Choreographed Chaos

Whitman Kessler can see half of the universe as clearly as anybody.

It bores him to death.

001-054

Have you ever seen one of those videos of a double pendulum?

A single pendulum is easy to follow. It swings back and forth in a pattern you understand almost immediately. Add a second arm and everything changes. The movement becomes unpredictable. It reverses, accelerates, doubles back on itself. And yet it is not random. The two arms remain connected. One movement changes the next. What looks like chaos begins to look strangely like a dance. 

When I saw that video, I realized that was what had happened to 001-054 after I reconceived it.

Whitman Kessler has spent most of his life talking to another version of himself. He calls him K. K watches the room, reads the danger, tells Whitman when to smile, when to shut up, when to take the deal, when to keep moving. He is Whitman’s protector, strategist, critic, antagonist, and a sort of friend.  K, who rules Whitman like a hall monitor, does not approve of Whitman's instincts, until the end of the novel, when he finally backs away. "You're on your own now, my love."

Once I allowed both of them fully into the novel, its movement changed. Other voices entered. Memory, desire, fear, and ambition began pulling Whitman in different directions. 

I think of the result as choreographed chaos.

The point is not formal experimentation for its own sake. It is intimacy.

The reader is immersed in Whitman’s consciousness in a way most literary fiction leaves untouched. You are there while he argues with himself, contradicts himself, misreads someone he loves, catches himself doing it, invents what another person is thinking, fights with the thought he has put in that person’s head, listens to K, ignores K, and hides something from K. Occasionally he discovers something about himself before he understands what he has discovered.

Whitman can see the conventional world perfectly well. He understands what people want from him. He knows how to make himself legible. He could take the deal. Write the easier book. Accept the identity someone else has prepared for him. Smile at the right moment. Be a better father. Teach tennis. Live a more normal life.

He can see that half of the universe as clearly as anybody.

It bores him to death.

To Whitman, life and creation involve a tradeoff between normality—even happiness—and seeing how beautiful the whole world really is.

There is another way the novel makes the reader part of Whitman’s struggle with legibility. Whitman is a mixed-race Black man. His mother is white and Jewish; his father was Black, who died when Whitman was very young.

The novel withholds that fact until the very end. And when it comes, it feels less like a revelation than a breath of fresh air. A recognition. A feeling of, now I see. Now I see him.

I wanted readers to interpret Whitman through familiar racial and class markers they take for granted, then reach the end and see how deceptive—and how socially constructed—those markers really are. Whitman spends much of the novel allowing other people to decide who he is, resisting their conclusions without necessarily correcting them. The reader is doing the same thing.

I wanted the reader to stop and think: I did that.

That is the struggle inside the novel. K is often the voice of sanity. He understands consequence. He understands survival. Whitman understands those things too. He simply cannot stop reaching toward the part of existence that remains unexplained: beauty, imagination, mystery, contradiction, the possibility that what exists is not the limit of what can exist.

When I look at Whitman and try to find ways to show you who he is, I think sometimes of Don Quixote, whose damage is inseparable from his grandeur, and sometimes of Yossarian, surrounded by reasonable people explaining why the insane thing is actually perfectly sensible. Whitman is profane, funny, furious, tender, frequently impossible. The lonely tree on a mountain can break his heart. So can his daughter. So can a sentence. So can the possibility that the world might be more beautiful than we have allowed it to become.

This is not a novel about the relationship between two Whitmans. It's about why this one man is at once so wounded, so alienated from normal life, and yet, in a sense, so perfect. He is not finally bound by the normal life most of us take for granted, by the things most of us strive for—love, security, belonging. He accepts all of that as necessary, but ultimately understands it as irrelevant to what binds him to life: the irrepressible need to see what lies beyond what most of us are willing to imagine.

Whitman may be the most damaged human being you can imagine and, at the same time, because of his absolute, unwavering love of beauty, the most perfect man you can imagine.