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Bob, or Man on Boat

Bob.jpg

Peter Markus

June 2008

Blake Butler

The collected work thus far of Peter Markus could be likened to an early earth encyclopedia, or a table of the elements. In Markus’s world, though, the elements are not cryptic chemical symbols devised and laid in line by science. Instead, they are the epoxy of existence – they are the things we know without having to decipher, they are brothers, fish and mud. One could cut to most any page in a Markus apparatus and find these common images there repeated, like age lines encased in a tree trunk. Markus’s word channels the innate. Each sentence placed next to one another as if by nature, his layered phrases cause an incantation.

The collected work thus far of Peter Markus could be likened to an early earth encyclopedia, or a table of the elements. In Markus’s world, though, the elements are not cryptic chemical symbols devised and laid in line by science. Instead, they are the epoxy of existence – they are the things we know without having to decipher, they are brothers, fish and mud. One could cut to most any page in a Markus apparatus and find these common images there repeated, like age lines encased in a tree trunk. Markus’s word channels the innate. Each sentence placed next to one another as if by nature, his layered phrases cause an incantation.

In his first two volumes Good, Brother and The Singing Fish (both available from Calamari Press), Markus brought into the world these brothers, these fish and mud, and made them things that anyone could recognize as his. Using his elements somewhat like stones placed in a very certain order to make a pattern, Markus develops a base-terrain that seems to out-Hemingway even Hemingway, to primordially out-lurk even McCarthy’s Child of God. It is a statement to his cryptic senses, to his bare and yet mesmerizing speech, that with such spare tools Markus can create so consuming and explicit a word world.

Markus’s new novel Bob, or Man on Boat is another entry in the spare, unleavened world Markus has created, though in a slightly shifted sketch of terrain. It deals with precisely the man it’s named for – Bob, who lives on a boat. Bob spends his every hour in the river flowing through a small town where he fishes for fish with an affluence unlike any other. The fish are compelled to Bob, and Bob to them. There are many reasons Bob does not leave the water, but, for the most part, it is because it’s what he knows, it’s what he lives for.

The novel is narrated by Bob’s son, Bob, who also has a son of his own. Much of the novel follows Bob’s observations of his father Bob, of the folklore that surrounds the man on the river in the boat. It is Markus’s DNA-like prose that makes the rendering of these Bobs and their surroundings so provocative:

Nights when the moon is full, it is so lit up on the river that Bob in his boat looks like he is glowing from inside him.
As if Bob is made out of light.
– – –
But no.
Bob is a man made out of flesh.
Once, when I shook Bob’s hand, there was bone there for me to shake.
I’m Bob, I said, and I stuck out my hand for Bob to take it.
It’s true that Bob hesitated at first, Bob looked at my hand, but then he took it, my hand, the way that a fish might look at a rusty hook before taking it into its mouth.

Like other writers who elicit as much or more from tone and phrasing as they do actual occurrence – say, Dawn Raffel or Brian Evenson – much of Bob, or Man on Boat comes off hypnotic in a timeless, storybook kind of way: the sort of thing one might find themselves reading to their child and hearing things they know the child does not understand completely, but takes delight in, and likewise the child might hear things the adult does not. In this way it manages to stimulate not only the child in the man, but the man in the child, channeling somehow in the ground between the two. This is Markus’s magic.

Though it is a novel that can be finished in one evening’s read, Bob, or Man on Boat is the kind of work that moors in your head and, like Bob on his river, never leaves. Markus makes myth so well that it seems like child’s play, like a humming game, but those who’ve tried to write so sparsely know that these kinds of creation gifts only come innate. If it is truly the inimitable that lasts forever, consider Markus going down with the ship.

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