Nathaniel Mackey
Atet A.D.
publisher: City Lights, 2001
isbn: 0-87286-382-4
price: $13.95
This third volume of the sequence From A Broken Bottle Traces Of Perfume Still Emanate (Bedouin Hornbook and Djbot Baghostus's Run are the first two) returns to the story of the Mystic Horn Society, that band that, like Scooby Doo and his cohorts, seem to court supernatural disaster with every turn.
Like its predecessors, Atet A.D. is composed mostly of letters by composer/musician "N." addressed to a mysterious correspondent Angel of Dust in which N. recounts these odd events and the often odder interpretive spin he puts on them.
The central turn in this volume occurs at a performance in Seattle, in which one of the horn players, Penguin, suddenly acquires for an evening the ability to project cartoon-like thought balloons, text and all, out of his oboe. As with all of Mackey's fiction, N's hermeneutic speculations are motivated as much by the power of puns as by syllogistic reasoning:
The balloon not only swelled like a pregnant belly but, thanks to the mixed-metaphorical ground onto which we'd moved, it appeared to be a sobriety-test balloon as well. Penguin blew into it intent on proving himself sober even as he extolled the intoxicant virtues of Djeannine's audiotactile perfume. Whiff of What Was notwithstanding, the vacant balloon seemed intended to acquit him of drunken charges, the admission of words' inadequacy a sobering descent from the auto-inscriptive high to which the earlier balloons had lent themselves.
[57]
For all the wordplay, Mackey manages to cover a lot of ground in this novel which is not so much about "characters" as ideas and themes such as gender equality, the survival of African customs and spiritual values in America, the legacy (positive and negative) of slave culture, and the plays of ghost/dream world on our waking realities.
Most idiosyncratically, Mackey, with his incredibly detailed knowledge of jazz recordings and their subtle interrelations, convinces the reader that music operates like a language, with all the power to convey the subtleties of a specific feminist critique of male-centered jazz culture or acquire levels of symbolism that would make Dante wonder if he shouldn't have taken up sax.
From a Broken Bottle is proving to be a major, and highly entertaining, sequence of fictional works that straddle what were once considered a huge divide between logos-bashing postmodernism and the historical redressings of postcolonialism.
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