Review: A Bended Circuity
by Robert S. Stickley
No, it’s not a video this time. W.A.S.T.E. Mailing List Episodes 8, 9, and 10 were delayed on account of unforeseen (but positive) personal circumstances. However, all three are actively in production and will be available for your eyeballs soon enough. In the interim…
April - a month spent frantically hopscotching between novels - brought with it one stable daily read across my four weeks of consistently inconsistent page-flipping. The novel in question also turned out to be one of the stranger and more ambitious texts I’ve read in recent years. Pitched to me as a Modern Maximalist Masterpiece (henceforth M3) by fellow readers in my digital orbit, A Bended Circuity by Robert S. Stickley (who compacts his name into the initialism ‘RSS’) certainly exhibits all the taxonomic defiances one would come to expect from an M3, but is that third M a justifiable laurel to be wreathed upon this glitzy new doorstopper? I suppose that would be the ambition of this review. Read on if the argument amuses you.
I suppose a lay of the land is in order. A Bended Circuity is the debut novel from RSS, published in July of 2022 via Corona Samizdat, a Slovenian micro-press known for championing eclectic, subversive fiction as well as packaging books in a manner that resembles Bolivian cocaine shipments (search #RickBrick if you’re unfamiliar). Despite the Mom n’ Pop presentation of the press, their editor has a knack for picking critical hits – I myself have yet to encounter a miss. By saying so, I suppose I’ve just laid my cards on the table a little early here. Yes, I am a fan of what RSS has accomplished over the course of these densely-packed 592 pages. But my admiration is not without reservations, which I’ll get to shortly. I think it’s only fitting that my review of a book with “circuity” in its title has its own allotment of digressions.
ABC (hopefully the initialism should be self-explanatory) is a novel amenable to meandering exploration but hostile as direct summarisation. I can’t imagine that’s a surprise to anyone who is teeing up to read it themselves. Even the dust jacket summary defies diegetic explanation:
“There are screams in the night. Interlopers are afoot, have taken hold. Wildfires are burning the countryside and the gentry are running for cover. Fortunes are at stake. The South will not sleep.”
If you have read (or are currently reading – Godspeed) ABC, you may find yourself struggling to chronologically situate the story, so let me attempt to shine a torch into the proverbial fogbank. The novel opens in Charleston, South Carolina during the declining days of August 1969 and chronicles a year of narrative action, ending in late July 1970. Let the record reflect that it personally took several passes of close reading particular sequences to piece together a timeline. The plantations, mentions of slave quarters, foot soldier battles, and liberal use of old rhotic Anglo-Saxon English made me feel initially as though this was set near the American Civil War. I took some solace in speaking with the author directly and learning the chronology was intentionally cluttered with anachronisms and obfuscations, imbuing the finished product with a hazy, transhistorical atmosphere. I didn’t probe RSS too much on the subject of his intentions here, though one could infer that untethering it from clear historical signifiers allows the story’s message (and ideological axe ready for grinding) to be mapped onto events past, present, and future. Because what is the glorious US of A if not an exercise in “I know this didn’t go right last time, but let’s give it another go”?
This leads me inelegantly to the players and plot. The Long Sixties of RSS’s alternate reality in the American Gothic South usher in with it a protagonist – to whatever extent that an ensemble novel can be considered as having one – named Bradley Pinçnit. Yes, that’s “Pinçnit” with a cedilla diacritical accent below the c. Bradley, a wealthy municipal newspaper owner and vocal neo-confederate, finds his jingoist way of life wronged one evening in the summer of ’69 when a black tie ball hosted at his Greek Revival “Marigold” Manor, is interrupted by a series of.. pranks(?) as far as I can tell, which culminate in an oversized paintball attack on Charleston and an unplanned fireworks display. This humiliates him and his family in direct view of the Southern “Upper” Elite, upon whose communal opinion his social standing is precariously perched. As a staunchly conservative ideologue, Bradley responds in a manner proportionate to the perceived wrongdoing against him: by corralling a mass of likeminded, heavily armed, Republican extremists and marching North on backwards horseback (read the book, it’ll make sense later). Their path toward the nation’s capital weaves, past “that despicable milestone at the North of the Mason-Dixon Line and its untalked-of pressing down on us”, through a carnival of histrionics and plot machinations. Bradley and Co. have no trouble amassing an army along the way who feel they are “in between wars here, not antebellum, not post-bellum, rather a lingering hiatus of intrabellum, a period of unsettled hostility felt by conquered people that yearn for retribution.” Their goal? Blurry at best… which is at least in part the point. Bradley and his “Junto of Condign Men” become so fixated on their task of seeking revenge and reclaiming their dominant position in the American imagination, that they’ve somewhat glossed over the exact “who” they’re after in their winding Northward crawl.
