Paul Metcalf. Genoa: A Telling of Wonders.
Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2015. PP. 264
Reviewed by Eric Meckley
We humans have a strange attraction to round numbers, and a penchant for marking the decades. En route to a sacred centennial we satisfy ourselves with intermittent end-zeroes, and what tastes sweeter on the tongue or rings more melodiously in the ear than “half-way?” It is no surprise, then, that Coffee House Press has chosen to publish a 50th anniversary edition of Paul Metcalf’s Genoa: A Telling of Wonders. Although the book is billed as a novel, it may only qualify as such because of its substantial, if not massive, length at 264 pages, and its fragmented fictional narrative.
Metcalf, a descendant of Herman Melville, sets passages from his great-grandfather’s works alongside selections from the diaries of Christopher Columbus, L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, and other sources to narrate the ruminations of lapsed Hoosier M.D. Michael Mills, who sits in the attic of his ancestral Indiana farmstead ignoring his children until his wife returns from her shift at the GM factory. His thoughts meander from the books on his desk, to the minute sensations of his club-foot, to the tragic life of his brother Carl, who––after surviving the Spanish revolution and a stay in a Japanese prison camp––is finally executed in a Missouri gas chamber for murder.
While the story is sparse, Metcalf’s command of the source material is extraordinary, and the book displays a remarkable literary, geographic, and temporal dexterity. Many may find Genoa novelistically lacking; as a textual collage, however, it is a striking and evocative work of literary art. What is more, the capacious temporality and prodigious referentiality has allowed the book to age remarkably well. The book’s suburban Indiana setting, for instance, thrums with the same flat, frigid, spacious liveliness of my own teenage years spent there at the turn of the 21st century. The book thrives on its oddity, and even as I heartily recommend Genoa to adventurous readers, I realize that my fondness for this text depends upon my own devoted obsession with all things Melvillian.
In his essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville wrote: “It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.” Certainly this wisdom is proven in the pages of Genoa as the originality of Metcalf’s derivative text transcends mere imitation. Ultimately, the success and failure of his art form a Melvillian joint-stock company; happy bedfellows in a text that defies definition, even description, sure to polarize its readers to the end. For fans of experimental fiction, Herman Melville, 15th Century explorers, and Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor.