"P"

You'll be getting a lot of art for your dollar when you buy a copy of P by Andrew Lewis Conn. Because creating a work of art in our times that is devoid of reference, influence, homage, and downright stealing is next to impossible Conn has chosen to embrace rather then deny his predecessors and create a work of ultimate reference. He has taken James Joyce's Ulysses as his model and created his own single day in the late 20th century over which the action of his story takes place. Certainly Ulysses does more than merely inform P (both in structure and style), but Conn is smart enough to stray away from so much modeling and gives in to his other, equally admirable influences.

His book is also smart. Its intelligence and wit seem to surpass what one could think was possible from a single voice. This is partly due to the aforementioned source material but it's certainly not necessary to have read the magnum opus of modern literature to see the brilliance and relevance of what Conn is doing: fashioning an epic-tragedy for our times. But knowing that Joyce is out there peering down on Conn from behind Ulysses can help explain the 'why' of certain choices that might otherwise seem like tributaries to the main story.

But if P sometimes feels forced in its mimesis, the effects of all the obvious research of date and time-specific minutiae never seem constructed for the purposes of showing off. Rather, it comes across as the work of a writer fully in love with his craft working harder and demanding more of his reader than most, if not all, of his contemporaries. Details are of ultimate importance to Conn. All minor characters have names, all places and experiences are described within a millimeter of detail, and one character's obsession with lists serves as the practical tool by which Conn can work in all of the referential details that would not otherwise naturally occur.

Among it all, allusions abound. A Nabokovian obsession with alliteration is noticeable from the onset, with an opening paragraph full of phonetic reference to the infamously lyrical opening to Lolita.

"He was Benjamin Seymour, thirty-three, Benji the Boss in the black leather chair sitting in his office at Commercial Urban Models, where Benji the Blasphemer had been quietly cranking out adult entertainment for the past five years. And she was Allison April Pryce, Allison of Littletown, Illinois, All-American Ally of the loosefitting black leather pants, white halter-top, platform shoes, and a teddy-bear knapsack."

In this form of grand allusion are we elegantly fed character backgrounds so that we hardly notice at all the yearning, painful loneliness that exudes at the center of these characters' lives from the onset. Probably no two other sources get quietly or outwardly referenced as much as Nabokov in literature and The Godfather in film ("… the subway platform is empty save for an asian man playing The Godfather waltz on a steel drum."), but for obvious reasons; both are benchmarks in their artistic field. But in P one can find similarly sly and not so sly fingers being pointed at Philip Roth, Iceberg Slim, Jung, Freud, Nietzche, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Boogie Nights, David Letterman, and Larry Flynt, amongst many, many others.

Surrounding such astute and erudite influences and nods, is a good deal of information about pornography and in the book's initial chapters this can be a bit overwhelming and difficult (and if intimate discussions of masturbatory practices make you squeamish, then you might reconsider this book) but it is securely in the knowledge that he is going somewhere with this that Conn can startle us with this smut-filled opening. Because much like Joyce's structure, Conn is beginning with a trashy tale (in this case, of a pornographer and his lost love and his manic obsession with masturbation) seemingly devoid of much structural or artistic merit, only so that we can ascend further and further up with him and his characters into the various literary forms which he will play with- and revel in- one by one.