INTRODUCTION

"You know something? At first he was a teacher of English.
Next he became a teacher of English.
Now he is - of all things - a teacher of English."
- a friend of the author's, having read a biographical note on Jonathan Carroll

He rarely gives interviews. For years he has resisted having his photograph on the back covers of his books. He is the son of Sydney Carroll, a screenwriter, who made his mark with the screenplay for Paul Newman's The Hustler; his mother is a comedy actress, his sister a painter, and his half-brother, Steve Reich, a renowned composer. He collects expensive fountain pens. Pressed for self-disclosure, he will go no further than to say, aphoristically, that he has no hobbies, no politics, nothing besides raising his son and walking the dog. Dogs are the creatures he seems particularly fond of and he grants them most unexpected names like Nails for him and Petals for her. He used to be a juvenile delinquent before he graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers University. In what might be a significant act, given the heritage of American literature, he moved from New York to settle permanently in Vienna. He precedes his novels with quotations taken from John Ashbery's cryptic poems. He has a rare gift for inventing titles for the novels he writes, as well as for those he only allows the reader to imagine: Bones of the Moon, Peach Shadows, Sorrow and Son...

"FAIRY TALES FOR ADULTS"

"If you want to know how the rockets are going to work in any hypothetical future, turn to Larry Niven or Robert Heinlein;
if you want literature about what the future might hold, you must go to Ray Bradbury or perhaps to Kurt Vonnegut.
What powers rockets is 'Popular Mechanics' stuff. The province of the writer is what powers the people."
Stephen King (1)

If at all, booksellers store his novels on their 'Fantasy' or 'Horror' shelves. Whether this label is attached to Carroll's works on the basis of their titles, cover art, or trade gossip (for want of informed critical opinion) - it is probably as relevant to their content as the label of science fiction is to the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Such a label however may make or mar an author, as Vonnegut's history of initial lack of recognition attests; the normative theories of literature are equally removed from the critical practice and from the reading habits of the public at large. Then again, even such well-established and elevated pieces of literature as Alice In Wonderland will be found among children's books as well as in the Penguin Classics, depending on the issue format. Suffice it to say that, despite their face value, Jonathan Carroll's novels would not score high as horror: not when measured against the works of such masters of the genre as Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King. For most part they fail to evoke and sustain the emotion of fear, and it is the characters, rather then the readers, who experience most suspense in the course of action. In fact, the readers will usually be allowed the comfort of watching the scenes unfold, with minds cool and collected, much as they might be drawn to sympathize with the protagonists, and so a question should arise, whether the author - the one responsible for the feelings of both his characters and his readers - actually undertakes to "frighten" anybody, whether horror is either his target genre or the target emotion. That understood, it might still be possible to endeavor a comparative study: to examine in what ways Carroll's writings depart from horror, still retaining enough qualities of the genre for the association to be evident; the usefulness of such an attempt this author finds at least questionable. (2) The last thing a critic could do to save this concept would be to observe that in Carroll's work the feeling of fear is secondary to that of paranoia and then... either proclaim the emergence of "a new type of horror"(3), or better, to refocus his attention: from the general (the genre) to the particular (the set of writings). This would lead the hypothetical critic to what this author wishes to make the scope of his inquiry: the novels of Jonathan Carroll, without further qualifications. And as it is impossible to comment on them without referring to the notion of horror - or fear, or paranoia - in the pages of this guide, the reader is asked to assume that henceforward any mention of the word "horror" will refer to the concept or emotion it signifies, and not (unless clearly indicated) to the genre.

