FICTION
“300,000,000”
by Blake Butler
Harper Perennial
576 pages; $16.99
“Into the night of homes I walked in waver … The unseen held the world together … everything remained for me to make of it what I could.”
This is the voice of Det. E.N. Flood in Blake Butler’s “300,000,000,” a Rubik’s cube of shock and gore that readers of soft romance won’t be able to scramble out of quick enough. The Atlanta writer takes a blowtorch to everything, including himself, and all we can do is stand back and marvel at his fiendish endeavor.
Flood struggles to comprehend Gretch Nathaniel Gravey and his kill-crazy followers; to explain their mission to bump off the universe and themselves. “We clearly knew one day we’d have to kill one another to become all,” admits one disciple, “Why not begin now?”
A “45 year-old Caucasian male,” Gravey is the “Organizing Wind” behind a mind-control death cult headquartered in the “Black House.” They sweep out of an unspecified American city, avatars for a cruel zombiefied belief system that operates with the force of a deadly mind-borne virus; soon it will become “an infestation” that will end in world slaughter.
Inside, the Black House is festooned with thousands of mirrors and high-intensity incandescent lighting. Its basement becomes a hecatomb for hundreds of victims. That’s just the kickoff for a grand pyramid scheme of mass murder, soon to top 340,000, then 2,441,560, the count rising exponentially upward to the novel’s numbered title. In due course, America will be reduced to an uninhabited landscape of plastic ruin.
Gravey is, in actuality, the stooge of some thing or force named “Darrell,” whose “commandments [are] full of silence.” Unlike his late colleagues back at the station, Flood is for some reason exempt from conventional liquidation. After he falls through the collapsing floors of the Black House, we follow events through his commentary, as he pushes deeper into the underground “City of Sod.” The further Flood goes, the more he becomes — like Darrell — a disembodied intelligence, inching toward an ultimate revelation in the form of speaking geometric shapes known as the “Seven Symbols.”
It’s clear from the outset that Blake Butler is not working in the Genteel Tradition. “Congealment,” mutilation, cannibalism — there’s more “meat” in “300,000,000” than on the cool aisle at Kroger. To whine about the aesthetic would be futile, like passing moral judgment on an exploded nebula. As the essayist William Hazlitt once wrote, “There is a hankering after evil in the human mind … [it is] a never-failing source of satisfaction.” He might have been thinking about Butler 200 years in advance.
Proceeding, consciousness may be nothing more than chaos our brain has developed some instrument to contain; if so, Butler, pursuant to his purpose, has forced that mechanism to fail. From his long vexing sentences — often-spectacular formations, one measuring 26 feet — filigrees with the luster of undiscovered elements burst forth from the gruesome density: Bodies are “piled like prisms in low artificial light.” A female victim hears “moving tubers in the ground, the oncoming rush of liquid between dirt somewhere beneath them.”
Many times it’s necessary to part the foliage, pushing ahead like Flood to the story’s heart of darkness. But just when you want to throttle the man, Butler — blasting away like Coltrane on “Sun Ship” — really gets it going: “The dysfunction between what was and what would soon be mayonnaised a medium between the features of the present moment.”
The goofy supernaturalism and surgery-theater prose is always delivered with maniacal energy, but it’s really a camouflage, or, rather, calling card, for a Victorian theosophical tour. While it’s tempting to regard the book as an extremity of negation, most of it takes the guise of a thought-and-language experiment involving the meaning, or lack of meaning, of human identity, its cockeyed message a stew of Buddhism and Boris Karloff: “You are not dead and never will be and you are not dead and you are not alive and you’re alive and you will never be…death is not a question of becoming nothing, it is a question of everything at once.”
Blake Butler writes on various subjects for Vice and edits the literary blog HTML Giant. (He was an astute critic of punk for All Music Guide, where he reportedly treated himself to the occasional hoax.) He grew up in Marietta, studied at Georgia Tech and Bennington, and was inspired by David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.”
In an anomalous chapter in “300,000,000,” Butler cites various literary ancestors, including Melville, Gaddis, Pynchon, and the “transgressive” writer Bret Easton Ellis, who kicked up a fuss in 1991 with “American Psycho.” Whatever Ellis’s talent for outrage may have been, it’s hardly an exaggeration to proclaim “300,000,000” as probably, more than likely, indubitably, one of the most disquieting art novels of the modern age; until, of course, Butler’s next. Meanwhile, his favorite pastime is poker.
