Liar (ISBN 0974950289)

Double, Double:
Joe is "no working class hero," but he lives a double life by day a steward in the metal trades at a high rise building going up in the San Francisco of, I don't know, 1990 or so, and at other times he suffers his way through the insular avant-garde writing circles of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and their epigones. Similarly he's got two women as well, a longterm live-in relationship with the artistic, ambitious and elegant Jane, and a dirty little affair with Ann, a married woman who can't get enough of Joe's big construction worker thing. As befits a roman a clef of the San Francisco writing scene of 20 years back, the theoretical disputes between Ron Silliman and Leslie Scalapino form a convincing backdrop to Joe's intellectual disquisitions. Michael Amnasan's novel LIAR works all these complications into one extremely rich and gritty piece of fiction that will have you thumbing through avidly to see how it all ends up. Amnasan's prose style is insanely catchy; after you close this book you will inevitably wind up writing sentences like his--plain, severe, cryptic and often laceratingly cruel, but yours won't be as unsparing or accomplished. He has a keen eye for the outfits his women wear, the way they pet their cats, and in fact he's all observation, like a Robbe-Grillet flaneur. LIAR switches back and forth between paragraphs in the third person, to a first person that seems to be Joe as well, or is he the author? Likewise we sometimes are presented with the present tense--particularly in his descriptions of sex play, and in the tedium of construction work and its hierarchies of union top-down organization--but then, after a tiny white space, we'll be in the past tense, a continuous past of entrapment and lack. He's jarring, but he wants to use the jangly, shifty surfaces of his prose to keep us feeling off balance, like Joe hanging upside down from the girders, high above the little people on the sidewalks of Market and Fremont Street. By now the story of how Amnasan lost track of his manuscript, only to have the only extant copy of it turn up, years later, in the collection of another "New Narrative" writer of the period (Camille Roy) has entered literary history as yet another example of how fragile is reputation and how random the ways art avoids oblivion. Spunky "Ithuriel's Spear" Press of San Francisco, which has already earned our gratitude for its sponsoring of the collection POST WAR by F.S. Rosa and the reprint of Bruce Boone's MY WALK WITH BOB, has pulled another chestnut out of the fire with LIAR, its most daring gamble yet.