Interview with Sam Shalabi

Allen B. Ruch: Hello, Sam! Both myself and Christian are big fans of your music, so thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

Sam Shalabi: My pleasure. Thanks for the interest!

ABR: Before we discuss Against the Day, let’s talk about your interest in literature. In a 2018 interview with MusicWorks, you said you “used to write fiction, before playing music.” What kind of fiction did you write? And what made you decide to devote your time to music instead?

Sam: Yes indeed, I wrote fiction and poetry before I started to play music—and music derailed my literary aspirations twice. As a kid I used to write horror stories. I’m not sure why exactly…but I loved any and all horror movies so that may have been an influence. The very first book I read was Alice In Wonderland, and I discovered it in a strange way. The first house my family moved into after we relocated from Egypt to Prince Edward Island was empty when we moved into it; except in the children’s bedroom, which I shared with my brothers. There was an odd closet which had some junk left over from the previous tenants of the house. Stashed amongst the junk was Alice In Wonderland, a very beaten-up hardcover copy with the classic illustrations. I’ll never forget it. That book had and continues to have maybe the most profound influence on my little (and bigger) brain and writing.

ABR:  I don’t think you’re alone there! It’s still a tremendously inspirational work.

Sam: When I was around 14, I discovered James Joyce. My parents had purchased the World Book Encyclopedia: A-Z with an annual “Science” edition. They got that when I was about 10 years old, and I just loved it. I’d pick out a letter/volume and just sort of drift around in it—reading entries haphazardly and checking out any photo that caught my eye. So, Volume J/K was one book, and I discovered two writers just by being very intrigued by their photos: Franz Kafka and James Joyce.

The first one was Kafka. I loved his spooky face, and I loved his writing! Joyce was the same: I thought his face seemed enigmatic—somehow.

ABR: Kafka’s spooky face! I’m curious how many other people were prompted to explore a writer because of their photograph. For me, it was Oscar Wilde and Aleister Crowley. Your story reminds me of Borges, as well. The first thing he purchased with his literary earnings was a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Sam: I got a copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and it (as I’m sure it’s done with a million other teenage boys) resonated deeply with me. But it was the double whammy of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that changed everything. Those two books affected me and continue to affect me deeply. All I wanted to do was be a writer. In high school, I started writing fiction. I was a terrible student but suddenly I’d found my “calling” in a way. The fact that twice I was accused of plagiarism by my English Lit teacher—to the point where I had to “explain” my stories to her and the principal(!) of the high school—only made me feel I was on the right path.

Then I got an electric guitar—music and fiction started to bleed into each other. I quit high school and sold all my records to be able to travel to Dublin to become a Great Writer (I know how silly that sounds) and ended up in…Ottawa instead (ha)!

ABR: It happens! Did you ever try to get published?

Sam: I wrote a novella there, and by accident met Michael Youle-White, an English professor at Carlton University who I’ll be forever grateful to. He read my manuscript and loved it, even spending weeks editing and proofreading it. We sent it out to various publishers but it was rejected by all.

It was a very strange novella—a sort of cross between Rumble Fish and Finnegans Wake—not surprisingly, it was roundly rejected. For years, Finnegans Wake very much influenced my writing. I ended up feeling beaten and demoralized and went back to Prince Edward Island where I’d grown up (after my family had moved there from Egypt), and started a band—in fact, the first punk rock band on P.E.I.! I kept writing, but music became my focus for a while. I juggled writing fiction and doing music for a long time. During that period I formally studied jazz and modern poetry at St Francis Xavier University. At one point in the mid 90s I gave up music to devote myself to writing fiction.

Then around 1997 I took a long trip to the Four Corners—Arizona, New Mexico, etc.—to do research on a long novel I was writing, and something happened. This weird epiphany that I think the landscape “induced.” I decided to devote myself to music. It was this strange certainty that that was what I was gonna do and have been doing that ever since. But I still very much “think” in fiction/poetry and text. I incorporate a lot of text in my music and work out things the way I used to when I was writing fiction. For example, every Kush piece or any large scale piece, I fill notebooks with structures, characters, dialogue expository writing, etc., well before I start composing the music. Even if only 5% of that process ends up in the finished piece, I need to do that before I can hear the music.

