Review of 'Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (Vintage International)' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I guess in the time of the book, the word "neurodiversity" hadn't been coined yet. But this book, with its experimental form and somewhat taboo topic, reads like a compassionate but tragic apology for neurodiversity. It's tragic, for as we follow the hero's journey we see the Normal as it is: a kind of censor that compels us to discard the spontaneous emergence of values rooted from exactly the Normalcy itself, and the hero is at odds with this compulsion. It shows the inherent oddity of the Normal: that it is a double bind, forbidden to contravene but at the same time impossible to comply with. We survive, when we accept it as our own; but we grow, when we see it as the double bind it is.
In the former case, it means surrendering; and in the latter, evolving. And in either case, we suffer the loss of what …
I guess in the time of the book, the word "neurodiversity" hadn't been coined yet. But this book, with its experimental form and somewhat taboo topic, reads like a compassionate but tragic apology for neurodiversity. It's tragic, for as we follow the hero's journey we see the Normal as it is: a kind of censor that compels us to discard the spontaneous emergence of values rooted from exactly the Normalcy itself, and the hero is at odds with this compulsion. It shows the inherent oddity of the Normal: that it is a double bind, forbidden to contravene but at the same time impossible to comply with. We survive, when we accept it as our own; but we grow, when we see it as the double bind it is.
In the former case, it means surrendering; and in the latter, evolving. And in either case, we suffer the loss of what we construct as the "identity", perhaps followed by mourning. This is the price that must be paid no matter what.
Perhaps, if we read it this way, the ending may not seem that tragic. There is some ambiguity about how the hero ultimately turns out. The text doesn't rule out a subversive reading and extrapolation.
The style is sort of close to James Joyce's Ulysses or John Gardner's Grendel. It shifts between various "genres" such as stream-of-consciousness, magic realism, play, epistolary novel, tacky Eastern-bloc propaganda war-time romance, contemplative essay, and conventional fiction with a third-person omnipresent reliable narrator. And it's not divided into chapters. I guess this is part of the amorphous metafiction parallel to the text (if you read the book you'll see what I mean by "parallel") -- to heck with the walls that divide genres, whether they're genres of literature or of humans.