The reason why this misplaced label has become so firmly attached to his novels probably lies in the difficulty of defining, or "describing" Carroll's style and subject matter. In a few words, that is. If the hundred-word reviewers and authors of back-cover blurbs are to be masters in the art of expression both concise and precise, perhaps it is not out of way to resort to these excerpts. After all, they provide the first information a potential reader is likely to find, save for the title and the cover price of a book. Here they are, in order of appearance. The Land of Laughs was thus hailed by Washington Post: "Beguiling and original. An intricate, challenging, ultimately chilling tale." Voice of Our Shadow, International Herald Tribune: "Jonathan Carroll seems to have invented the tale that is convincingly supernatural in some episodes, psychological in others, and totally ambiguous in others." (seems to have invented... totally ambiguous... Are we being enlightened yet?) Bones of the Moon, Library Journal: "A powerful story that traverses the two-way street between the dreams and the reality" (not quite illuminating, given the fact that the plot of this particular novel develops in two interwoven lines, one narrating the apparently "real" world events, while the other describes the main character's sequence of dreams - the quoted excerpt is thus no more than a statement of an obvious fact). Sleeping in Flame, Kirkus Reviews: "Fever-dream writing; many vivid images" (the same can be said of hard-core pornography). A Child Across the Sky, Observer: "Searching, cold, quicksilver tale... Carroll is sly and taxing and corrosive." (Brilliant adjectives certainly help advertise, but hardly elucidate.) Outside the Dog Museum, Million: "Quirky, wondrous, pithy, magical, poignant, scary, luxurious, profound, uplifting, enigmatic..." Fortunately, no blurbs for the latest novel, After Silence, as yet. To conclude this eloquent parade, here are the spare words Jonathan Carroll himself used to describe the quirky and the wondrous: "Outside the Dog Museum is 100% serious." (4)

It is probably this seriousness that mostly eludes description, or that has often been put aside for the purposes of commerce; the seriousness of an author, as The Times' critic puts it, "with more ambition in his little fingernail than most novelists have in their entire bodies." It is this very seriousness that I will be looking for in the writings of Jonathan Carroll. I will try to show that on this seriousness relies the artistry of his stories, the stories that Carroll himself likes to call "the fairy tales for adults." Yes, there are talking dogs there, there are tattooed birds that fly off a man's skin, there are videotapes from behind the grave, there is magic and there are angels - just as, it might be said, there are rifles and horses and saloons in a western movie. A poor one will make these objects its prime characters, along with the good guys, the bad guys, and the women and Indians somewhere in between. The heroes of a poor western will be lost when deprived of the props that justify their existence and give them the setting within which to perform, and the story line will rely on these items being (masterfully) utilized. A "good" - that is, an artful - western will use the same objects only as the means to create the scenery for a human story to unfold, and if the characters are put to a test, it won't exactly be to measure how fast their draw is: not so much the story as its implications will be the main concern.

UNRELIABLE REALITY

"There is a saying - and I would be happy to attribute it if I could remember who to attribute it to -
that PERFECT PARANOIA IS PERFECT AWARENESS."
Stephen King

In a Franz Rottensteiner interview, shortly after The Land of Laughs was published, Jonathan Carroll thus summed up the main concern in his first novel: "I have tried to show that in literature as well as in life, the very things that delight us may well turn around and hurt or scare us, unendingly." In The Land of Laughs, as well as in most of his subsequent novels, he achieves this by following what amounts to a classical ghost-story structure: introducing the reader to a perfectly lifelike, almost tangible (though rarely mundane) world of his characters, disguising his intents under a pretense of a romance, an autobiography or a detective story. It is only later, when the protagonists have assumed their identities and began exploring their world and themselves that they start to discover ghastly cracks which suddenly appear on the seamless surface of their reality. Imagine a thick cover of ice breaking slowly but relentlessly, coming apart under your feet. Imagine taking a walk down New York's Fifth Avenue, the street flooded with sunlight and suddenly splitting into countless, disconnected pieces: the sidewalk, the sky-scrapers and the sky itself; imagine catching a glimpse of the clockwork machinery or maybe theatrical strings behind them and, yes, the horror that comes with it, but more important, the necessity to walk on with the new knowledge and maybe the futile wish you had chosen some other day for the innocent stroll: this is the situation, if not quite the scenery, in which Carroll's characters are sooner or later bound to find themselves. Carroll however doesn't take particular interest in whatever the mechanics are that underlie such phenomena - these are acknowledged, then taken for granted. The essence, and the really enticing part of Carroll's show is instead to examine the characters' minds and to see what happens to people facing such an alarming revelation: how they will react, how - and if - they can cope and go on living with the Faustian knowledge, when the alternative to assenting to its logic is assenting to one's own insanity. Anything from the fleeting sensation of uneasiness arising from having come across a crack in Nature's otherwise smoothly running plan, to the disturbing suspicion that there is another life going on silently along its own tracks, to the dizzying realization that some unthinkable powers are pulling the strings of one's life for reasons inscrutable - all of this is craftily woven into the plot of Jonathan Carroll's novels, taken a slightest bit further step by a careful step, until one cannot but admit that something is very wrong indeed with life as we know it - and as this slow but irrefutable conclusion settles in, the cracks in the sky disappear, the mundane reality resumes its ways, while the heroes, the accidental hunters of the unknown, become the hunted, or haunted rather, by whatever powers they involuntarily stirred.

