Going to Patchogue, by Thomas McGonigle (Tough Poets Press, 260 pp., $26.46)
First published in 1992 by the avant-garde stalwarts Dalkey Archive Press, Going to Patchogue, a morbid, mordant, and at times malicious anti-novel written by Thomas McGonigle, has just been reissued as a paperback by Tough Poets Press. Oddly for such an experimental work, Going to Patchogue received generally positive notices 30-plus years ago from mainstream outlets such as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, and the Los Angeles Times—surely an impossibility today for such a demanding novel.
The modulated praise that McGonigle earned for Patchogue was a high point for a writer whose influences are primarily European and whose uncompromising vision long ago left him at odds with mainstream fiction. To give you an idea of how contemptuous of the literary marketplace McGonigle has been for nearly 40 years, just consider that his obscure debut novel, The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov (1987, Dalkey Archive Press), was a stream-of-consciousness reconstruction of the last moments of Bulgarian politician Nikola Petkov, hanged in 1947 in Sofia after a show trial. Even during the height of the Evil Empire, no one was likely to rush over to the local Barnes & Noble or B. Dalton to scoop up a novel about the ex-head of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, executed by the Soviets for anti-Communist activities. (That Petkov remains in print is a testimony to its evocative power.)
On its surface, Going to Patchogue would seem a far more accessible work than Petkov. A narrator (a novelist named Thomas McGonigle) in extremis, preoccupied with death, possibly contemplating suicide in his Lower East Side apartment (circa 1984), sets out after a series of fits and starts to visit his childhood home in Long Island, which triggers bitter memories of a lifetime ago. That, at least, suffices as a general synopsis, and more than once McGonigle offers his own mocking summary in the text: “A man is living in the city. He takes the train to a village out on the Island. He walks around the village. He meets a number of people. He comes back to the City. Nothing could be more straightforward. Nothing could be easier to follow. Everybody likes to complete a journey.”
A novel as complex as Patchogue, of course, is anything but straightforward. Essentially unclassifiable, it is part novel, part essay, part local history, part travelogue, and part memoir. It interweaves newspaper snippets, photos, obituaries, signage, train schedules, letters, urban legends, poems, municipal board meeting transcripts, portions of an imaginary film script, and a hallucinogenic stream of consciousness into a kind of bleak psychogeography that never stops undermining expectations. To enter the world of Patchogue is to be thrown off balance and to remain so for its entirety. Plot, incident, character development, chronology—all the standard elements of the traditional novel give way to the elliptical, often solipsistic observations of a narrator whose spiritual malaise colors every anecdote.
McGonigle not only dispenses with most literary conventions in Patchogue but also lampoons them at every turn: “Here we are pages later and not a single character has made the scene; there has been no conflict laid into the story, there is no motor installed in the locomotive of plot, no sex to grease the wheels or the pages. Still sitting. Stuck, you could say at the thought: to go on is to leave behind and to have been left behind by other people.”
Similarly, reader expectations are rejected outright, with McGonigle stating his Ars Poetica bluntly: “I am not interested in reality. I am not taking dictation from reality. I could go on and get lost in describing the whole fucking block and planet and then the other blocks up to St. Marks then along St. Marks in either direction but why stop there.”
And while its modernist inspirations are clear (ranging from James Joyce to John Dos Passos, with a nod to Thomas Wolfe, whose Look Homeward, Angel makes a cameo in the text), Patchogue, by repeatedly highlighting its artifice, also evokes the self-reflexive concerns of the later metafiction school, though with a gravitas that reminds us of the difference between American postmodern literature (impish, genre-bending) and its European counterpart (solemn, philosophical). Indeed, what separates Patchogue from the more playful and less substantial metafiction is his ability to imbue his narrator with a human depth that transcends literary puzzle-making. Part of that depth involves the acknowledgment of personal failings and foibles; the narrator emphasizes his own flaws as often as he does those of his repellent cast of characters. At one point, exasperated by the futility of his literary pursuit, he cries out, “Self-centered lout. Ignorant shit! Who gives a flying fuck that you lived, that you will die!”
Going to Patchogue opens with a prologue reminiscent of the “Etymology and Extracts” portion of Moby-Dick, its encyclopedic overview of whales and whaling. This sly parody of Melville even includes a mock epigraph from one H. Malgard warning the reader, in archaic tones, of the unreliability of the forthcoming text. (“Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel.”) Despite its status as a 250-year-old classic, Moby-Dick is also notable for its radical narrative: a first-person account that slips, almost surreptitiously, into third person, with a detour into soliloquies and even a chapter written as a one-act play. Like Moby-Dick, Going to Patchogue swerves from one literary device to another, combining past, present, and future and shifting points of view, its narrative never settling into familiar storytelling.
At times Patchogue drifts into the territory of literary diatribists such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline and especially Thomas Bernhard, with off-topic musings ranging from suburban sprawl to Catholicism—all delivered with misanthropic gusto. But it is Beckett who acts as a lodestar for McGonigle, particularly his late works, with their focus on voices and the claustrophobic narrators who generate these voices out of compulsion, necessity, or despair. The medley of voices in Patchogue—some remembered, some invented—often intrude without warning into the text, underscoring the theme of an impromptu narrative constructed moment by moment, highlighting not only the creative process but also the creative impulse of a gloomy consciousness. Sometimes set off by dialogue tags, sometimes by ellipses, sometimes by italics, and sometimes not at all, these overlapping, interweaving voices occasionally befuddle the reader but expressionistically reflect how a feverish, fictional memory works. And that realization, in the end, provides the skeleton key to Patchogue. “Those voices,” the narrator says. “Am chased about in a small room by those voices.”
