The Complete Collection of people, places & thingsBy John Dermot Woods |
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Reviewed by John Madera
John Dermot Woods’s The Complete Collection of people, places, & things is set in a strange town organized by a distorted, fantastic logic: Optimus Prime from The Transformers governs; Rainbow Brite, Punky Brewster, and She-Ra romp around; and Voltron is its champion. Given these kitschy touchstones, you might confuse this book for an adult version of Toy Story, though one filtered through the nostalgic lens of the eighties. With its inventive form, its metafictional conceits, its plethora of pop cultural references, and its out and out weirdness, you might also think that Woods’s novel is a cold construct full of flat and fairly predictable tales. Fortunately, you’d be wrong on both counts. Instead, this book is something altogether different: a deeply moving narrative unmoored by conventional storytelling, one that, among many other things, involves one man’s neurotic collecting and another man’s attempt to recapture that collection.
In the beginning, we’re introduced to an old man struggling to “acquire history” and “create the world,” and, quickly after, the man who unwittingly becomes a kind of archivist of this man’s project. Disregarding the old man’s notes, the other man writes down what he himself remembers from this daunting obsessive personal historical project:
I saw the notebooks only once. It wasn’t just a recounting, or some sort of a Manual; it was complete. As he was seized by the frenzy to acquire history, I don’t know that the collector ever understood that his goal was fully realized. I don’t remember it all, but I do remember that it was completely focused. He thought he was creating the whole world, but, as I read it, it was clearly his own world. It could not have been anything but a re-creation of his home—a much more valuable resource than the project he had intended. I can’t visit that town, but I can see it in my own. I see pieces of my world that I thought would be forever hidden.
It was the complete reality of his accounts that made them so unapproachable. His descriptions were ultimately comprehensive; his world was one that left no luxury for erosion. Its reality was certainly what prevented his notebooks from being printed (and reprinted). The book only lives on in my flawed memory and the memory of the others of my time who had the opportunity to read his hand-scrawled notes.
The conceit of Woods’s novel is that it’s simply the archivist’s transcription of what he remembered from the notes of the “collector,” an obsessed creator reminiscent of famed outsider artist Henry Darger who became famous for his posthumously discovered 15,145-page, single-spaced and unnervingly illustrated fantasy text called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. And the world of The Complete Collection of people, places, & things is just as meticulously and lovingly rendered as Darger’s text. It’s a world where conjuring alchemists and talking bears live, where chopsticks are a chic accessory and the theft of them merits police involvement, where people wear top hats or crash helmets that, when worn, don’t “reveal man’s inner truth [but speak] to the world around him, his community, his civic body, his town itself,” where a media blitz can ruin your life, where a switchboard can take away your leisure time forever, where you can dance the Roger Rabbit, where water has only recently been “proven,” and where it becomes mandatory for everyone to wear stilts.
Paradoxically, each recognizable characteristic of the icons and toys featured in The Complete Collection of people, places, & things is inexplicably removed. Woods uses these kitschy references as containers for re-creation rather than as souvenirs recovering the past. While the names are certainly familiar, the characters bear no resemblance to their namesakes. Despite the nod to ALF, the eighties television alien, Woods’s Alf is the name of a woman, and her bedroom, with its snaky array of “vents, chutes, and shafts,” could be a still from the cutting room floor of Gilliam’s Brazil. Other characters named for eighties icons populate the rest of this “village without approach”: Voltron is a middle-aged townie and athlete, a reluctant champion. Lady Aberlin from Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood is newly imagined here as caretaking “exactly one-eighth of the TV screen, the bottom left section.” She-Ra virtually goes catatonic with love on a new light rail, a train that literally goes off the beaten track. And Hacksaw Jim appears as an arsonist:
Results weren’t his worry; starting things was. He was long gone before the fruits of his fire dropped from their tree. He paused just long enough to let you see those orange and yellow pinwheels spin in the glass of his rapt eyes, then he was far across town, enjoying a draft or an espresso by the time the spectators were coughing and the soot began to settle on their cheeks.
One of book’s recurring themes is that whatever is old is new again, but also that whatever has been dusted off from the past always loses it luster: once it becomes a “Thing,” it “rarely lasts.” In this way, Woods, even as he toys with his generation’s childhood nostalgia, constantly defamiliarizes. For instance, in one of the book’s most memorable sections, Velcro ceases to be mundane, becoming instead a “solemn” thing “that touched people where it meant the most,” something kept hidden from children not because it was dangerous but because it was “precious, sacramental,” a holy relic, in fact. And in one absurd moment a man is chastened for having his Velcro hanging out.
Woods’s puzzling stories bear some resemblance to the fabulist works of Augosto Monterroso and Eduardo Galleano, and kin to the fictions of Italo Calvino and Ben Marcus (albeit without Marcus’s energetic syntactical constructs). Can Xue’s elliptical narratives fit in here somewhere, too. But the book’s details, rendered in a deceptively simple but beguiling prose, makes for a bizarro world of its own. These are beautifully crafted stories, brimming with incisive wit, with an underlying philosophy underscoring the thrills and dangers of obsessions and compulsions, and the inevitable short shelf-life of any person, place, or thing, but also the revivifying power of collecting, as peculiar as it is profound. Also Woods’s drawings, brusque crosshatched renderings of each character, add another dimension to the book: each title page looks like a playing card with the passages following them feeling like the writing found on the playing card’s verso. The illustrations dovetail well with the idea that this book is another man’s collected works.
The whimsical world of The Complete Collection of people, places, & things is a purgatory of pop cultural detritus, a subversive invention, a memory, a dream; it's also a world that unravels as Woods ultimately unmasks nostalgia as a kind of necrophilia before using the husk of its remains to ingeniously invert and pervert the yearning of fan fiction.
[Full Disclosure: John Dermot Woods is a contributor for Big Other, a blog which John Madera curates.]