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Nathan Martin on Christopher Miller's
The Cardboard Universe
The Stop Smiling Review
(Harper Perennial)
Monday, June 29, 2009
The Cardboard Universe
By Christopher Miller
(Harper Perennial)
Reviewed by Nathan Martin
The Cardboard Universe is ultimately a sad book. Sure, the novel is loaded with jovial shenanigans and charming characters whose shortcomings Christopher Miller wiggles with a comedic touch into the soft, warm nook between our funny bones and hearts. Its purposeful nerdishness is playfully kitschy when it doesn’t work and endearing when it does. But beneath the myriad layers of deft quips and sincere wit, it’s a story of the sad lives of sad men who barely, if at all, survive to tell their tales.
Phoebus K. Dank is a fictional science fiction writer modeled more than loosely off of Philip K. Dick. Like Dick, Dank is a neurotic paranoiac who lives in Northern California, anxiously staggers through bouts with drugs, a series of failed marriages, and maddening obscurity despite the onslaught of inventive books he churns out. Also like Dick, Dank enjoys a small, fervent following of admirers who indignantly proclaim his genius in the face of a literary establishment that responds with utter disregard. Among this band of Dankians is Bill Boswell, an academic who’s devoted his life’s work to Dank’s, acts as Dank’s live-in biographer, and is the co-narrator of the Cardboard Universe, an exhaustive compendium of all things Dank.
Boswell begins writing this authoritative Dank text the day after Dank is murdered in his sleep. Owen Hirt is the primary suspect — a failed poet, enemy of Boswell, and longtime friend of Dank’s who resented the SF writer’s relative success. The book notes major Dank works, important people and events in Dank’s life, as well as conditions and habits — like “Agoraphobia,” “Mental Exercises” and “Inventions” — that are intrinsic to an understanding of Dank. Along the way, Boswell describes the process of writing the book, which includes early on the addition of a co-commentator: Hirt, who files his entries via email from undisclosed locales abroad. Hirt and Boswell are the two people most familiar with Dank, but hold diametrically opposed opinions of him: Boswell lauds the author at every turn, while Hirt never misses a chance to disparage him. This back and forth, which propels much of the novel’s action, is a debate that runs the gamut of arguments both for and against science fiction. In the process it unveils the psyches of all three men, and eventually provides the key to the murder mystery.
The seamless interweaving of elements in The Cardboard Universe is mind-boggling. It’s a detailed biography, self-reflexive journal, literary catfight, and hammy whodunit all contained in an alphabetized encyclopedia. A single entry might describe a short story’s plot about a time-travel love affair, relate its themes to the insecurities of its author, fit these into the larger context of Dank’s failed love life, and expose Boswell’s resentment of Dank’s third wife, who forced Boswell to move out of Dank’s house until the couple divorced weeks later (see the entry “Long-Distance Relationship”). Another describes a story about a pandemic virus that causes chronic lethargy that Dank wrote at the beginning of a two-year bout of severe laziness, which prompted the author, bedridden by choice save mechanized wheelchair rides to the toilet, to hire interns to write his books for him in a Warhol Factory-esque environment (except instead of a warehouse filled with avant-garde artists, Dank’s factory was a split-level house bustling with sci-fi geeks).
Nearly every page of The Cardboard Universe is funny. Miller’s humor is rarely sidesplitting — it’s more of a consistent amusing buzz. Most of the novel’s comic jabs land firmly in the ribs of science fiction, its fans and Phil Dick in particular, but Miller (through the mouthpiece of Boswell) saves some lines to defend the genre’s proponents: “[Dank] never lost touch, as a reader, with the pleasure principle. He never forgot what it feels like to read for sheer enjoyment, with no thought for self-improvement or cultural adornment. Most writers spend so many hours in their teens and twenties straining to love the right books, and — like self-repressing perverts — not to love the wrong ones, that by thirty they no longer even know what it means to love a book, and so of course their own are anything but loveable.”
It’s obvious Miller respects the pleasure principle of reading as much as his narrator does. A teacher at Bennington College and author of the well-received Sudden Noises from Inanimate Objects, Miller is far from the sci-fi hacks he describes. His outstanding imagination and deftness for creating compelling sentences that approach pitiful people at lighthearted angles make The Cardboard Universe an intricate and enjoyable book.
Click here to read another take on Christopher Miller's The Cardboard Universe, reviewed by Jessica Herman