well, it's complicated. Suffice to say that these two storylines—the world within Wilson and the world without—intersect in dramatic fashion.

Klein's mastery over these two narratives makes The Shimmering Go-Between a shocking and delightful debut that will beguile you at every turn.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a just world, Lee Klein and his fabulous The Shimmering Go-Between would shift ‘units’ in the same quantity as far lesser writers—those genre-ist, inkpot bastard authors whose names rhyme with Koontz, or King, or Cussler. Tartt, Tan, or Turner. Crosby, Stills & Gaiman. This book deserves that wider audience because, given an equitable chance, they would gobble it up after 10-pages. Listen: this thing really isn’t my bag in theory, but, no shit, it works gloriously. Alternating between fantastical postpostpost(post?)-meta-whateva and heart-on-sleeve emotionality, it reads like the work of a man truly dumbstruck with awe at the wonderment of life and its lack of plenary absolutism. I get the feeling that Klein is silly with love—in life, interiorly, in family—and that his writing is less the purging of demons than the praising of angels. How refreshing!

There’s no way to synopsize this book; it defies any attempt. Just read it. It’s cheap as all get-out and you won’t regret it. I promise you. It is simultaneously platypus-odd and disarmingly simple, Klein proving that complex ideation doesn’t necessarily have to translate into textual density. The Shimmering Go-Between only asks that you leave your polymathic demands at the door and just read for the unadulterated pleasure of an original voice telling an even more original story, or vice-versa. Make no mistake as you sally-forth to get this gem: this is, at its core, an old-fashioned love story with magical-realism’s goop smeared inside all the right crevices. And its name comes from Nabokov's Lectures on Literature! What else do you need, my credit card info?

Oh, it is just so so sweet-natured! So without cynicism—another rarity these days. It dip-danced this cairn of birdlime into heretofore unexperienced levels of swoondom, so I can’t even begin to comprehend what it would do to anyone who had their heart’s choke even the weensiest bit open-throttled. Joysplosion? Heartgasm? Tickledbrainspiritu-o-tosis?

Either way, sign me up. When the next Klein book comes I’ll be waiting with ticket-in-hand, trusting fully wherever the author dare take me. You buy the ticket, you take the ride—that’s the way it works. Join me? Destination: FURTHER.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a lovely oddity, an insanity of surreal magic realism, a balance of formal structure play (let's call that part "The Princeton") with muddled, seething, inventiveness on the verge of exploding (let's call that part "The Trenton"). If this book has a genre, it's New Jersey Gothic.

There's a lot to unpack in this book and I certainly haven't done so yet. I also hate plot summary as review, and am happy to announce I am freed from that obligation here because to summarize plot would be nearly impossible. The critical through-line (in my reading) is that of the homunculi women growing grub-like out of beards and their mysterious interaction with the nesting worlds-within-bodies-within-worlds found in one of the protagonists and... And, like I said, nearly impossible. Instead let's talk themes.

Loss. Yes, it's about loss. I tend to roll my eyes about how "loss" is always applied by critics as a catch-all explanation for any book with a surrealist leaning. It's an unsatisfying explanation, like saying "It was all a dream," as if surreality can be excused because "it's really just a character's way of coping with loss." So, yes, this book is about coping with loss, and the nested worlds are certainly tied to death and grief, but you don't get to easily wave them away as that alone.

Sex. This book is about sex. Some might say that the sex in this book is used as a metaphor for the other themes, but as I see it this book is a rumination on sex and reproduction itself. Sex is a beautiful, weird, gross, messy thing and us humans are practically obsessed with it. Reproduction is a self-propagating cycle that requires allowing yourself to be somewhat subsumed making way for the next generation. Not to get too Barthelme, but I read it here as tied to the production of literature itself, which is also a beautiful, weird, gross, messy thing, a self-propagating cycle of reference and allusion where prior generations are both honored and rejected, it's the act of building a verdant mountain on top of centuries of rubble.

Wait... I said that the sex was about sex and not a metaphor. Well, it can be both.

Art. See above.

The Ouroboros. Plenty of people who dislike literary fiction have called it a masturbatory genre, and I think Lee Klein is running with that. Although now I'm making every theme a self-referential literary theme, but such is the ouroboros. All the best literature is secretly about literature, hence those naysayers who call it masturbatory! But, also, this is true of sex, to bring it back around. Hard to disentangle the two from each other.

Plus a whole bunch of sub-themes: legacy, impermanence, what we owe to our progeny (even when our progeny are sexy homunculi living in a terrarium), what we owe to ourselves and the ideas we put out into the world, etc. etc. etc.

There's so much going on, more than I can really understand after one reading, and it's definitely the kind of book that calls out for second chances. Fortunately, it's a fun ride.

(Also: New Jersey!)

[Penny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Holy crap .... it may be the strangest book I ever read. From an inadvertent Mary to a lady-swallowing guy, and several dead folks, it defies description. Have strong stomach and an open mind.

