THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS

A comic novel of paranoia, misdirection and suicide.

Museum curator Jim Rath has gone beyond eccentricity in his displays at the Colorado Springs Center for Gender and Power. He gets canned for including “a meticulously reproduced menstrual rag” in his exhibition on pioneering birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, though Rath feels he’s merely “pushed the conventions of sociopolitical diorama design to the brink of acceptance.” His personal life is falling apart as well; wife Jean has grown tired of his comics collection (he uses white gloves to handle the mint-condition items and surgical tweezers to turn the pages), not to mention his loopy plans for a museum based on the Aquatic Ape Theory of Evolution. Rath has become obsessed with water, which he believes harbors “a lost civilization” that he named Nautika after first glimpsing its wonders in the pool of the Colorado Springs Hilton. At a minimum he’s convinced himself that he’s found a Nautikon, an inhabitant of this magical world, replete with gills. Believing it to be the genetic residue of a race of aquatic apes, he follows the putative Nautikon, who turns out to be Les Diaz, a Department of Homeland Security agent almost as bizarre and insecure as Rath himself. Rath begins to stalk Diaz, eventually dogging him to a superannuated water park. Along the way we’re treated to the outlandish mythology of Nautika, including the Fish Girl Labiaxa, who eventually reunites with her mother the queen. Jean has perhaps the sharpest, most scathing perception of her husband. “She says I live in a diving bell where the real world can’t get in and I can’t get out,” Rath tells us. That about sums it up.

An offbeat and Pynchonesque debut, with some genuinely funny moments—and some freakishly aberrant ones.