Review: Major Arcana, by John Pistelli
by Rich Horton
This ambitious novel opens with a bang (pun sadly intended) as a young man, accompanied by a friend, on the ground of the University they are attending, takes a gun purchased from his mother's antique store and shoots himself in the eye. The balance of the book, of course, asks why?
We learn quickly that he and his friend Ash have become close (but are not lovers) and that they are taking a class together from Simon Magnus, who had written three very popular graphic novels a couple of decades earlier, and then had quit writing and taken a position at this University, and that Jacob seems a fairly happy young man, a good athlete, an avid reader of serious fiction (and graphic novels -- and part of the point of this novel (a small part of a big novel) is examining the "seriousness" of that long-disparaged form), and a good student. Ash and he are passionate friends, though radically different. So why did Jacob kill himself? That question -- and many more questions -- will take the rest of this book to unravel.
Stepping out a bit, to questions of genre, of setting, of timeframe, of intention -- the novel is for the most part a realist novel set in the United States in our time, from a few decades in the past (to the childhoods of several key characters) to right about this moment. It has an almost Dickensian scope (though it's not very Dickensian overall) -- there are perhaps five truly major characters, and about as many critical secondary characters, and we follow them all in separate though intertwining threads, from childhood to early adulthood to middle age (or to death in several cases.) The novel wears its ambition on its sleeve: it is in part a portrait of our times, of the political and personal upheavals of the past decades, of social media's influence, of the changes in acadème, of the gender wars, of the popular culture/elite culture divide. But it's also a work of fantastika, deeply influenced by the Tarot (as the title promises) and by the science fictional and fantastical speculations embodied in one character's graphic novels, serving as a dark prophecy and/or surrealistic representation of the coming future, and of the philosophical questions which are reified fictionally in the comics, and which haunt the characters of the novels -- questions about what is the purpose of our lives.
The novel does slightly distance its setting from our world, by coyly adopting the names used in the graphic novels for New York, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh for the cities in which much of the action is set: Cosmopolis, Oceanopolis, and Steel City. The graphic novels, then, are pretty transparent variations on Swamp Thing (here called Marsh Man), Batman (here Ratman), and Superman (here Overman). This distancing, of course, frees the author from exactly hewing to geographical details, or of hewing to the real comic storylines (or indeed from any copyright worries!) But for all that this novel isn't quite in our present day world -- it undeniably is of our world in its concerns.
Thus we learn of the origin stories, if you will, for Simon Magnus, the writer of the graphic novels; for Marco Cohen, the illustrator of the most important one (Overman 3000); for Ellen Chandler, Simon Magnus' editor; for Diane del Greco, Marco's model during his art school days and later his wife and the model for Overman 3000's Mina Mars; and eventually for the boy and girl we met in the Prologue: Jacob Morrow and Ash del Greco. We see their traumas -- the suicide of Valerie Karns, Simon's first lover; Ash's early purposeful burning of her cheek on a stovetop, and her obsessive friendship with the radically genderfluid Arielle (or Ari) Alterhaus, followed by an unexpected and strangely eventuated betrayal; Marco's artistic ambitions and disappointments; Ellen's desire to shepherd something special into the world; Diane’s desire to be a painter while becoming a model. All these lives are full of loneliness, ostracism, usually absent fathers and misguided mothers, books, overweening artistic ambition that somehow is thwarted or stunted, poverty (either material or spiritual), and tragedy.
These lives all collide, as Simon Magnus and Ellen Chandler make it to Cosmopolis and fortuitously meet and manage to convince a publisher (VC Comics) to let Simon Magnus take Marsh Man in a radical direction. Its success leads to the even more controversial Ratman and then to Simon Magnus' masterpiece Overman 3000, for which they manage to convince Marco Cohen to do the art -- and Simon Magnus and Ellen (now a couple) along with Marco and Diane del Greco rent a house in Southern California to produce the new book at maximum speed -- and maximum tension, including of course adultery -- so everything collapses, the couples disintegrate, and everyone's career is altered. But life continues, as chaotically as ever, post 9/11, into the social media era, and the Trump era, and the lonely childhoods of Jacob Morrow and Ash del Greco leading to the novel's climax.
The climactic chapters are beautiful and very powerful, finally revealing the nature of the relationship of Ash del Greco and Jacob Morrow. It is at once an almost conventional portrayal of the friendship of two lonely and literarily obsessed young college students; and a peek into real magic -- spells (or prayers) that truly work (though of course with unintended consequences.) Ash and Jacob together are trying to make life meaningful, and in very different ways -- with very different beliefs -- find a way to demonstrate one dark but perhaps hopeful road to meaning. Ash del Greco's "sermon" is perhaps the true climax of the book, and it hit me hard ... much of the book's extended denouement had me in tears.
What is the novel about, really? Is it about American life over the last 50 years? Is it about comic books? Is about gender and identity? About religion and magic and the Tarot? Is it about character -- the sometimes desperate, sometimes passionate, inner lives of half a dozen people? Is it about literature and art and education and parenting and social media and violence and death? All those things, I suppose -- and in the end we are left with a great deal of loss and a certain amount of hope, and one character who stands about above all in Ash del Greco.
I thought of a few books when reading Major Arcana. In no case are there particularly close correspondences between Pistelli's novel and these books, but I sensed a sort of subterranean kinship. The more obvious one is Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay -- most overtly for the centering of comics creators, but also a certain structural similarity -- the decades later conclusion with a certain sense of taming of the main characters in particular. Major Arcana's obsession with the tarot, and secret mysteries, brought to mind John Crowley's Ægypt books. And the many children raised by single mothers, the search for missing fathers, a fascination with education, especially for autodidacts, and the centering of suicide(s) called to mind The Last Samurai, by Helen de Witt. Those three works all date to approximately the turn of the millennium, which is also a hinge point for Major Arcana. Having said that, this is its own work, and I doubt any of these books were direct influences. But they are all part of the lifeblood of American literature of my time.
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Nice review. I'm kicking myself that I didn't see the links with "The Last Samurai" - especially since I reviewed both these books on my own site.