ABR: How were you first exposed to the work of Thomas Pynchon? And how did Pynchon’s writing affect you artistically?

Sam: I was exposed to Pynchon by a friend who ran a really amazing record shop in Charlottetown, P.E.I. He was really tired of me saying that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were the two greatest books in the English language. He handed me a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow and said, “Come back when you’ve read this.” It changed everything. I was about 16 years old when I first read it. It was a life-altering experience that still resonates. I remember the first time I took LSD, I felt like I already “knew” this—from reading Pynchon.

ABR: Sixteen! That’s pretty early for a successful reading of Gravity’s Rainbow, let alone Joyce! What struck you the most from your first reading?

Sam: I guess what struck me most was how much the book felt like the present. I’d been reading Joyce, Kafka, Elliot, and a lot of the European “canon.” Not consciously—I was just following certain vectors out of Joyce, mainly. Reading Pynchon was the first time I felt the modern world is in fact as interesting as the “classical” or Modernist world! As rich and as deep. Even though I was a teenager and growing up on this little island in the backwaters of Canada, I could feel in my bones Pynchon was writing about my world somehow, even though it mostly took place around the end of World War II. I’d never read any literature that felt so much like my present (without being explicitly about “our” present). Gravity’s Rainbow is like a frequency—the frequency of the late 20th century. It made my world itself feel mythological, deep and dense and infinitely profound—suddenly my own time was as interesting as Joyce’s or Homer’s or Melville’s.

And—a very big and—it was the funniest thing I’d ever read. Pynchon’s humour resonated so deeply with me. It was the first “literature” that was LOL. I would laugh until I cried at certain scenes in the book—I’d never read anything so funny. I was already interested in two big motifs in the book—science and drugs—and to read a book that was so deep, and had those two elements baked in so deeply, I basically was and am hooked for life. It really did change my life.

ABR: Let’s talk about your musical response to Pynchon. Land of Kush fuses psychedelia, progressive rock, jazz, and mid-century Egyptian big band. With nearly thirty members, the group represents quite an achievement! Kush’s first album is Against the Day, each song named for and inspired by a section in Pynchon’s 2006 novel. Did Pynchon’s novel factor into your initial conception of the group? Or was Against the Day simply a focus for its initial creative energies?

Sam: The musical piece Against the Day started life as an electronic composition that was commissioned. I was supposed to present it at a gallery in Ontario. I was reading the novel around that time and was very much in that headspace, and so took advantage and based the piece around the novel. (The opening of the album, “The Light Over the Ranges” gives an idea of what that electronic piece sounded like.) I had already composed it but then that gig was cancelled.

ABR: I’m not surprised to hear the album started as an electronic composition. The analogue electronics really stand out—there’s a very “Silver Apples” feel to the textures, an evocation of science fiction. What inspired you to use vintage electronics?

Sam: The electronics are akin to “The Chums of Chance”—anachronistic and futuristic! I love how analog electronics always sound like Future Past and vice versa—they sound like The Possible. There’s an optimism about that sound…like something interesting is about to happen.

ABR: That’s a terrific way of putting it—I still get excited when I hear the original Doctor Who theme! Or Pierre Henry’s “Psyché Rock.” So, how did things evolve from a canceled solo project into an epic involving thirty people?

Sam: Without going into too much detail: Land of Kush had existed as a completely instrumental ensemble very influenced by Oum Khalsoum—I had written two long pieces for the group around 2000–01. I pulled the plug on that version because I think my writing for the group wasn’t very good, and I don’t think at that time the ensemble knew what I was trying to do—which was mainly my fault—or understood Maqam so well.

ABR: Maqam is an Arabic mode of music, yes? Am I correct in understanding that it’s partially improvisational?

Sam: Maqam literally means “steps” or “stages” in Arabic—Maqam is both the form and content of Arabic music. So for example, Iraqi Maqam has a certain structure. There’s a sequence of scales you follow, and certain scales you transition into to get to the next scale. And there’s certain melodic motifs and rhythms, meters (called Waz’n) you have to play in a certain sequence to introduce or get out of a section or stage. The word Taksim refers to improvisation; how you improvise using Maqam.

In its more widespread usage, Maqam refers to scales—particularly ¼ tone scales, which are non-tempered, non-Western scales.

