Novel

Saturday, February 19 (cont'd)

Travis McGee would sally forth on his spavined steed, an electric blue 1936 Rolls Royce pickup truck named Miss Agnes, to right injustice. Brew wished he could take the family car, your father's Oldsmobile with 175,000 miles on it, and drive down to Slip F18, Bahia Mar Marina, and take a picture of the placard honoring the berth where McGee's houseboat, the Busted Flush, was moored, or drive over to Sarasota, and see where depressed widower Lew Fonesca lived, up over the Dairy Queen, watching tapes of Victor Jory in The Shadow.

Instead he wrote about bitter would-be writer Art "Home" Brew, compare art brut, driving over to The Red Bar, in Grayton Beach, and photographing Gaston Lagaffe.

Gaston Lagaffe called himself le héros-sans-emploi.

Brew wasn't sure if that meant "without a job" or "of no use."

He wasn't sure if he was a hero or an antihero, of his own novel, or antinovel.

The creator of Gaston Lagaffe was from Belgium. I think Ollie is from Belgium.

Brew thought he would be more popular in Belgium than in Panama City, but he didn't know how to get from here to there.
Except by writing absurdist, po-mo novels. What would Bubba Po-Mo do?

In Sideways, Miles calls his unpublished 2,000-page novel a semi-autobiographical account of his father's stroke that "sort of devolves into a Robbe-Grillet kind of thing,"

The New Novel or Nouveau Roman refers to a movement in French literature that flourished in the mid-fifties and early sixties which called into question the traditional modes of literary realism. It is seen by some commentators as standing mid-way between modernism and postmodernism. Associated with the works of Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Phillipe Sollers, and Nathalie Sarraute, the new novel is characterized by an austere narrative tone which often eschews metaphor and simile in favour of precise physical descriptions, a heightened sense of ambiguity with regards to point of view, radical disjunctions of time and space, and self-reflexive commentary on the processes of literary composition (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0260.html).

I guess the new novel wasn't so new anymore.

But Brew was not some sad-sack 8th grade English teacher who couldn't sell a book. He had a book coming out.

He was a writer.

He was at home, writing a sequel to his forthcoming book.

Continuing the saga.

He was happy. So what? Everybody's happy.

He was productive. The impediments between himself and his work had been removed. He came at it with his ears strapped back.

A pack was off his back, the one hand tied behind him had wriggled loose.

The antihero isn't a villain, he's a hero with scant resources, a jakeleg hero, jury-rigged, and put together out of scrap. A bricoleur, or knacker in an abattoir. Driving a clapped-out Key West car.

Ostracism tantamount to death in Greek city-states, and no bed of roses in American popular culture, either.

Mexican bus fumes on the band bus. Owen said his job was "riding around the tri-states." On a band bus, a fishing boat, a snapper reef.

A snapper reef is a car you tow out and sink, and note the LORAN coordinates of, so you can come back and fish off of it.

I guess it's GPS coordinates now.

When Potter tried to sink his Chevy Caprice Classic it wouldn't go under. The styrofoam coffee cups and plastic bag full of empty beer cans in the trunk kept it afloat. It drifted around in the Gulf of Mexico until the Coast Guard hung a Hazard to Navigation flag on it and used it for gunnery practice.

That was Brew's goal. To drift around in the Gulf of Mexico being shot at by Coast Guard recruits. Like leaving your body to the medical school in Gainesville "for the duffers to practice on," as Chief said.

Write about people like Chief.