The narrative confusion is further compounded with the reader’s (yeah, that’s you) inevitable realisation that the nexus of antagonism is multifaceted. If that’s not a characteristic quality of an M3, I don’t know what is. Bradley’s Junto sets their sights (pun intended) on a whole manner of perceived wrongdoers during their journey North, including a band of Latino Renegados, slaves (they appear to still exist in some capacity here), Cantina owners, any passersby with vaguely Liberal leanings, and at times, themselves. It’s a close reader’s wet dream trying to identify the puppet master thumbing the wires and string. Given its late 60’s setting – the Cold War not yet in the rear-view mirror – it’s not exactly a reach to position a Russian Sleeper Agent as one possible locus of their designs. I’m editorialising now, but I’d like to suggest that the agent in question, Maxim Dyxsov, is far and away the most interesting character in the book). Through piecemeal exposition, it’s eventually revealed that Dyxsov is at least in part responsible for igniting this second iteration of the American Civil War; an honest-to-goodness False Flag the likes of which you’re bound to hear accused if you regularly watch Fox News (if you do, Bradley would love to have you join his cause).
I haven’t exactly hidden my own politics here, have I? I normally like to maintain a cool distance from the subject of my criticism, but I find it difficult to compartmentalise an affective response when reading ABC because this book made me (interrupting periods for dramatic effect) So. Fucking. Angry. The kind of anger that’s uniquely provoked by reading a text that is viscously honest in its reflection of the “what the fuck is going on?!” reality we’ve constructed for ourselves.
Let me reposition myself before I give a false impression of blame. My anger isn’t laid at the feet of RSS or even his book in question, but rather the context in which this book was read: April 2023. On a daily basis, I have the displeasure of watching (mercifully, from a transcontinental distance) Supreme Court Justices accepting bribes to sway their opinions, of bodily autonomy being slowly repealed, of firearm ownership growing at a rate matched only by its death toll. Need I go on here? There’s a sickness growing in the governing authority of these three hundred million and change. A nation that doesn’t recognise the laugh-out-loud irony in calling itself “United” despite teetering constantly on the brink of yet another Civil War… which RSS has imagined here is vivid, vaudevillian detail. For all its moments of hysterical absurdity – literal cock fights and musical spittoon performances among them – ABC’s rendering of the American condition (and indeed the larger Capitalist project) is simultaneously a window and a mirror. Or, to put it in Floydian terms, it’s a prism; a prism I can’t help but refract the world through. As is tradition in an M3, the author has left no cultural stone unturned, particularly in his depiction of how blind faith can act as a catalyst to a latent social pathology. This cadre of revolutionaries, guided by the iconography of the mysterious “Red Radical”, allow their outrage to proceed exponentially as they tear northward of the 39th Parallel, with the voice of omniscient preacher interrupting the narrative periodically to sermonise at both the characters he presides over, but also the reader directly. Yes, the book may be an exercise in labyrinthian plotting of the highest order, but one could make the case that it’s just as much a homily to the Heartland’s Soul; an American Prayer, if you'll forgive my deployment of a tired cliche.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the prose, as this is the quality of the novel that most reviews focus heavily on. RSS recently posted on his socials that he was waiting for someone to “lay into his book and tell him it’s the worst thing they’ve ever read”. I’m not going to be that guy, as this is far from the worst thing I’ve ever read. Conversely, this is actually one of (if not the) strongest novels – particularly debut novels – I’ve read in the past several years. However, in spite of that suggestion, I’m going to offer a fairly blunt criticism that I very rarely offer: ABC is overwritten. I normally revel and bask in lexical exuberance, but this novel is a paragonal example of allowing the language to proceed beyond the bandwidth of unreserved enjoyment and land somewhere in the desert of exhaustion. Let me take this a bit further. it won’t take the reader more than a chapter or two to recognise that RSS positions himself as a prose stylist first and foremost, with