ABR: Non-tempered? Can you explain for readers who may be unfamiliar with the term?

Sam: Tempered music is literally a kind of ½ tone music—diatonic—with only two types of musical intervals: half step and whole step; whereas Arabic or non-tempered music has other intervals between tones like ¼ , ⅛, etc. These are the notes that make Arabic music sound Arabic. So more often than not—since Maqam has loosened up considerably in the 20th century, it doesn’t refer to the form or structure of Arabic music but the notes—the scale and certain rules about how to play that scale are usually ¼ tone scales which are only found in Arabic music.

ABR: I think it’s interesting that a lot of avant-garde composers explored quarter tones in the mid-twentieth century: Boulez, Penderecki, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and of course Tristan Murail. But yeah, it never really made a comeback in Western music.

Sam: All music, without exception, Western or not, had ¼ tones. You find different versions of ¼ tone in all non-tempered music—Japanese, Indian, Greek, etc., all have ¼ notes. These are basically the “in-between” notes that Western music got rid of progressively, and by the time of Bach, was pretty much on its way out. In a way, Western music is characterised by its lack of ¼ tones, with the obvious exception of African American music.

ABR: What caused you to return to the Land of Kush ensemble?

Sam: So the ensemble was inactive for about 8 years. Around the time my electronic piece inspired by Against the Day was shelved, a festival in Montréal (Suoni Per il Popolo) asked if I wanted to do another large ensemble gig. I’d been to Egypt a few years prior to that, and I was very inspired by vocal music there. I had written an album in Cairo (Eid, 2008) mostly centered around vocals. I wanted to work with vocalists again, so I decided to translate the electronic version of Against the Day into the big band version; which was how the piece took shape and Land of Kush got reactivated.

ABR: Against the Day takes a unique approach to songwriting. The album has three vocalists, and each wrote their own lyrics. What were your creative reasons for this approach?

Sam: I tend to want the singers to write their own lyrics for both creative and pragmatic reasons—lack of rehearsal time is a big reason! But the main reason is the improvisational element. Since I write the melodies/arrangements, I think it’s good for singers to have this zone where they can have leg room and input into the process. It’s more fun that way. For my “solo” albums, I always write the lyrics because those pieces tend to be 100% composed; whereas in Kush, I want an open element to the singing where and when there needs to be one.

ABR: Having heard the album many times, it seems the lyrics are only tangentially related to the novel. How much freedom did you give each lyricist? Did you impose any frameworks, restrictions, or inspirations? And finally, are the lyricists themselves familiar with the novel?

Sam: I like when other voices give their take on an idea or concept I might put in their head. I first discuss what the piece is about—the concept and ideas behind the composition, etc. Some singers work off of that, while others actually go to the source and read the book, as in the case of Against the Day and Monogamy. Admittedly, it’s hit and miss, but that tangential, aleatory quality can open things up more.

And maybe it’s obvious or not, but things not always “working” isn’t always a bad thing. There’s a perverse part of me that welcomes “Bad Art,” because there’s a part of me that doesn’t really know what bad or good art is anyways. In a sense, to walk that thin line is very, very important to me, and fucking up or something completely uncanny which I could never predict or control, could happen. I think art or music is one of the few places in life where we can really fuck up—to get too close to the sun and be burned—and not hurt anyone or yourself really. Except maybe your reputation or career (ha), but that’s all a part of learning. I’ve certainly fucked up a bunch in that respect (even being blacklisted and boycotted from two festivals for it ) and part of that “relinquishing” control in terms of a concept I care very much about is about that idea.

ABR: I would love to hear more about how you got blacklisted from a musical festival! Christian Hänggi—who’s actually a musician, unlike me!—has a few questions about Kush’s music.

Christian Hänggi: I have a special interest in Pynchon’s use of musical instruments, and you seem to be a great interview partner to learn from. Three of his favorite instruments are the kazoo, the ukulele, and the harmonica, his “preterite” instruments. All of them have one or several appearances in Against the Day, but none of them appear on your album (unlike the saxophone which Pynchon also appears to be fond of). Still, the global outlook of the novel is well represented by your music. How did you decide on your instrumentation of the album or, more broadly, Land of Kush?

