LOWDOWN GLOOM MIXED UP IN MOLASSES

Throw Auster, Beckett, Pynchon and Faulkner into a blender and you’ll get Lowdown Gloom, a book that’s too clever by half and experimental enough to scare away casual readers.

The problem with Baldino is not that he’s a bad author, but that he knows that he’s a good one. Though the young man clearly has talent to spare, his new book is an overly self-aware exercise in avant garde writerly craft. The book’s protagonist is Johnny, a fictional avatar, one assumes, for the author. While Baldino’s plot shoots Johnny through an imagined landscape like a pinball and asks him to solve a sort of postmodern mystery, Lowdown Gloom is first and foremost a novel-length reflection on writing. This, it seems, is the rebel’s craft, and is not to be taught but intuited. Readers learn as much from an episode late in the novel, where Johnny is held at gunpoint by a professor who wants financial compensation for teaching him the definition of poetry. But while Baldino writes like a rebel, he already knows his cause too well. He replaces his to’s with t’s, dropping the “o” to access the vulgar charm of colloquial speech. He loves the slapstick energy of onomatopoeia and his prose is overpunctuated with capitalized phrases like “DWAP” and “SPAT” and “RINGALINGALING!” The author frequently spews arcane, chock-full descriptive passages–“the glow of hot lantern orange imbued in the drawn shades could be seen; a peculiar beacon at the hour; he could only presuppose that his presence was expected, and he knew just the prowl for the approach that would permit him to espy the tinkerings.” It’s almost impossible to be so simultaneously baroque and difficult without being somewhat annoying. Take Thomas Pynchon, an author whom Baldino–whether he knows it or not–has as a forebear. In his recent Against the Day, Pynchon was too Pynchonian. In Lowdown, Baldino is already too Baldino-esque. He’s a parody of himself before he knows what “himself” is.

Way too meta.