Mark Swartz protests a bit too much about the distance he keeps from the protagonist of his first novel, Instant Karma. Though Swartz seems to favor nonautobiographical fiction, young David Felsenstein, underemployed anarchist, fantasizes incessantly about blowing up the Harold Washington Library Center–where Swartz will read from his novel next week. Consider yourself warned.
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“I still have to sort out my feelings toward, one, David, and, two, the 27-year-old who wrote this book,” says Swartz, whose work lay “in a drawer” for seven years before City Lights Books in San Francisco picked it up. Text-obsessed Jewish diarist David’s self-deprecating psychology is plausible. His antics (near the end of his gig as a Salvation Army Santa he’s bawled out for working with a paper bag over his head) and cleverness (his diary’s footnoted like a cross between a textbook and Infinite Jest) are hooky. But as his packed and idle brain milks creepy non sequiturs from the tomes he quotes, you’ll start wishing you didn’t like him so much.
In the novel David takes the logic of Swartz’s thesis a step further, conflating fire and art–“Fire, like art,” he says at one point, “is always diminished by an agenda.” Swartz thinks that’s true of most art, but doesn’t share David’s ideas about fire. “He has some religious baggage he’s not dealing with too well,” he says of his hero. “He’s not too worried about God, but he’s caught up in some kind of Talmudic trap.” A dogged bibliophile who believes in the inevitable obsolescence of all art, David’s shocked by the library’s modern document-preservation techniques, such as regluing bindings and setting books “on conveyer belts to pass through fumigation chambers.” He wants to burn the books in order to save them from a living death.
