I first thought of Renee Gladman’s The Activist as a booklength poem. That was before I read it. Later, I felt as though I were in the middle of a novel. But then the work also had the feel of a conceptual art project to it. In retrospect, I think The Activist is a little of all three – in some ways, one of the very few such projects that manages to resist settling comfortably into a single genre (usually, it is the novel that takes over). It has a relationship of sorts to that wonderful literary niche, the poet’s novel, but it’s not that either. Nor is it new narrative in the sense that one might take from Bob Glück, Bruce Boone, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Michael Amnasan or Camille Roy. Ultimately, The Activist is The Activist. You have to take it on its own terms. On that, it pretty much insists.

A bridge has been blown up. A group of terrorists is being blamed. Except that some people claim that you can tell that the bridge itself is still standing. Others, however, insist that it never existed. Gladman presents the event from a variety of perspectives, much of it from the vantage point of a journalist, that professional observer & chronicler of facticity. We read media reports, all written with the hyperventilated tone of cable news, alarmist, authoritative, completely sans clue as to what’s happening. Eventually we find ourselves inside the radical group itself, at meetings where actions are discussed, decisions made. We find ourselves inside the head of the speaker at the podium & find that nothing is more real here than anywhere else. Characters behave as if the simplest acts must be conducted through a fog of inertia, and as if knowledge is the hardest thing imaginable.

In a way, if this book has ancestors, it may Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren or Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, novels about rebellion that are long on narrative & curiously agnostic on plot. But where those venerable pomo novelists dive into the language itself for its absolute sensual nature, Gladman gives the surface textures of the media she’s exploring. The book reads quickly for the same reasons, stylistically, that a newspaper does. Indeed, individual sections almost invariably would fit onto any page of USA Today.

When The Activist finally comes inside & enters into the world of the movement itself, I experienced an enormous anxiety as a reader. I’m old enough to remember the revolutionary romanticism of the 1960s – Diane DiPrima’s Revolutionary Letters, say, or the work of Alta – works that helped set up the environment in which the suicidal & terribly destructive behavior of the Weather Underground & the Symbionese Liberation Army helped to shred what remained of the antiwar movement and set the foundation for the wave of reaction that first brought Ronald Reagan to power. The last thing I wanted to read was another text with Baader-Meinhof envy. But Gladman surprised me in this regard completely. Monique Wally and her followers are as completely paralyzed by the problems of knowledge & action as the state outside is an hysterical ensemble of dysfunctional elements. Imagine, if you will, Steinbeck’s one true communist novel, In Dubious Battle, filtered through a screen of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. The Activist is both that exciting and that frustrating. You can’t, it seems, have one without the other.

Gladman has written, I would say, eighty percent of a great book. My hesitation is my own alienation from the discursive mode of reporting, and with the tone of expectation that it sets up. Even more than Dhalgren or Vineland, The Activist is a powerful narrative engine roaring down the track with no particular place to go. This makes it radically unlike, say, the poetic prose of Robert Creeley, Richard Brautigan, Nate Mackey or even Pamela Lu, where you may or may not be going anywhere, but it hardly matters since what you’re paying heed to are the details along the way. Consider, for example, this passage (borrowed as it were from the Woodland Pattern website):

Officials pursue activists over rocky terrain in
search of answers. "We want to make sure anger
does not ruin these kids," Daniel Sharpe of the
Brendan Seize Unit (BSU) confides, "but it's like
pushing against water."

Investigators combed shards from the collapsed
bridge for signs that it had been blown apart. "I
have a feeling that Monique Wally and her group
are behind this. What we have is a smell of iron
burning, but no visual evidence on site." Sharpe
and his BSU team have joined with local police
and the FBI to solve the encrypted crime.

"Only the time of day distinguishes these so-
called dissidents from terrorists. Had they blown
that bridge an hour earlier or an hour later, we
would have had a lot of death on our hands."

The bridge remains in tact today, despite reports
that it is long gone. A team of specialists from
the Institute of Explosive Applications in
Toronto, Ontario is expected to settle the mat-
ter by mid-week. "These scientists are the elite
among their field. We have every faith that they
will acknowledge the violence done to the
bridge," the President assured viewers today.

This is where The Activist felt most like conceptual art to me – in its cool, even cold, distant tone. Yet the instrumentalism of the language – so efficiently executed here – doesn’t yield the truth, nor even a web of lies. Rather, it’s as if all language were a membrane through which we had to reach in order to do anything in the real world. It’s a membrane that starts out just perceptible, as in this passage above, and which becomes impenetrable by the book’s end. Imagine, if you will, searching for a book by Dr. Spock or Brazleton on raising babies & coming home with Eraserhead instead.

The Activist is a deeply pessimistic work, always brilliant, but not particularly interested in pleasure. It’s unusual in that regard and it makes me realize just how much contemporary poetry wants us to like it – you almost have to go back to Pound to find work that could care less what you think & feel (especially the latter) as you read. Yet, also like Pound, it’s a book that will make you think, stop & if not wonder, at least worry, on every page.