Book Review : Blake Butler - 300,000,000 (2014
No new word shall form. No shapes. No abyss of sky. No now.
I've been told a thousand times that I could change the world if I really wanted it. That I needed to change my attitude first. Change my perception of reality. It's a piece of lazy and hollow advice that's never lead to any world-changing endeavors from anybody I've ever known. It's just a mantra that people chant to themselves, in order to feel different, enlightened. Blake Butler's new novel 300,000,000 looking through the vapidness of contemporary living with weapons far more sharp and dangerous than cynicism. It's a violently original thriller, a courageous literary novel and an abstract meditation on the thinness of the veil we call reality. It's also the first literary event in the post-David Foster Wallace era.
It's a novel with fang and claws and it's going to fuck you up.
Troubled police detective E.N Flood is in charge of the Gretch Gravey investigation. The man is charged with the murder of 440 people, including some of his own followers, teenagers looking for cheap drugs and quick thrills, who found a little piece of transcendence alongside the madman. Flood is going through the journals of Gravey, trying to find leads for his investigation, but what transpires of his researches is a madness that goes way beyond what you think madness can mean and what happens after that is a horror that goes way beyond what you think horror is. It's not madness. It's not horror anymore. It's the end of the world as we all know and love it.
The first name that came to mind when reading 300,000,000 is Vladimir Nabokov. The structure is reminiscent of Pale Fire (annoted text), which I believe served two purposes: 1) clue you in on the nature of Gretch Gravey's crimes and 2) break your natural defenses to believe that Gravey is a meaningless madman, because the analyzed text is not insulated the person analyzing and eventually become part of the same reality. Detective Flood's obsession with the Gravey case is going to reveal the true meaning of the cult leader's action and as Flood starts losing perspective on his investigation and becomes a part of it, Blake Butler adds more investigation notes from different authority figures that give you a creeping sense of the endgame of Gretch Gravey's ambitions.
What if I told you I was Gretch Gravey? That I was you and you were me. That everyone I killed was by your hands as I had moved inside you, or just the opposite: you through me. That Gretch Gravey was not a person but a feeling.
300,000,000 is an angry and terrifying novel, and I expect it to piss a lot of people off. It's an all-out, metaphysical declaration of war against the notions of bullshit individuality that paralyzes most of Occidental society into self-indulgent beatitude. I consider myself an angry person in general and reading 300,000,000 had the energizing effect of an ice bath on me. The ambitions of Blake Butler with this novel go beyond the narrative realm, as exposed by the long, high-flying, scattered passages of abstract storytelling.
300,000,000 is meant to challenge the sense of false security and moral righteousness that you've been lulling yourself with. I would call it ''of Nietzschean ambition'' but I don't think Blake Butler is nearly as idealistic as Nietzsche. I gotta say, it's a complicated and fractured read. I had a couple of ''what-the-fuck-am-I-reading?'' moments. 300,000,000 is that kind of novel, one that demands extra effort. If you can't stomach abstraction and sudden thematic departure, you gotta know that this is heavyweight stuff.
300,000,000 comes full circle though. It's not a vapid exercise in style, every detail matters and while you might find the conclusion to be a wild and chaotic departure from the original premise, your irritation might be rooted in the fact that you let your strong sense of morals dictate what you believe the conclusion of a thriller should be. Open up your mind and fall into Blake Butler's abysss, I say. Salvation is not necessarily on the way up.
Every time something terrible happens in North America, some pundit is going to play the ''meaningless violence'' card and renounce the duty of trying to understand the crawling oblivion. Enter Blake Butler, literary alpha dog, and 300,000,000, a novel of systematic violence and apocalypse that's inspired by Vladimir Nabokov, Georges Bataille, James Ellroy and Sigmund Freud. Your excuse not to look into the abyss is invalid. Your faith in the fabric of reality is based on empty promises. 300,000,000 is a middle finger raised at the status quo and I fully expect the righteous to raise pitchforks at it. I also expect it to forever change the way we talk about violence in literature.
