Genoa

by Paul Metcalf, Rick Moody (Introduction)

Overview

"[Genoa] invites us to pass our minds down a new but ancient track, to become, ourselves, both fact and fiction, and to discover something true about the geography of time."—William Gass, The New York Times

"Genoa is a spectacular confrontation with Melville's work, the journals of Columbus and molecular biology—all folded into a hallucinatory narrative about two brothers and their different paths through the American century."—Publishers Weekly

"Much like his great-grandfather, Herman Melville, Paul Metcalf brings an extraordinary diversity of materials into the complex patterns of analogy and metaphor, to affect a common term altogether brilliant in its imagination."—Robert Creeley

"A unique work of historical and literary imagination, eloquent and powerful. I know of nothing like it."—Howard Zinn

First published in 1965, Genoa is Paul Metcalf's purging of the burden of his relationship to his great-grandfather Herman Melville. In his signature polyphonic style, a storm-tossed Indiana attic becomes the site of a reckoning with the life of Melville; with Columbus, and his myth; and between two brothers—one, an MD who refuses to practice; the other, an executed murderer. Genoa is a triumph, a novel without peer, that vibrates and sings a quintessentially American song.

Paul Metcalf (1917–99) was an American writer and the great-grandson of Herman Melville. His three volume Collected Works were published by Coffee House Press in 1996.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566893923
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	07/14/2015
Edition description:	Anniversary Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Paul Metcalf (1917–1999) was an American writer and the great-grandson of Herman Melville. His three volume Collected Works were published by Coffee House Press in 1996.

Editorial Reviews

“Metcalf’s masterpiece undermines the idea of authorship while showing a way forward for the novel.”—Stephen Sparks, The Scofield

"by cobbling together disparate extracts from a variety of sources, Metcalf has recreated that uniquely readerly revelation of finding in unrelated literature of all kinds resonances and echoes that inform one’s lived experience."— Full Stop

“Metcalf’s investigation of the darkness lying at the heart of human existence is bold, unsentimental and unsparing. One of his quotes from Melville tells it all: “Bail out your individual boat, if you can, but the sea abides.”—Lively Arts

“Any great book—and yes, Genoa is emphatically great—transcends the tricks in how it was made. It’s hard to explain the unique power of what Metcalf has written; better, perhaps, to simply acknowledge that something powerful is happening. Case in point: I seem to have settled on writing whoa in the margins of many pages.”— Electric Literature

"There isn’t much that one can compare [Genoa] to: in both its form and its incorporation of other works, Anne Carson comes to mind, but in broader strokes rather than more specific ones. . . Genoa is a slippery book, a literary collage that nonetheless advances with a startling momentum.”— LitHub

“A singular novel, blending history and fiction, Metcalf’s book follows two brothers, one of whom narrates, as passages from the journals of Melville and Christopher Columbus are woven into the story. It works! And is best pondered seaside.”— Vanity Fair

“Fascinating and engaging.”—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

From the Publisher

★ 2015-04-29
A reissue of the 1965 cult classic by Metcalf (1917-1999) that weaves together stories by Herman Melville, Christopher Columbus, and an emotionally rattled narrator. We meet that narrator, Michael, in the attic of his Indianapolis home, trying to tell his own story about growing up and losing his brother, Carl, who was executed in prison for reasons not disclosed till the novel's end. But Michael can't write more than a paragraph or so without other stories elbowing in: the novel quotes heavily from Melville's and Columbus' writings, as well as the medical texts Michael has stored away (he's a nonpracticing physician). This conceit is initially disorienting and orthographically busy, with the disparate quotations set off in italics, boldface, and indentations. But as the quotations begin to cohere around particular themes—fatherhood, exploration, loss, madness, health, faith—the novel becomes an affecting cubist portrait, acquiring its psychological depth by including the multiple ways writers have considered these ideas across the centuries. Metcalf, who was Melville's great-grandson, once said he wrote this novel in part to escape the long shadow of his literary antecedent. Mission accomplished: this work is itself pioneering, anticipating metafictional experiments by Robert Coover, Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, David Shields, and others in the decades since. Unlike many experiments by those writers, though, Metcalf's has a strong narrative arc and (most surprisingly) rhetorical warmth. That's partly thanks to the copious quotations from Melville, which any Moby-Dick admirer will be thrilled to revisit. But once the story gives way to the news stories about Carl that reveal his tragedy, all that quotation takes on a deeper layer of meaning—Michael clings to those old stories not just as a reminder of enduring sensibilities, but as a shield against the horrors of the present. A welcome reappearance of an influential sui generis story.

Kirkus Reviews