The Walls by Jay Fox - Part Two
After letting my previous review marinate a bit, I've decided to slap on an addendum. It’s not like I said anything I didn't mean to in the previous review, but there’s a thing or two worth adding.
In many ways, I wasn't planning on running into this book for a while. Experimental, ambitious, and very long. The Moby Dick of ebooks landed unexpectedly in my lap. And on display too all the vices of self-publishing: a lack of sensible cutting, an unchained pretentiousness, and endless navel-gazing.
But there was a lot I enjoyed as well. The narrator didn't attempt to seem too cool. He was nerdy and awkward with women, and this was endearing.
I kept wishing he’d stand up for himself a little more, ask some of the people rambling at him to come to the point. But shortly thereafter he’d be rambling on himself, the people around him maybe listening intently, probably not. And after a while I figured this was how people talk in this particular circle. They talk about whatever happens to be flitting around in their head, some shit they read someplace, and they keep going on about it until, by whatever invisible signal, it’s somebody else’s turn to talk.
I realized this by spending a bit of time, recently, with someone who actually talks like this. And I realized, before hardly any time had gone by, there is something seriously wrong with this guy! I think Jay Fox knows there’s something wrong with people who talk like this, too. The book’s best section involves the character Patrick Shaheen blathering on for hours as countless cheesy seventies songs play on the jukebox, songs that he picked himself before sitting down to talk. There is magic and looseness to the scene, a real evocation of place and character. You’re carried on by the weirdness of Shaheen and the situation.
Such bursts of talent are what make The Walls so confounding. Almost fifteen percent of the book is taken up with a single conversation with a man named Willis Faxo, another oddball New Yorker who muses on and on and on about any topic that comes into his head. The section, however, is deeply, deeply uninteresting, and was the only section of the book that I felt absolutely no shame in merely skimming. I feel quite certain no one will ever read the Willis Faxo section from front to end, including Jay Fox. It is the most unforgivable filler section in the book, contributing almost nothing toward the story but quite a bit toward some magical word count which will make the book important or something.
So, in The Walls we are confronted by a book populated by men who go on and on about more-or-less random subjects in a fairly erudite fashion, apparently whether or not anyone is really listening to them. Men who seem to have something wrong with them. We have a narrator who seems to understand these guys have something wrong with them, even while he displays many of the same symptoms. I have no idea where he is going with this the narrator says while absorbing the pointless verbal barrage of Willis Faxo, and of course neither does the reader.
In the previous review, I lamented how murky The Walls was, how desperately it seemed to be fishing around for a topic, but after thinking about it for a bit I wondered if perhaps the actual subject of the novel is this specific subgroup of men, these awful men who can’t stop talking about all the shit they know and half-know, these men whose ability to absorb and regurgitate facts seems to their entire raison d’etre. While reading The Walls I sometimes gently hoped that this was the case, and that at some point the narrator would come to realize there is something stupid and wrong with the way I am living.
This is literary gold, of course, from Frédéric Moreau to Humbert Humbert to Ebenezer Scrooge, but it requires a depth this novel lacks. Instead, the novel ends as the narrator meets up with his girl in Union Square, a scene lifted right out of the last five minutes of a Meg Ryan movie, and they head off to the nearest bar to apparently bore the living shit out of someone else. It’s a happy ending though because we don’t have to listen in.












