Out In The Mountains : Arts & Entertainment

Krandall Kraus’s admirably ambitious new novel, Bardo, is probably not for readers who require a straightforward narrative or tight plot-line. Kraus casts conventional storytelling aside in favor of an existential and elliptical look at the range of possibilities within an individual life at the moment of death. Yet in spite of its philosophical intentions and the sometimes abstract nature of its prose, Bardo offers a world the average reader can easily enter: it’s a complex, contrived novel with a simple, uncontrived heart.

The term ‘bardo,’ as the author explains in the novel’s foreword, refers to the Tibetan Buddhist belief in an “in between place,” the state in which one thing ends and another begins. Bardo is so brief it “virtually transcends time and space,” and has “a quality of uncertainty, even paranoia.”

The foreword outlines the challenge Kraus has set for himself and warns the reader that what is about to unfold takes place in a fraction of an instant – and a less than fully coherent instant at that.

The bardo concept provides not only the novel’s philosophical core, but also a handy structural gimmick giving the author great latitude to wander – back and forth in time, between that which seems real and that which seems fantastic or dreamlike, between what was and what might have been. It’s a gimmick Kraus cleverly uses to meld several different types of narratives into one; the reader, meanwhile, is left to pull a whole life from the fragments the author has scattered around him. This task could be “challenging” (as the press release optimistically hopes) or irritating, depending on the reader’s point of view.

I must admit I dipped skeptically into Bardo. I’m leery of literary gimmicks, particularly ones with a philosophical bent. How easily the philosophical slides into pretension; how swiftly the author’s challenge becomes the reader’s nightmare! The New-Agey Buddhist cover art wasn’t particularly reassuring.

I was pleased, then, to discover that though Kraus sprinkles Buddhist musings throughout the novel, his spiritual touch is relatively light, allowing the reader to remain grounded amid the shifting sands of reality and time. And for all of the novel’s experimentation in form, Kraus is, by and large, a clean, direct writer.

The essential story is that EG, who, on July 2 at 10:19:59:58:28 A.M., lies in a White Room on his deathbed. From here, Kraus zigzags through pivotal moments in EG’s life, focussing repeatedly on certain scenes – a boy getting into bed naked with his father, a slimmed-down Catholic college student confronting and seducing his childhood tormentor, an old woman in a nightgown peeling an apple with a scythe, a man tumbling beautifully to his death. Each time the scene appears from a slightly, or sometimes radically, different viewpoint.

Complicating matters is the inevitable impression that EG is not one character but many: a San Franciscan AIDS veteran tending a dying lover and seeking solace with his dog in a place called Anchor Bay; an aging Hollywood actor pining for his glamorous past and attempting one last seduction; a brutal leader of a gay paramilitary unit seeking sadistic revenge on “Breeders”; a man in Houston with a fiancŽe and a dying mother; a disabled young man in love with his abusive attendant.

As if that weren’t enough, early incarnations of (presumably) EG crop up as the innocent yet sexually curious child called “The Boy,” and as the overweight but clever Catholic adolescent called “AD.” In some scenes, The Boy communicates with the adult EG, acting as a sort of inner child simultaneously needing and offering affection, The Boy helping EG rediscover innocence in desire, EG helping The Boy discover desire in innocence.

To Kraus’s credit, describing Bardo is more complicated than reading it. Though, ultimately, the author puts more balls up in the air than one book can handle without a few of them landing with a thud, surrendering to Bardo is not the onerous feat it could have been. I rarely suspected Kraus was playing literary tricks just for the sake of it. Rather, I had the sense the author himself has faced mortality – his acknowledgments include a doctor “who kept me alive long enough to write this” – and felt certain this was his best method for describing a moment we might contemplate but can only experience when it’s too late to be articulate.

The overtly psychological/philosophical portions of the novel dip into clichŽed jargon – which Kraus amusingly acknowledges in the occasional aside – but accepting Bardo on literary terms isn’t such a leap if one can accept the following sentence: Doesn’t every life unfold, one possibility at a time, only to reveal that all possibilities were present all along?

Reading Bardo I was reminded of two other fine novels: Mark Merlis’s American Studies”and Dale Peck’s Martin and John. Bardo resembles American Studies in that it involves a bed-ridden man reassessing his life. Structurally, it’s more in keeping with Martin and John, in which characters with the same names are viewed from myriad perspectives, and certain small details are repeated over and over until they acquire an almost hypnotic power.

While not quite up to the level of those essential gay readings, Bardo, at its best – which, ironically, is often when Kraus’s prose is most pared down – has a hypnotic power and honesty of its own. It contains some of the most disturbingly erotic scenes I’ve read recently, and some of the most plainly tender. The novel, comprised of so many disparate elements, never quite coheres – if it was meant to – but there are a number of scenes worth returning to, just as Kraus does, just as we all might if we are fortunate and strong enough to re-envision our existence in the state known as bardo.