The Iceman Cometh

Reading “Iceland,” Jim Krusoe’s slim and surreal first novel, is rather like watching a gifted, self-assured magician perform a routine in which the audience’s willing-suspension-of-disbelief threshold is constantly being reset higher and higher. It shouldn’t work. It can’t work: Too many ironclad laws of fiction writing are being casually violated on every page. Then, miraculously, the author pulls it off, and you’re left feeling dazzled, even breathless.

This is literature at its most audacious and imaginative but also at its most coolly controlled. Krusoe is stylistically daring without being self-consciously avant-garde; he’s laugh-out-loud funny but never lapses into contrived jokiness. Moreover, “Iceland” manages to be that rarest of things: a novel of ideas that’s unpretentious and great fun to read. Somewhere up in heaven, Donald Barthelme, Joseph Heller and John Gardner are looking down and smiling proudly. Here on Earth, Martin Amis regards “Iceland” as “a work of great originality, humor, cunning, and charm.”

Any attempt to synopsize the almost cartoonishly absurd story line of “Iceland” is doomed. Here’s the old college try, all the same. Paul, an underemployed and critically ill (or so he believes) typewriter repairman, is instructed by his doctor to select a new, unspecified organ from the local organ pool, not a figurative term for the supply of available organs in a given area at a given time but an actual swimming pool filled with spleens, kidneys, livers and other human viscera. Tending the pool is Emily, a beautiful stranger with whom Paul immediately has a passionate sexual encounter (the description of which reads like a letter to Penthouse “Forum” drafted by Andre Breton). Later he misdials her phone number and accidentally reaches a carpet-cleaning service. A technician pays Paul a couple of visits, cleans his mysteriously stained carpet and then invites him on a spur-of-the-moment all-expenses-paid trip to Iceland.

And so the brand-new friends head off together for Reykjavik, which will become Paul’s home for a few years (once he’s undergone a terrifying ordeal in the bowels of an active volcano and yet another bout of spontaneous vigorous coupling with a sexy stranger). Love, marriage, birth, disillusionment and death make significant appearances. Then, in just one of many nods that “Iceland” makes to the Nietzschean concept of eternal recurrence, Paul finds himself back in his American hometown of St. Nils, living once again in his old apartment, free to resume the life he had placed on hold and determined to reconnect with Emily, whose memory has haunted him ever since their magic moment at the organ pool.

Krusoe teaches writing at Santa Monica College and Antioch University and is former editor of the Santa Monica Review. His 1997 book of short stories, “Blood Lake,” spent six weeks on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. He writes with bravura is rooted in his supreme confidence. He has little use for the hoary conventions of traditional narrative exposition, and he’s not afraid to compress or elide the major events in Paul’s life if it will get him where he wants to go that much sooner. (The book is filled with the kinds of expository humdingers that would get any other writer in big trouble; my favorite is the paragraph that unapologetically begins: “Then a few years passed.”) Where Krusoe wants to go is inside Paul’s head, to the space where perception, memory and invention, chained together, are hard at work constructing his reality. It’s true that the outlandish plot of “Iceland,” combined with the author’s shaggy-dog-story delivery, makes the novel seem at times like a complicated, protracted joke, but it’s like a joke being told during the keynote speech of an epistemologists’ convention. It’s funny, but if you pay really close attention, it’ll mess with your mind.

Every few pages Paul is “suddenly reminded” of the conversation he had with Emily during the languorous pauses between their poolside sexual acrobatics. Never mind that, as narrated, their encounter lasted for only a few minutes and was marked by almost no dialogue: Paul is nevertheless able to remember Emily intelligently discussing Zen metaphysics, spinning weird folk tales a la Arthur Schnitzler and recalling her childhood on a Midwestern farm as the daughter of germ-obsessed antibiotics addicts. Is he fantasizing? Embellishing? Krusoe offers no clues. What he does offer is a definition of love as something much more than sexual chemistry, mutual tenderness or even shared history. For Paul, love is discourse, and its rose never blooms more magnificently than in those moments early in a relationship when you’re learning everything there is to know about your beloved. He recalls Emily’s gnomic soliloquies the way a lovesick soldier might recall the blue eyes, ruby lips and soft hair of the girl waiting for him back home.

The question of whether Paul’s memories are trustworthy or not is almost beside the point. What matters is the way in which these memories, real or imagined, animate him and propel him toward his destiny. Meanwhile, however, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the line between the objective world and Paul’s subjective experience of it is breaking down. Magazine articles, carpet stains and paintings become cryptic signals, pieces of a puzzle that seem to have something to do with Paul’s role in the universe. A mysterious pair of men keep showing up over and over, always with different names and different reasons for being there; at one point they bug his apartment. Anyone familiar with the literature of schizophrenia might recognize in Paul the seeds of that particular disorder: the disjointed narrative (complete with temporal collapses, suggesting fugues), the belief that secret messages are being sent to him via mass-produced images, the regular appearance of suspicious men engaging in spy-like activity. Is Paul schizophrenic? Krusoe certainly invites us to speculate. But ultimately he seems less interested in answering that question than in studying the ways that perception and reality are constantly folding into each other in the Mobius strip of Paul’s existence.

“Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down / And they all led me straight back home to you,” goes a line from a Gram Parsons song. This idea--that the circuitous paths we take in our lives have been deterministically mapped to place us, finally, at the front door of the person with whom we’re meant to be--has been the bread and butter of poets, troubadours and other romantics throughout the ages. Paul’s crazy route in life leads him through “Iceland,” inside boiling volcanoes, into the beds of other women, even to a life of crime and a stint in jail. And when he’s done, he thinks he knows--and we think we know--how his story is supposed to end.

Everyone is surprised. Krusoe may be a magician, but it turns out he’s one of those subversive magicians who delights in exposing the artifice behind our cherished illusions. In this case, the illusion he punctures is that each of us is destined to be with someone else, the mystical “soul mate” of Plato and poetry. In the last pages of this amazing novel, he paints an almost Sartre-like picture of a man alone in the universe, connected to no one but himself, belonging nowhere but inside his own head. Comic surrealism gives way to a poignant depiction of a hard truth too often lost on troubadours: The thousands of roads down which we travel lead us, ultimately, to no one’s home but our own.