Sam: Pynchon loves his kazoos, doesn’t he?! Well, I’ve used ukulele and harmonica in other compositions, but Land of Kush’s make-up was very much inspired by the great Arabic classical ensembles. More conceptually, Oum Khalsoum integrated electric guitar and saxophone in her bands and Abdel Halim Hafez used very Doors sounding organ in his. I like the concept and challenge of integrating whatever I “need” in Kush for the specific composition. (For instance, one Kush piece featured a tap dancer in the percussion section—he almost passed out, as it was a nearly 2-hour piece.) But in Kush there is the “core” ensemble (instruments that have always been there) and ones I only use for that specific piece. And it’s true: Modernism, as far as the early 20th century version in Egypt, which I kind of used as a template for the album Against the Day, intersects nicely with the “exotic” qualities and locales of the novel.

Christian: Another instrument-related question, if I may: In the novel, Frank Traverse goes undercover in a band and is given a Galandronome, reminiscent of Tony Curtis’s tenor sax in Some Like It Hot (1959). While the novel claims the bassoon was “once standard issue in French army bands,” I had to go to actual books in a real library to find out more. Before reading the novel, have you ever heard of this instrument? Could it, in fact, be a mirror-image bilocated tenor sax (double reed vs. single read, so forth)?

Sam: I’d never heard of it outside of the book!

ABR: Speaking of the book again… It’s very clear that Against the Day isn’t intended as a mere soundtrack to Pynchon’s novel. However, when listening to music inspired by literature, it’s often a temptation to seek literal relationships. Are there any sections you clearly identify with sequences from the narrative?

Sam: Not really, no. I always think of music inspired by a novel or text as a parallel phenomenon—and a reactive causal one—an Event. It’s one of the most fun things about writing music, for me: just to “intuitively” respond to something and see what kind of “thing” it is without being conscious of what exactly I’m doing while I’m doing it. There’s always a Sense to a reaction I think—a logic—and if there seems like there isn’t, it’s even better in a funny way. I feel the act of writing how I do is like how a boxer or gymnast trains and trains each day. When the moment comes to write, I just assume “I’m ready.” That approach obviously comes from my background in jazz and free improvisation—you practice and practice, and when the time comes to play, you forget it all—you can’t really make it work otherwise. That “technique” or process has a huge and profound influence on me. In that respect, fucking up, flubbing notes, creating monsters or “bad” things is very very valuable, too.

ABR: Were any creative decisions you made directly influenced or inspired by the text?

Sam: I get inspired mainly by how a text and the ideas in it “sings.” The challenge of flipping that around in a way—to make “singing” or music “textual”—narrative—and music is a really great vessel for that. Pynchon in particular is dealing with things like mathematics, science, etc. in a very poetic way. I’ve always felt he’s an extremely musical writer—symphonic, really. And so, Against the Day—the book—I felt was a kind of Ikea assembly instruction, Exploded View or a tool kit: as in “Here you go, now go make your own Against the Day!”

Intuition informed by discipline is very important. It allows the act of creation to be “gestural” for me. I like the Heideggerian idea of Attunement—that once you’re in that “frequency” or once you’re tuned into the ground or Dasein etc. (once you’re “ready”) of that particular thing’s Being, poetry, intuition is the compass. Like a tuning fork you “sing out” in that same frequency—and so in a way it’s a form of mimetic (hopefully) shamanism (then again most shamanic stuff is mimetic) or speaking in (other) tongues. I’m basically trying to tune in to the text and play my own version of what I hear, and so certainly there are “specific” characters and events in the structure of the music; but I (or the music) would probably need psychoanalysis to sort those out… That’s generally how I work, and I love it because it’s a lot of fun and I “trust” it. In a way “you can do no wrong” even when the result is something that you can’t tell is any good. A lot of my music is like that—it “feels” right but I truly have no idea if it’s any good or I’m easily convinced that it’s bad (ha).

Christian: A Thelonious Monk quote, “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light” (which I haven’t been able to trace back to Monk verbatim, so perhaps Pynchon is paraphrasing or maybe it’s something he heard Monk say at a concert) opens Pynchon’s Against the Day. In your liner notes, you emphasize the role of light and you briefly touch upon Monk’s somewhat cryptic utterance. Could you expand on why you think Pynchon chose this epigraph for precisely this novel and what it means to you? Do you see Monk the musician or Monk the mystic represented elsewhere in the novel, as a bilocated character or as resonance, perhaps?