all the other elements of structure and narrative playing second fiddle. To put it another less incendiary way, “the language is the story” here. Am I suggesting the diegesis is inconsequential? Absolutely not. It’s the story that lit a furious fire under my ass and compelled me to write a 2500-word polemic on the state of the American populous. Personally speaking, frustration and enthusiasm are responses that will only come from a text that reaches out and grabs me by the proverbial collar. If I had kept ABC at an arm’s length, this review would’ve been two sentences in a slapdash star rating. I’m getting away from the point again, aren’t I? I think that story would’ve benefited from denying the authorial impulse toward ten-dollar words when a two-dollar word will do. Let me offer an exhibit of one of the simpler passages you’ll find in ABC:
“All men are part of God’s method and plan. From atheist to zealot, all men are working toward the same thing. Scientist or sectarian, they are not enemies but rather partners in gridlocking sanctity with progresses, of eradicating the aboriginal ‘harmony’ that infected this planet so long. And neither are even entities, rather paths forward into the dim and yellowing climate lenient with the Sin of learning too far above the heads of mankind. They are both needed, wanted, as are all of you. We all play a part in The Great Dismantling.”
Picture this, for 600 pages. Gorgeous, erudite, rapturous, and fucking exhausting. This is the aspect of the novel that I think will turn off a certain demographic of readers, depending on their typical reading habits. Again, this is very much a case of “your mileage may vary” but as someone who regards Maximalism as his preferred genre of choice, it takes a very heavy hand for me to suggest that something is “overwritten”.
Now let me walk this back, as I don’t want to come off as unfairly critical. For all my frustration with the density of RSS’s prose deployment, I cannot argue that ABC is phenomenally styled as a work of prose. The author stretches the boundaries of contemporary language and constructs a unique syntactic logic that provides a New View of an Old World. People may criticise the dialect as archaic (not without some merit, mind you), but to do so would be to miss how the language services the story. This hyper-stylised rendition of the South is a transhistorical landscape where 19th and 20th Century touchstones are commonplace (remember whose foot soldier battles, plantations, and slaves I mentioned earlier)? What better way to express the country’s cultural recapitulation than by employing the lexicon of the period from which those values are drawn? If Bradley wants his state and country to return to the era of pre-Emancipation, then he’ll have it: antiquation and all. I wasn’t pulling my punches when I said, “the language is the story”. I just wish that language didn’t draw so much attention to itself; less telling, more showing.
So where does all this leave me? As much as the critical glitterati would like to think that such a notion as an “objective” review exists, I assure you that beneath every 500-word New Yorker postmortem lies a deeply individual opinion that informs all the facts gathered to support it. The opinion here is that I’m simultaneously awed and frustrated with my reading experience. A Bended Circuity (dropping the initialism while I round this out) is a meticulously arranged, vividly lived-in picaresque experience... that also goes through painstaking and continuous efforts to channel Michael Lentz in telling you that “this is called WRITING”. Is that third M justified? Not quite, but RSS has made it abundantly clear that he has an incredible writing career ahead of him, and he has my immediate carte blanche purchase on anything he published in the future. Moreover, after allowing myself the necessary period of digestion, I am already anticipating a future reread of this slab, as there is plenty more I anticipate being able to mine from the text once a degree of familiarity has been established.
And so, I’ll wrap this up by quoting the opening line of this novel, which I view as a sort of Rosetta Stone for the nearly 600 pages that follow it:
“In this place, outside elements are rendered useless.”
No one will be able to help America until America learns to help itself.
A Bended Circuity by Robert S Stickley
Corona Samizdat, Paperback, 592 pages.
€20.00 + shipping (no tax)
I'm curious to hear your thoughts (or anyones thoughts) on the ending? It's been some time since I finished it but I was blown away.
I listened to this after reading it....it’s the South .....you had me at that