If all these deliberations seem baffling, or at least vague at this point, their purpose is to provide a general pattern, a mold, a paradigm, that will take on more particular meanings as soon as we have left this troubled introduction. Yet another example may however be provided within its bounds - the common, real-life experience of déja vu: the "I've-been-here" or "I've-seen-it-before" sort of revelation. For all we know it's quite impossible - surely untransferable - and yet it occurs every now and then, a fleeting glimpse of... horror? the other world? or the machinery of the brain gone haywire for a split second, like a glitch in a computer's logic circuits? Whatever the cause, most people will be familiar with the effect. After that, it takes no more than a couple of seconds for the doubt to arise if it ever was real - until there it comes again, real as fear itself, the next time. It shouldn't even happen - yes, but this is only tantamount to saying that brakes should never fail in a car; they certainly do, at times, and when that happens it is quite immaterial exactly which screw or cable went loose: not so much what powers the car becomes critical then, but what powers the driver in his ability to handle the crisis. In a Jonathan Carroll novel (as opposed to "straight" genre horror) a moment like this would be the beginning, not the climax, of a good story.

* * *

It has already been mentioned that, an author of seven novels and a book of short stories so far, Jonathan Carroll has not received much serious critical attention - and the fact has been attributed to the pervasive difficulty in finding a clear "label" for the sort of writing he creates, in defining a "handle" to his original - there is a critical consensus on this point at least - style. This, of course, doesn't exhaust the issue. Another fact that may be as well responsible for the apparent lack of recognition (despite favorable press reviews which cannot conceal the absence of "highbrow" criticism) is that not only are his writings hard enough to place, but so is the man himself. In 1974 he left his home for Vienna, and although he did not speak German at the time and though it was his first visit to Europe, he has lived there ever since. Consequently, most of his novels are at least partly set in Europe, some of them entirely so. Also his popularity is definitely greater in Europe than in the States: as of January 1992 the aforementioned collection of short stories, The Panic Hand, had not been available in the original version, but had been published in Germany (as Die Panische Hand). It may be a simplistic but nonetheless defendable view that, although neither of these facts necessarily makes him a more "European" than an "American" writer, they may lead to a confusion as to exactly who is in charge of assessing his literary achievement, to "which literature" he rather belongs (and there is no doubt at all about the dissimilarity in the English writing on the two sides of the Atlantic).

For better or worse, Carroll himself has never done much to help sort this question out. He has so far resisted a biography, and the brief notes he allows his novels to bear read simply: "Jonathan Carroll is an American writer. He lives in Vienna." It seems that, contrary to our century's prevailing tendencies, Carroll never allows himself an ego trip. In fact, even the interviews that are published are scarce and far between - and Publishers Weekly's Michelle Field, a rare journalist to obtain one, discloses that "in an interview Carroll can be rather discomforting." (5) So, too, this author, in the course of research, has come across a disappointingly small number of applicable sources. When, in a matter of a page or two, we begin to concentrate on the subject of this work - and that means the novels, not their author - we will be looking at texts, their implications, the imaginary worlds they project and possibly the conclusions that the analysis will yield; consequently little time will be devoted to the creator of the artifacts in question. At the moment, however, this author would like to take the liberty to use what limited sources are available in order to present the reader with a brief look at Jonathan Carroll - the live person.