Sam: Well, I certainly couldn’t source the quote by Monk and it may be apocryphal—but it really sounds like something Monk would say. I think it’s a great “pointer” of what’s coming in the book. I think one of the great achievements in Against the Day is that Pynchon uses Light as Temporality. It shapes the tempo of the book and infuses everything in the book, figuratively and literally. But in a way, it could have been an epigraph for any of Pynchon’s books—the idea that we are in darkness, that we are always surrounded by it and the universe is a mostly dark place, as above, so below. Without light, lightness, The Word, and how light/frequency/sound/music “save” us and attune us, we quite literally would be (are) in eternal night. Light is the act of creation to ward off the darkness and entropy which is always lurking around the corner.

ABR: I agree—spurious or not, the Monk quote would make a suitable epigraph for any of Pynchon’s books. There’s a reason we call our site Spermatikos Logos, a religious phrase meaning the “generating principle of the universe.” Let there be Light, the Word, etc…

Keeping on the subject of light, in your liner notes you write, “each section of the music stays pretty close to the arc that Light traverses in the novel because I really think there’s a deep deep method to HOW and WHERE Light travels in the book, and what it does to the characters.” Would you mind elaborating on your interpretation?

Sam: My reading of it (and I wouldn’t dare try to seriously convince anyone that my reading is The One) is that Light acts in this book the way Entropy functions in a lot of Pynchon’s other works: Subject—Predicate—and Object. Certainly Light is a subject/object and character in the book—the “discovery” of electromagnetism, electricity, and special relativity pervade the text, and these things are a kind of Holy Grail sought after for both positive and negative schemes. But in another sense, they are the universe and multiverses of our world and the world of the novel.

But yes, I think Light is the “limit” of the narrative in the book—the speed of light—the overlapping narratives, coincidences etc. are in a kind of Fourier series of various frequencies, waves etc.—harmonics of each other and different timespaces. There’s Lorenzen Transformations (with “inert” narratives and their “velocities” and moving frames of reference interacting with each other etc.) built in to the structure of the book—how certain “world lines” are faster/slower than other coincident worlds and timelines—how characters brush up against a “limit” their own limit or mortality and what they do to “solve” or resolve it (in some ways the sections of the book seem more like light cones intersecting other ones). There’s also (a Pynchon favorite) imaginary, complex numbers and their implications as a narrative tool. But mainly those two things: the relationship of the harmonic spectrum of light, sound, color frequency, and optics reflections/refractions, etc.; and the speed of light and how it bends space/time. These ideas shape everything in the book.

Joseph McElroy in Women and Men uses a similar “set up,” specifically using Lorenz Transformations. But to me, McElroy’s book is pretty clunky. Another of Pynchon’s great achievements in Against the Day is that these subjects are so gracefully woven into the fabric of the book that they’re barely noticeable, yet they profoundly shape the book. Pynchon is such a master of making physics and mathematics sing.

Christian: Pynchon references or alludes to most of the innovators in jazz at one time or another. Why do you think he never mentions or somewhat unambiguously alludes to John Coltrane in his entire published work? What historical musicians that are important to you do you feel he left out?

Sam: Hmmm… I’m not sure I’d look at it that Pynchon has “left out” any jazz innovators. I think he leans in a certain direction, maybe? But if I were to do a quick shot at that I’d say he is really into bebop—Parker, Gillespie, Monk, etc.—and there’s a really big Beat influence in Pynchon’s writing so that kind of makes a certain kind of sense. What I hope I did with his writing, I think he does with music, which he clearly loves and is inspired by. He’s taken stuff like, say, bebop or psychedelic music and made it “textual”—it’s in his writing—so I don’t think he’s left anyone out in that respect. But it’s funny you mention Coltrane, as I’ve just released an electronic music album inspired by late-period Coltrane [Bennu, 2022].

Christian: You have spoken very highly of Pynchon’s writing. Are there any novels of his you do not like or do not find inspirational for your own work? If so, which ones and why?

