2015 read #62: Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente.

Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
432 pages
Published 2015
Read from October 29 to November 4
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

Metafiction, to my tastes, is best enjoyed in small, measured doses, rather like children's medicine that, no matter how sweetened, has to be choked down with reluctance. Honestly, I admire it more often than I enjoy it. And really, short fiction (rather than novels) seems best suited to experiments with form and presentation. It took almost one hundred pages before I began to concede that Radiance might have something of its own to say, rather than repeating (at much wordier length) the essential points of Valente's short fiction masterpiece, "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" (which I read and reviewed here). Perhaps it took so long because chunks of "The Radiant Car" are recycled in Radiance, once or twice crammed verbatim, with little regard for speech rhythms, into the mouths of side characters. Further, the bulk of Radiance is comprised of film scripts, interrogation transcripts, gossip columns, cargo manifests -- none of which permit Valente's intoxicating prose to reach its full strength, as it does in The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World.

Beyond those first hundred or so pages, however, as Radiance found its own momentum and swung a dizzying, decopunk parabola beyond the constraints of "The Radiant Car," I found myself quite satisfyingly drunk with it. Radiance earned a rare distinction, becoming the first book in recent memory that I've wanted to reread while still barely half done with it. Part of that urge had to do with writing a better review: I had found myself what I considered a clever and perceptive angle upon the concepts and layered perspectives of Valente's novel, but then, after a weekend break for trick-or-treating and hiking, couldn't scrounge up so much as a crumb of my supposed insight from the messy desk of my memory, and I wanted to go back and sniff it down again from the first page. But even without that case of the missing exegesis (I never did recall what I had been so proud to figure out), Radiance is a book that would reward a second read -- and certainly a more careful immersion than my usual page-a-minute pace.

As with the original short story, Radiance is a work of style-as-substance. Layers of perspective, re-shoots and second takes, revisions and outright fabrications are all we are given of the story at its heart. And disregarding the quite lovely digressions and spectacular subplots, that story remains little more substantial than it was in "The Radiant Car," pinned on some kind of quantum foam / matrix of reality stuff that would have seemed hoary in the 1990s (though told with such elegantly baffling Valente-esque vigor). But the style! Disappeared filmmaker Severin Unck's final film is projected onto the naked bodies of fair-goers. Her father, filmmaker Percival Unck, struggles with his writing partner to craft a fitting end for her story, a proper cinematic ending, and the genre zigzags from noir to Gothic to fairy tale to a locked room mystery, its final reveal sung by a tapdancing cartoon octopus and mongoose. There's a religious play enacted by players dressed as Uranus and its moons, spoken in a pidgin of Valente's own devising. It's fantastic. It's fanatical. It's heady. It's dizzying and delirious and delightful.