Gary K. Wolfe Reviews A City Made of Words by Paul Park

A City Made of Words, Paul Park (PM Press 978-1-629-63642-9, $14.00, 128pp, tp) June 2019.

Paul Park has always had a rather sidewise relationship with science fiction and fantasy. His early novels demonstrated a sophisticated awareness of the literary possibilities of the far-future, dying-Earth theme, and his vastly underappreciated A Princess of Roumania series was as carefully worked-out an alternate history as you could ask for – except that it also introduced a dizzying metafictional overlay that basically presented our entire world as the invention of someone else’s book. That ongoing negotiation between the textual and the real has probably been most noticeable in his short fiction, which would sometimes even feature a character named Paul Park, and by the time we got to the three-novella novel All Those Vanished Engines just five years ago, Park was cheerfully incorporating bits of his own family history, and even his own work writing actual museum exhibits, into a multilayered narrative that also featured superweapons, clones, aliens, giant insects, pandemics, mysterious spacecraft, and a rather sad dystopia. This qualifies him as a distinguished member of the “what’s he up to next?” club, and we have something of an answer with A City Made of Words, the most recent of PM Press’s excellent series of chapbooks edited by Terry Bisson (another member of that same club). It features six stories, two of them original to the collection, along with an actual homily delivered in his local church and, as usual, a characteristically quirky interview with Bisson.

It might be worth noting that only one of the four reprinted stories comes from a traditional SF publication (“Creative Nonfiction” appeared in Asimov’s), but that two are from Conjunctions, the literary journal edited by Bradford Morrow, which has been unusually welcoming to authors such as Park, Jeffrey Ford, John Crowley, Eliza­beth Hand, Peter Straub, and others comfortable in the borderlands. One of those stories, “A Re­sistance to Critical Theory”, is a good example of how rewarding and how problematical those bor­derlands can be. On the one hand, it can be read as the sort of literalization of metaphor that’s sometimes viewed as SF property, but the meta­phors in this case come from postmodern literary theory, which Park parodies with perhaps a tad too much glee (“It wasn’t so easy, distinguishing the post-anthropologic from the predeceased”). His central character Yvette, a graduate student whose thesis adviser has recently committed suicide, sets out to sabotage a trendy professor at a lecture – and perhaps to commit murder. While the tale works its way toward a rather graphic horror story denouement (with a comic fillip at the end), getting there involves follow­ ing some abstruse arguments apparently derived from the actual theories of Julia Kristeva, Donna Haraway, and others, and having some awareness of the controversies surrounding the WWII activities and anti-Semitic writings of deconstructionist guru Paul de Man. Without revealing too much, it’s safe to say that the idea of the posthuman gains a rather blunt literalized meaning.

The academic setting recurs in “Creative Nonfic­tion”, the Asimov’s story, and in “A Conversation with the Author” (which, to avoid confusion, is a story title and not the title of Bisson’s inter­view with Park; Park seems to enjoy story titles that don’t sound like fiction at all). In “Creative Nonfiction”, which carries a few echoes of David Mamet’s play Oleanna, a part-time college teacher is having trouble with an ambitious and attractive young student upset that he’s only given her a B on a “creative nonfiction” assignment that begins increasingly to interpenetrate his actual relationship with her, in a world that seems to be growing ominously apocalyptic. “A Conversation with the Author” at first appears to be a traditional author interview, focusing on questions of teaching writ­ing, but quickly takes an ominous turn when we learn that the interrogation is taking place in a bare room over a metal table, that the author has been “brought in for questioning,” and that his arms are strapped down in a wheelchair: it’s a critique of creative writing programs oddly crossed with Guantanamo-like interrogation.

Two stories touch upon, if not SF directly, what might be called the folklorization of SF ideas. “Blind Spot” is at heart a rather touching story of an older and younger man sharing a bedroom, but the older man seems obsessed with explaining his notion of reptilian aliens from the twelfth planet who have long influenced human affairs (the partic­ular mythology is drawn from Zachariah Sitchin’s crackpot series of ancient astronaut books, which are still around). The narrator of “A Short History of Science Fiction, or the Microsopic Eye” meets an aging, blind match-seller whom he recognizes as John Palmer, who as a boy had gained fame for ex­treme farsightedness back in 1876, claiming to see details on the moon and cities on Mars, but who has suffered an ironic fate in his later years. The most compelling original story here, though, is “Climate Change”, in which a 70-year-old retired travel writer receives an invitation from a former lover to meet her on a remote Melanesian island where they spent time decades earlier, even though the island may now be partially submerged by rising oceans. The balance between his contemporary conversa­tions with his quite reasonably concerned wife and his not entirely reliable memories of that ancient assignation are handled with a delicate assurance and grace which reminds us that, while Park can deploy SF and fantasy notions in unexpected ways, he doesn’t really need them at all.

This review and more like it in the July 2019 issue of Locus.

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