[Dey Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun little bedtime story for the kiddies.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Little Things Mean a Lot

I am not (though sometimes I pretend to be) a literary critic like James Wood or Dale Peck or (shiver my timbers!) Yale’s Harold Bloom, who late film critic Roger Ebert believed was the inspiration for the bad poetry-spouting Vogons in Adams’ “Hitchhiker's Guide…” But I digress. My point is that I cannot discuss with even a modicum of persuasion the techniques author Lee Klein uses to weave his spell in his novel The Shimmering Go-Between. Suffice it to say that he’s a veteran of the Iowa City Writer’s Workshop, so as a reader you know you’re in good hands. (NB: Although hushed reverence needn’t be one’s posture -- as seems required of a reader experiencing a “New Yorker story” and all that may imply -- you can be sure that anything coming out of the Iowa mill will be a cut above and meriting attention.)

Klein was something of a cult figure during the boom of Gen X interest in lit that -- with McSweeney’s -- was the juggernaut enabled by the wild success of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. A literary zeitgeist was being made and observant and entrepreneurial emerging literatis had no intention of being left behind. Hence, websites like Klein’s eyeshot, which quickly became known for publishing stuff that was more “out there” than that featured on the McSweeney’s site. TSG-B continues this tradition.

Klein’s fantastic and hallucinogenic novel, told from multiple points of view, is non-linear, yet manages to move forward in a way that kept me turning the pages. The disparate points of view do become the driver of this particular roller coaster ride. Characters get inside other characters’ heads. Take control of of them in a creepy Jurassic Technology insect way. (See L. Weschler’s Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology.) Meta SF/Fantasy/Magic Realism get blown up and when the pieces come back down to earth, the rubble that was once solid and defined characters reforms to become a traveling mass of freaks that makes the story a prime candidate for an adaptation by Charlie Kaufman. (That may have been a pun. Sorry.) Perhaps a Being John Malkovich affair, if I may be allowed another cinematic cross-reference.

If I were better versed in classic lit and the tropes and influences that have come down through the years to inform writers’ current offerings I might conjure a comparison of the character Rue’s journey through her death-life to Dante; attribute Wilson’s obsession with the little ladies to D.H. Lawrence; mention Petronius’ The Satyricon as a precursor of the ghastly sexual comedy of Wilson’s hobby/source of extra income. (But as I’ve said, I’m not a literary critic, so please take my observations with a 5 lb. bag of salt.)

I’ll not attempt to assign meaning to the fantastic events in TSG-B. After all, my interpretation may put a damper on your own. I did find enjoyment in its echoes of the glory days of zinedom when such stories would often go off the rails but keep their forward motion, arriving at their destinations through the sheer will of their writers. On its way The Shimmering Go-Between made a brief stop at a station called the Iowa City Writer’s Workshop. What happened to it there, I can’t say. But I know it survived with its crazy heart intact.

[Stephen Kowalkowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite possibly the strangest novel I’ve ever read, The Shimmering Go-Between (fantastic title, by the way) reads like a less-malevolent Kafka story of transformation. Dolores becomes a stranger to herself and those around her when her unique powers become manifest, and the socially-isolated life that follows is her attempt to hide her freakishness from the shame-inducing glares of others, while also achieving some form of human connection.

The themes are as dark as anything Kafka addresses, but the storytelling is somehow more light-hearted. The interior world of Wilson proves so bizarre that one can’t help but feel some delight, because while a woman commits suicide over and over again, there are also weird egg children hatching in some inner layer of this nesting doll. As soon as I found myself being overrun by tragedy, the plot would yank me out of my melancholy—wait, what’s happening? Did I read that right?

It’s tough to keep up. The author takes us to new worlds and resurrects a dead wife. You have to pay close attention to remain grounded in the events. Otherwise it’s easy to miss some coordinated effort of little women forming human mounds, a maneuver toward achieving their desire to be swallowed. Yeah, that’s right. This stuff’s so strange I don’t even feel duty-bound to call Spoilers! because it won’t make any sense until you read it yourself.

So type autofellator.com into your address bar and start picking nits out your beard. You’re in for one long, strange trip toward a hopeful glimpse of that shimmering figure “between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall tale.”

[Micaela · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was weird, and only got progressively more weird and more complicated and more fun and I liked it a lot.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Loved it. The vividness and wildness of the worlds nested in worlds, the tangibility of the character's yearning, the laid back way the book quietly but earnestly goes about its business, there's just so much to love here. It's a fable set in daily life.

[Sam Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewed here: http://heavyfeatherreview.com/2014/09...

