Fail better

The voice of a former (and admittedly, older) colleague echoed through the hollow chambers of my head when I began Josh Barkan’s debut novel, Blind Speed (Northwestern, $21.95). Encountering a metafictional direct address from the author on the first page, I remembered a gray-templed critic once uttering: “Experimental fiction is a young man’s game.”

The implication, of course, is that any novel with extratextual elements at the forefront requires extra work. Not so, says Barkan.

“I just wanted to have fun,” says Barkan, 39, from his New York apartment. “I wanted to write a book that I would want to read, and the books that I like to read put the story first and foremost. So I didn’t want to distract from the story.”

The author’s voice—which interjects at moments to clarify or to expand on some of the research—never feels intrusive so much as provides a backbeat to the story. Not that the story needs much help: a sort of comedic bildungsroman about a man who should have grown up by now, Blind Speed takes on everything from the personal to the political.

When the novel begins, 31-year-old Paul Berger teaches American studies at a New England community college. He’s on shaky ground, however, as he heads for tenure and can’t get past the first chapter of his book-in-progress. He and his fiancée, Zoe, stop in at a reenactment of “the shot heard round the world” in Concord, Massachusetts, when he spies a ring of reporters on the outskirts of the battlefield. It turns out it’s his older brother, a high-profile lawyer, announcing a run for Congress. And as Paul greets the successful Cyrus, even taking a spin in his brother’s limo, a bumbling Revolutionary War enthusiast accidentally shoots Zoe.

The story takes even more twists, including a flashback that has Paul visiting a “health retreat” in Iowa, where a spurious healer gives him an ominous palm reading. As the book continues, the various vague predictions begin to crystallize. Oh, and Cyrus has Paul kidnapped by a cadre of ecoterrorists, to generate positive publicity for his campaign.

Mostly, though, if it’s not clear from all of that, Blind Speed is about failure—Paul struggles to keep his job, hang onto his fiancée and match up to his successful older brothers (another brother died in the Pentagon on September 11).

“I wanted to write about failure,” Barkan says, “actual failure. A lot of stories focus on success, but that’s not what a lot of us experience in this country; there’s a lot of us still trying to make it somehow.”

Part of Paul’s difficulties stem from his intense fear of failure, and as his life takes more and more outrageous turns, he constantly has to ask himself whether he is in control, or if he’s succumbed to some notion of fate.

Barkan says he wanted the narrator’s voice in the book, in part because he knew he was asking the reader to go on something of a fantastical ride.

“Life is stranger than fiction,” he says. “And if you create a fictional world as wacky as regular life, people think it’s not real. So I wanted to stop and have that fourth voice try to regain that trust in the reader.”

Barkan reads from Blind Speed Sunday 7 and Tuesday 9.