Born January 6, 1949 in New York, he was brought up in somewhat bohemian manner in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. Worried by his record of juvenile delinquency, his parents sent him to Loomis, the Hartford, Conn. prep school. About these early years he says: "I was a delinquent because everybody else in my family was such a glow-worm." He graduated as a Bachelor of Arts from Rutgers University in 1971, and in 1973 he received the M.A. degree at the University of Virginia. He was a teacher of English at North State Academy, Hicory, N.C. and in St Louis and, since 1974, along with his wife Beverley at the American International School in Vienna, Austria. Apart from teaching and writing novels, his other source of income is rewriting scripts on Hollywood movies, but he is reluctant even to name the films to which he has contributed: "I never put my name on a credit because I don't think it's my work."

Among the awards and honors he has received for his writings are the French Prix Apollo for The Land of Laughs, awarded in 1987 and Washington Post's Book of The Year award for Voice of Our Shadow (1983). A few years ago an upscale German magazine, Tempo, named The Land of Laughs number 4 on a list of the one hundred best books of the 1980s.

Although he was born into a Jewish family and raised a Christian Scientist, he describes himself as an agnostic and he declares that, unlike the characters in his novels, he has never had a mystical experience. His parents have remained Christian Scientists, his brother, the composer Steve Reich is an Orthodox Jew and his other brother a Sufi. Carroll's comment? "Table conversation is interesting."

Michelle Field, the author of the interview from which the quotations are taken, describes Carroll's physique in these words: "He is very tall and very tidily dressed. His face has sharp. almost aristocratic features, which seem never to relax into a grin. His voice still carries all the American inflections, but his manner is so decorous as to suggest other antecedents."

The quotation from Gustave Flaubert which precedes this section is one that Carroll himself chose as the motto for The Land of Laughs. Very appropriately so, it seems. Here is what he has to say about his method of writing: "Everyone laughs at the way I work. I first write a book very fast by computer, then I write it by hand as fast as I can, and then I buy these rare, expensive notebooks that look like something from the old days and I get a beautiful pen - and I rewrite the novel very, very slowly. To me, 'fast,' 'less fast' and 'very slow' are the three stages, and by the time it is finished I go back to the computer and make changes." Regular and orderly, and thorough, like so much about Carroll, but the slight oddity that might be observed even here, in employing modern technology on par with old-fashioned notebooks and stylish fountain pens is a characteristic one and will be observed, in many shapes, throughout his novels. In The Land of Laughs, the first time the main character feels a touch of magic in the air is while eating spare ribs by a hot-dog stand. In A Child Across the Sky a notorious Hollywood movie director, who died by his own hand, sends enigmatic messages to the living by means of videotapes. It remains to be seen whether this clash of worlds and juxtaposition of styles go beyond Carroll's manners and the surface structure of his novels, but at this point the observation itself provides a valuable clue as to how his writing can be approached.

For the last words of the introduction we will once again turn to The Times' anonymous critic who, in a few words, did perhaps embrace this very idea: "Carroll's world is one that is subtly out of kilter, and which can take a turn for the sinister at any time, yet his depiction of characters and dissection of their relationships is unflinching in its honesty. If he were a Latin American writer with a three-part name, his books would be described as magical-realist. . .an inventive and endlessly fascinating writer."

Enough said. We have completed the first approximation, and the domain of Jonathan Carroll's writing, as yet unexplored, should not be entirely unfamiliar to the readers by now. Those interested, please follow the guide. Welcome to The Land of Laughs.