It takes dedication to do something different—an unwavering commitment to one’s vision—to spend days, months, years working on something you know very well may be completely inscrutable to everyone else. Then it calls for boldness to take the dramatic step of actually showing the potentially incoherent work to others, confident or at least hopeful that there is someone else out there with a mind for it. Finally, on the part of the publisher it requires daring to take a chance and put resources behind the thing, whether it’s merely a slight oddity or a work of total fever delirium.
I should clarify that the book in question, David Connor’s Oh God, The Sun Goes, is by no means incoherent, only that I could see how, while in the process of writing it, Connor probably wondered more than once whether anyone would see in it what he did.
The novel’s conceit is rather straightforward: The sun has disappeared, and a man sets off to find it. Not a premise we’ve encountered before, but there’s the tease of a familiar Odyssean framework. So far nothing too strange, though the truant sun is admittedly unusual.
“There’s a spot in the sky where it should be, a hollowed-out circle that’s sort of grey, like the absence of light—not darkness, different sort of absence—in a way, it’s brighter than if the sun were there, more blinding even,” observes our narrator at the book’s opening. “Blinding grey absence in the sky.”
And then Connor wrangles the narrative down the rabbit hole, burrowing us into a surreal Southwestern landscape populated by characters who don’t act quite as people do in waking life—more like avatars in a dream—and exist against a backdrop of locations that bear the names of various brain structures (Thalamus Station, for example, or a neighborhood called Hippocampus), all the while insinuating some vague mystery involving a woman known only as M. Song lyrics are sprinkled throughout, and occasionally you come upon a cryptic illustration drawn by the author which I will allow you to decipher for yourself. The book closes with an appendix explaining the functions of different parts of the brain.
Tremendously weird stuff. It’s wonderful.
While reading I more than once received the gritty surrealist vibes of William Burroughs (though perhaps that is because I am deep in rereading everything Burroughs wrote in chronological order and it’s all Interzone at the moment). In any case, there is a flavor of Burroughs to the way Oh God, The Sun Goes explores a world that is familiar but viewed through an apocalyptic filter—nature gone awry, distorted just enough that you can apprehend that some catastrophe has come to pass. You’re not quite sure what it is, only that something is off. Slightly feverish and warped, as if witnessed through heat refractions rising off boiling asphalt or a Vaseline-smeared telescope.
It presents a mystery, but not in the typical sense. There are plenty of clues to follow, but what is revealed is not an answer but an awareness. I won’t spoil the context—which dawns on you gradually as you read—and will say only that it’s a clever way to approach one of the great postmodernist tools: stream of consciousness. You’ve seen it before, but not like this. Connor’s background in neuroscience affords him a unique perspective on how to go about what had otherwise been a thoroughly explored literary instrument, and it works.
Connor has cited a diverse range of innovative influences for Oh God—Italo Calvino, Tom McCarthy, Joy Williams, Amos Tutuola, Haruki Murakami, Wallace Stevens, Clarice Lispector—but manages to remain distinct from them all. The only book released this year that I can think of that rings anywhere close to its tone is Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, the protagonist of which goes about life with a black hole following her around that grows or shrinks circumstantially. The two books share a similarly unsettling atmosphere, even if Ripe is more absurdist whereas Oh God is more abstract. If the former is an anecdotal narrative on a late-capitalist society gone wrong, Oh God is a sort of avant-garde Grimms’ fairy tale through a world grinding along its end of days. The two books read side-by-side the way red wine pairs with ribeye.
Oh God, The Sun Goes is a book for the times we live in—a story for a people who weathered a long season of isolation and have spent too much time in their own heads. Its unreliable reality and restless, disquieted poetics strike true in the era of pandemic, climate change, and sociopolitical turmoil. Connor’s experimental approach will not appeal to everyone, as well it should not. Art made by the daring is made for the daring—those with the eye, heart, and mind for what is challenging rather than coddling, what is arcane rather than apparent. If you have an appetite for prose that is strange, stylized, prescient, and sincere, Oh God, The Sun Goes will come as a welcome departure from the ordinary and everyday.
