A Naked Singularity.

Sergio de la Pava’s sprawling, ambitious novel A Naked Singularity took an unusual route, albeit an increasingly more usual one, to the broader marketplace, appearing first as a self-published title in 2008, finding a small but dedicated online following, and eventually attracting the attention of the University of Chicago Press, which published it this May to largely positive reviews. I received a complimentary review copy around that time and just worked my way through it this month. It is at times darkly funny, cynical, twisted, and bizarre, reminding me of other works from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to Aravind Adiga, brandishing a new American hysterical realism that, while often uneven, grabs you by the throat and forces you to pay attention.

The novel centers on Casi, an inadvertently-named young public defender in Manhattan who enters the book having never lost a case, only to find his 12-0 record in jeopardy, which flashes him back to the career of the (real) Puerto Rican boxer Wilfredo Benitez, who was on top of the world until he wasn’t, leading to a rapid and ignominious decline. Casi finds himself entangled in his usual mess of near-hopeless cases as well as pro bono work on an appeal for an Alabama death-row inmate of well below-average intelligence, while his friend Dane (who never seems to appear when anyone else is in the scene) tries to convince him to participate in a can’t-miss heist, stealing $10 million (or more) by intercepting a drug deal that involves one of those hopeless clients. He also has to cope with a bizarre immediate and slightly-extended family who wink in and out of his non-working life, as well as an even more strange group of neighbors living upstairs, one of whom is convinced he can make Ralph Kramden become real by playing episodes of The Honeymooners nonstop on his DVR. And that just scratches the surface of what transpires across the book’s 678 pages, some of which becomes increasingly divorced from reality as the novel goes on – hence the ‘hysterical realism’ tag, which I first heard in reference to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, a novel on which I had mixed feelings but have often found myself pondering in the four years since I read it.

Aside from Casi himself, all of the subplots in the novel revolve around the theme of justice, and its only occasional, arbitrary connection to the law and the judicial system. His indigent clients have their sob stories, some more sobby than others, but are largely treated by the system as widgets to be processed as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Ramon De Leon, the client who knows about the huge impending drug deal – which also involves a very large man known as La Ballena, or The Whale – is trying to manipulate the system, which is hungry for headlines and career-making deals, for his own benefit, working with lawyers from the district attorney’s office who are eager to swallow any story he feeds them without regard to its veracity. The Alabama death-row case gives de la Pava some room to criticize the hilariously stilted system of “justice” in that state, where judges may impose the death penalty by overruling juries that have voted for life without parole, one of only three states that allow such atrocities. Casi has a conscience and a strong sense of justice, and his rising awareness of the gap between that sense and the actual level of justice meted out by the system causes him to become slightly unhinged, especially in the novel’s final third, where he and Dane execute their heist plan, after which Casi is subject to a series of kangaroo-court hearings at work, is pursued by a corrupt detective straight out of central casting, and bumps into a new neighbor who has to be seen to be believed.

There are some off notes in the novel, even beyond the handful of typos. De la Pava always capitalizes the word Television, without a modifier, although even in 2008 it had already started to lose its grip as the dominant force in our culture, to be replaced (for now at least) by Internet. The vignettes involving his family often felt tacked-on, and had they disappeared from the story the main plot wouldn’t have suffered any for it, the kind of bulk-forming narrative that an experienced editor might have excised. De la Pava also had to get the long meaning-of-life soliloquies that seem to plague every new author today out of the way; if I never have to read another chapter where a bunch of fictional twentysomethings debate the existence of God or the virtue of altruism it will be too soon. Dostoevsky and Trosky covered this ground a century and a half ago. Can we all please just move on?

My tastes in fiction tend more toward classic novels and straightforward narratives, so A Naked Singularity was a clear departure from the norm for me, and it’s often compared to three postmodern classics that I have yet to read (but intend to hit soon): The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Infinite Jest. If those appeal to you, or if you like novels that, while a little unpolished, are broad and experimental with a liberal dose of humor, you may enjoy A Naked Singularity even more than I did.

Next up: Still ripping through Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music.