[Richard Bon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't help asking 'what does it all mean?' My answer is that I have no idea what it all means, and I don't very well expect to figure it out, so I'm just going to write down a bunch of disjointed thoughts that come to mind:

Auto-pregnancy and the pill that stops it. A disease symbolic of the human tendency to procreate (sometimes unwittingly when we've had a bit too much to drink), ridiculous and surreal with its skipping of that intercourse part most people enjoy so much? The pill - it works whether there's sex involved or not.

Miniature women growing on men's beards after sex. A side effect of the auto-pregnancy thing afflicted on the men who do have sex with an auto-impregnator (or is it auto-impregnatee, kinda both, I guess?). Suggestive of the effect we have on the world around us, even when we try our best to control everything we do with stuff like the pill?

Auto-fellatio. One of those 'every action has an equal and opposite reaction' kinda things? Dolores' auto-impregnation, sans pleasure, is balanced by Wilson's self-pleasuring and the pleasure I suppose his web site subscribers get from watching him do it? Yeah. I don't know.

Eating the miniature women who grow on beards. Telling of the current absurdity of human consumption? Like a guy says, "Hey, there are these miniature women growing on my beard after my girlfriend and I have sex. I think I'll eat them just because they are there, and I can," the same way a guy might get wasted and walk home past McDonald's and say, "Hey, they sell cheeseburgers at this place and even though I've consumed double the number of calories I needed today, I'm going to stop and eat 3 cheeseburgers. Because they are there, and I can." Or not, I don't know. But certainly the eating of the little women isn't a functional action, it's unnecessary, and when Wilson does it, he has no regard for any potentially negative side effects.

The child inside of Wilson. As far as we know, men do not get pregnant. But we do so much bizarre stuff to our environment and to our bodies nowadays, who knows what's possible and what's not? When a woman auto-impregnates and miniature women are growing on beards post coitus, why shouldn't a child grow inside of a dude? Is this concept much different than some mutant fish being created because its parents swam through toxic waste we dumped in the Pacific?

The miniature women wanting to have sex with the child inside Wilson. Sure, why not? Apparently he looks like Brad Pitt, so it's probably worth it for them when they immediately turn into a ball that explodes into a gas that smells like roses. Their existence didn't seem to be all that much fun anyway - they don't get those late night cheeseburger opportunities - so why not transform into floral scented vapor? Are the little women kinda like female sperm seeking a male egg (Brad Pitt), fertilizing and then being auto-aborted? This would make for a neat extension of whatever metaphors I'm trying (and probably failing) to understand.

Question: who is the narrator? Wilson's conscience?

The underground explosion in Trenton and subsequent pile of waste and refuse that becomes a monument of sorts - I thought that was a nice touch. I thought of it as an example of a disaster that could actually happen as a result of the toxicity of a lot of our real, everyday human living, nicely juxtaposed against the surreal and fabulist events surrounding Dolores and Wilson.

That's all I've got, other than to mention that I dig Klein's writing style and the action kept me reading and all of it certainly made me wonder about what Klein may have been thinking about when he wrote it.

[Full Stop]

http://www.full-stop.net/2014/08/07/r...

Review by Hestia Peppe

This book doesn’t want me to spoil it for you. It says so on the back. It says: “All we can say is: please, no spoilers.” It recently occurred to me that the whole thing about spoilers is that they pretty much constitute a gag on critical discussion of narrative in public. This happened at an academic conference panel on ‘sitting with uncomfortable ideas’ in which a popular Netflix series was raised as a point of intersection between two complex ideas and was met with literal screams of “No Spoilers! Please!” and the discussion instantly and by consensus ceased entirely. As someone who’d seen the series in question and was mourning the lost opportunity to triangulate a rather disjointed conversation, I turned to my friend and said, “can you imagine that happening in a discussion of English Literature?”

When browsing haphazardly online not long after I found a piece by Anne Carson on Albertine and read myself slap, bang, into a big fat spoiler for the fifth volume of Remembrance of Things Past. I’ll admit, I reeled a bit, I figured that was what I got for tempting fate, sure — OK. So I got over it. I’ve been slowly savouring Proust for several years now. It occurred to me that if I stopped eking it out I could read it again all the sooner. I wonder at the total hours involved and then think about how many times I’ve re-watched Buffy The Vampire Slayer. When I find, a couple of weeks later, the no spoilers plea on the back of my review copy of Lee Klein’s The Shimmering Go-Between, I figure that the theory really does need testing. To privilege surprise and suspense in spectatorship in this way is, for me, to reject the value of the possibility of critical distance, to render sacred the immersive entertainment value of story and perhaps most significantly to devalue the potential of re-reading. In other words: if all ‘they’ can say is: don’t review this book, I’m up for it.

Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/08/07/r...

[Matthew Dexter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book in exchange for an honest review. Four years ago. This novel oozes ambition and takes the reader in weird directions. A fun beach read. Guzzle a few margaritas by the ocean at sunset, beachfront, with a bucket of beer on ice.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really weird book, but I genuinely had no idea what was going to happen next at any given point, which I liked a lot.