A Dark and Windy City

Abstract

A Dark and Windy City Stacey Levine Charlie P Richard Kalich Green Integer Press http://www.greeninteger.com 247 pages; paper, $12.95 It has been said for millennia that our exterior lives are mere shadows of what is truly real. Novelist Richard Kalich explores this idea quite originally in his second novel, Charlie P, published this year by the highly productive Green Integer Press. Kalich documents the life of an indefatigable everyman who struggles blithely to find contentment and leave his mark on the world. Without giving particulars as to geography, age, relatives, childhood background, education, or the like, Kalich constructs Charlie P using chapters—or bursts—ofexaggerations and absurd constructions in which Charlie Peitherproves himself a man hyperbolically, or experiences defeat in some drastic form. The character somehow conveys a quality ofbeing an iconographie blank, described as "all things to all people and nothing to himself." He is also described as a man who (perhaps toward a purported existential rebellion) is quite unable to complete a task because that appears to him to be some kind of defeat. In this way, Kalich begins to convey the painful sadness of the life at hand—Charlie Psuffers from an inability to engage with life or complete his goals because, in the character's perversion, he sees action as "giving in." Kalich successfully reproduces the sensation ofexistential indecision and doubt in all its intensity. Not that this narrative isn't crazily hilarious. At the book's beginning, Kalich conjures Charlie P in the imagery of a 1970s-era swingin' bachelor man: a misogynist due to his fear of women, yet equipped, perhaps, with a swank apartment and blacklights, mirrors , and a wet bar to impress the babes. As the tale progresses, Charlie P's thousandfold sexual conquests are, inaction and trepidation notwithstanding, stacked up alongside his impossible professional accomplishments —among them, solving all global economic problems and becoming areligious messiah. Added to these items are Charlie P's numerous physical mutilations , such as being disemboweled or losing his penis or, one day, having every bone in his body shattered. From all ofthese episodes Charlie P routinely returns to the narrative apparently unabashed, ready to move ahead to the next chapteroflife, where he is alternately "popular with the ladies" and alone and enfeebled. At one point, when Charlie P wants to know which woman really loves him, sex aside, and would break down barriers to reach him, [h]e corked his bathroom walls. Insulated his entire apartment with three-inch fiberglass . Then he got serious, building towering turrets and spires, moats anddrawbridges, ramparts and walls. He even laid down landmines, barbed wire fences, set up machine gun towers; a nuclear missile site. . . . Having made his home into a fortress, if not a castle, he began working on himself. First, opening the windows to air the rooms out, then hermetically sealing them shut so that not the faintest scent of female flesh could seep in, nor, just as importantly, his own very masculine scent out. Next, after plugging his nose and stuffing his ears with wads of cotton, he turned down the Venetian blinds and blindfolded himself. He even had a doctor friend anaesthetize him. ... In addition to being funny, nutty, and playful, this is also a complex narrative about human self-esteem and the human sense of self in general. Kalich's kooky, contradictory biographical map ofCharlie P's elaborate machinations in the world, his bizarre, colossal failures (which are described as inevitable), and his conviction that he must never even begin his life are correlates to the natural narcissistic struggles that most ofus feel at a low level nearly every day. Human life's endless ups and downs of loneliness, sensations of direat, violations, and pleasures are described in Charlie P's eyes in an incrediblyjumbled way, almost suggesting a developmental point ofview; Charlie P's journey is like an index of adult experience encoded to convey prelinguistic experience. He accomplishes everything; he accomplishes nothing; his sexual addiction causes him to bed hundreds of women daily; consequently, he is intimate with no one. Like a clueless tuning fork attracting the world's chaos, Charlie P's experiences are too intense: Before...