Weak In Comparison To Dreams by James Elkins

I believe it was an ecstatic Facebook post from Jeff VanderMeer that drew my attention to the novel Weak in Comparison to Dreams by historian and art critic James Elkins. I did what I usually do when someone I respect recommends a book I know I won’t immediately read; I open up an Amazon product page with the future intention of purchasing the book. If I haven’t bought the novel by the end of the year, I press the x on the Safari tab. That’s what happened here. I didn’t buy Elkins’ novel.

So, what changed? It was a request from The Unnamed Press to review the third volume in what’s planned to be a five-book series. It gave me the excuse to buy and read the first two novels. Now that I’ve read the oddball but often hilarious Weak in Comparison to Dreams, I know why VanderMeer was so excited. This is top-drawer experimental fiction, precisely the sort of “pushing the boundaries” novel that gets me so hot to trot these days.

Weak in Comparison to Dreams is Dr Samuel Emmer’s account of the time his boss compelled him to volunteer for an international project investigating the behavioural issues displayed by animals in captivity, notably in zoos. Small problem. Emmer has zero expertise in this area. He’s a microbiologist, with an interest in faecal bacteria, who manages the water supply of his hometown of Guelph. Emmer believes his boss has sent him on this fool’s errand just to irritate him.

There’s another problem. Emmer’s life is falling apart. His wife, Adela, has left him, returning to Estonia with their daughter, Fina. Emmer’s reaction is detached. He charts their relationship using a numerical scale—they started at zero when they first met, which rose to 900 at the height of their love. The “meter”, as he describes it, has been plunging ever since.

Emmer’s clinical perspective on his marriage speaks to who Emmer is. He cogitates rather than feels. He admits as much, telling us, “my feelings weren’t working right. Either they arrived a minute or a day too late… or they didn’t appear at all, leaving me in a vacuum.” Emmer’s affect is expressed in his plain, factual prose. When he does exhibit emotion, it’s typically in the form of cruelty, a nastiness that can be confronting (I’ll come back to that).

The novel is a Sebaldian mix of prose and photography. When Emmer is visiting a zoo, we get stark black-and-white pictures of empty enclosures. At night, Emmer dreams of an apocalyptic forest fire and we’re presented with photos of smoking brushland, denuded trees, and blackened skies. Emmer’s fascination with stereotypic behaviour in animals comes with figures and diagrams tracing their repetitive movements. Then, at the very end, an elderly Dr Emmer, reflecting on the events we’ve just read, speaks about preludes and fugues and the real and fictitious composers who wrote them, complete with musical notation. All of this—every photo, every diagram, every note—is seamlessly blended into the narrative.

If all this sounds rather earnest, academic, a bit too clever by half, it is. But it’s also fucking hilarious. As I say, Emmer can be a real dick. Out of sheer spite, he begins to psychologically torture the wardens showing him around their zoos, making up insane, easily disprovable “facts” about why the animals are displaying invariant behaviour. These passages are pure cringe, but also very funny, culminating in a visit to the zoo in Salt Lake City where he accuses the warden, Dr Preteen (great name), of sexually abusing the animals.

The extended passage that had me losing it (I went full cackle) is late in the novel, when a ninety-year-old Emmer tells us about the composer Asger Gaarn. The very fictional Gaarn wrote 693 compositions, more than 400 of them preludes and fugues dedicated to people who had just died. Initially these were dedicated to other composers he respected. By the end, it was any old codger who carked it in his vicinity, even if he barely knew them. It’s made funnier because Emmer takes Gaarn’s work so seriously.

I loved this strange novel so much I didn’t pay attention to the themes or the symbolism or the fact that Emmer is a broken man (yes, another flawed individual) who’s clearly struggling to deal with the emotional turmoil bubbling under his affectless surface. Not that it isn’t important, more that, when I wasn’t laughing, I was in awe of how Elkins uses the surrealist toolkit to tell what’s ostensibly a realist story—nothing especially uncanny or inexplicable happens. Even Emmer’s dreams, while destructive, are mostly mundane. And yet, there’s something disorientating about the novel. Maybe it’s the pictures and diagrams, maybe it’s Emmer’s obsession with preludes and fugues, maybe it’s all the depressed animals, medicated to the eyeballs on antidepressants, maybe it’s all of these things. Whatever the magic, if you have even the slightest interest in groundbreaking, experimental fiction, read this book. As for me, I’m looking forward to A Short Introduction to Anneliese.