Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant

Dan Green on Edmond Caldwell’s Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant:

Edmond Caldwell’s Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant (Say It With Stones) is a much worthier and more accomplished book than 99% of what is published as “literary fiction” by most “name” publishers. It takes numerous risks, both formally and thematically, but it also manages to be entertaining without conceding to conventional notions of plot arcs or backstory or “fine writing.”

Of course, that it does take risks is the primary reason it couldn’t be published by one of those name publishers. While it may be true that adventurous, iconoclastic writing has never found much favor among publishers (Sorrentino, Gaddis, e.g.), even publishers who claim to prize “literary value” as much as commercial value, these days small presses and self-publishers are taking up even more of the slack left by the abandonment by publishers of all but the safest, most formulaic versions of the literary. Such books might tweak established practice here and there, but the truly innovative writers are inhabiting the fringes of literary culture, as represented by mainstream publishing, more than ever. (The career of Gary Lutz seems to me a prime example.)

The first thing that undoubtedly would trouble many would-be publishers of Human Wishes/Enemy Combatants is to be found most directly in the title, which is taken from two separate chapters (the last two) in what the title page identifies as a novel, but which could as easily be taken as a sequence of stories featuring the same protagonist.

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