Sam: I’d say I love them all. They are like old friends I love, warts and all. The one that was disappointing at the time was Vineland. I’d read all of his books before it came out and when it was announced I was giddy with anticipation—Gravity’s Rainbow changed my life, and I was expecting something like “that”—kind of like his Finnegans Wake or J R after it. Vineland, though, isn’t that… I enjoyed it but thought it was disappointing for sure. Too high expectations. But when I read it again maybe about 8 years later, from a far enough shore away from “The 80s” I went OH RIGHT: Vineland is exactly how the 80s felt, and I realized it is an amazing, sad, unique, and funny book. It also later seemed like a kind of “eulogy” for the 60s, using Sometimes a Great Notion as it’s template.

Inherent Vice, I think, is his Weed Book—maybe not as deep as his Big Books but I don’t think it’s even trying to be—it’s really like getting stoned and watching YouTube videos and getting the munchies. If there was a “weaker” book in Pynchon’s oeuvre I’d say it’s this one, but it’s hard to fault Pynchon for wanting to write a Stoner Mystery Pulp Novel.

ABR: Glad to meet another Vineland fan! One aspect of your work that intrigues me is the way you approach your literary inspirations with unexpected musical expressions. We’ve talked a lot about Pynchon, but you’ve also created oud pieces based on works by weird fiction writers such as Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen [Bead, 2021]. First, what about Machen’s “The White People” inspired you, and second, how did you decide on the form that inspiration would take?

Sam: I love Machen’s writing and “The White People” is a masterpiece in weird fiction atmospherics. The key for me in setting it to music is my love of British acid folk. There’s a strong influence of the occult and British Wiccan paganism in Machen’s writing and also in British acid folk, so it seemed obvious that that would be the key. I heard artists like Incredible String Band, Anne Briggs, Shirley Collins, etc., wafting through “The White People” and so my approach was through an adaptation of that music with a kind of “technical” approach on oud to capture that atmosphere—influenced by Steve Tibbetts, a singular artist, whose acoustic music has that same pagan, occult element I hear in Machen’s fiction.

ABR: Do you have any other major “literary-based” projects in the works? And given the scope and scale of Kush’s Against the Day, do you have any “dream projects” based on literature you’d like to share? You know, a Moby-Dick opera set to autoharp and 100-member choir?

Sam: Well, I’ve already used a 52-piece vocal choir to set Short Sentences, a play by Gertrude Stein, to music. So I was only 50 voices shy!

In fact there’s so much writing I’d love to interpret via music. I’ve done a lot of it already. Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot on Luteness, an album I did in 1999. Naguib Mafouz in experimental Arabic “druggy” music I did for his novel, Adrift on the Nile. I also did a large scale composition around the book Alma Venus by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt that got me in trouble (won’t go into the details but it was a bit of a controversy in the world of “experimental music,” which is why no one, except those who were at the performance, knows about it). A while back, I wanted to use Mark Leyner’s early fiction (which I love) in a piece which may still happen. And the same with William Gaddis.

But in general, writing/fiction/text is as much an influence on my music as is music. It’s always there, and I’d say 70% of my music is sparked or directly involved with writing in some way. I also read a lot of physics/science/mathematics books since I was a teenager (another reason why Pynchon resonates so much with me) that stuff has had a profound effect on my music. Right now and over the last two years, I’ve been assembling “speech” for what will be a kind of radio play with music and text—kind of inspired by Robert Ashley, and very inspired by J R by William Gaddis.

ABR: Last question. Some visitors coming to this page from the literary side may not be familiar with your music; while visitors arriving as Sam Shalabi fans may not be familiar with Pynchon. Do you have any musical recommendations for the first group, and any literary recommendations for the second?

Sam: For the first group, I think Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, and Halim El-Dabh. They are three composers I love and I think everyone should know them. For the second group—read Pynchon! I’ve turned a lot of people onto Pynchon already but everyone should read him. I still think James Joyce is the best Feelgood writer and these days. It’s a good time to read stuff that makes you feel good—it’s a good time for Joyce’s Big Yes. For a non-fiction book that I loved that might make you feel bad (haha) but at least prepared and informed, I’d recommend The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshanna Zuboff. But if anyone wants to read a book that is “Pynchon-like” and very musical, I’d have to go with the old dark horse classic The Recognitions by Gaddis.