As the novel progresses, the narrator encounters several of his old cronies, and Patchogue shifts into a series of comic exchanges between characters, giving McGonigle the opportunity to indulge in extended dialogue that displays both his love of gallows humor and his ear for the twisted vernacular of Long Island barflies, which, of course, includes an assortment of crackerjack insults: “Nothing has penetrated that thick and large head of his. Always the largest baseball cap for him.”
While the narrator has left his provincial village behind and has pursued a cosmopolitan life, the denizens of Patchogue ridicule his literary activities: “You litter the page with all these names of cities, but who cares, since 1964, anyone can travel and has done so; who do you think you are, who cares; where is the conflict, the resolution, the interest, the development?”
A central theme of Patchogue is racism, and the unflinching portrayal of suburban bigotry approaches overkill, with nearly every character, past and present, real or imagined, seemingly possessed by overt or casual loathing. Indeed, Patchogue might qualify for some sort of record for the most racial slurs found in an American novel, a surefire way of vexing millennials and Zoomers, who reliably confuse depiction with approval. In this scathing critique of the xenophobic small-mindedness of a blue-collar enclave only 60 miles away from the liberal sanctuary of New York City, no one is free from what amounts to cultural determinism.
The seemingly inexhaustible pettiness of the village locals also extends to those who have left Patchogue for New York City: “When you had that job in Blue Point sorting gun parts you had more of a future than you do now living in the City, in the slums, with the sounds all night of police cars, fire engines, ambulances, breaking bottles. You had a drink instead of a vision.”
Between the non-sequiturs and ad hoc literary critiques, the narrator recounts—in his own Joycean way—his coming of age in 1960s Long Island. Throughout the rambling second chapter, he reminisces about childhood, including his doomed teenage romance with a girl named Melinda, and the everyday humiliations of high school life, such as when he begins driving an MG through the village: “I had the car for a month when I had an accident and it was back to the school bus for a month and the kids thinking the bank had taken the car back. Hot shit. Look at him.” Among his other fixations are blondes, parking lots (which seem to dominate his memories of Patchogue), authors such as John Rechy and James Thomson, and literary standbys like sex, death, and the Long Island Rail Road. The narrator is, as he mentions, “caught up in the drift of language,” and ultimately, there is no escape from the self.
But just as the narrator is often exasperated by his own digressions, so, too, does the reader occasionally rebel against stretches of indiscriminate prose. While over-inclusiveness may well be the default setting for a tortured psyche (especially that of a litterateur), it often verges on overwhelming. If the narrator seems indefatigable, the reader may not be able to match him for stamina. Here the dry, often absurdly understated, collage elements of the novel—press releases, meeting minutes, newspaper ledes, and so on—function as a merciful relief from the unrelieved pessimism and occasional meandering of the narrator.
Yet there are flights bleak of lyricism throughout the novel, as when the narrator recalls an episode of self-mutilation: “I offer up the wounds and if the camera was as easily available as the typewriter I would paste picture after picture of the scars on my fingers which I once carved with a small kitchen knife to let my central nervous system know I could feel pain in spite of what people said: you don’t feel anything that happens to you; you have a computer instead of emotions. . . . I don’t know what it means to feel anything, but I could feel the knife as it slid back and forth against the side of my finger: first, the second finger and then the index finger, then the fourth finger and, finally, the pinky for the sake of symmetry. Not a ritual of manhood but an admission: manhood had failed to grab me and I was still in that lane in Patchogue from which I should have turned and said: I was a kid, that’s all, a kid, and a kid filled with more poetry than sense, filled with clouds, oozing stones, whispering trees, girls with blonde hair and this one blonde girl who was finally by my side and then lips against lips to hear the watch pounding out something.”
There are also several vivid sections devoted to the Irish diaspora. Though McGonigle was born in Brooklyn, his grandparents emigrated from Ireland, and Patchogue recounts, sardonically, poignantly, the hopes and struggles of his family in its most openly autobiographical elements. Here, the narrator remembers his grandmother speaking about a new life in America that often leaves her in the past: “O, yes, we will sing the songs, play the instruments, more to just get away from the fact: we are here and they are there, back there. How good the songs sound here: a full stomach and a warm room to sing them in and on. Back there you sang to forget the hunger, to forget the cold, but once the radio came people were contented to put the thing on and listen. . . . I am listening to the radio. And do not disturb my listening.”
Other than Professional Bowlers Association champion Mike Fagan, the most famous resident of Patchogue might have been Jeffrey MacDonald, the notorious subject of the true crime classic Fatal Vision. After a lengthy and convoluted legal process, MacDonald was convicted of the 1971 killing of his wife and two children in North Carolina. (McGonigle attended Patchogue-Medford High School at the same time as MacDonald.) By 1992, when Patchogue was published, Long Island was in the midst of a tabloid moment, when a series of bizarre crimes over the course of a decade vaulted the suburban Eden into the popular imagination as a hothouse of murder, madness, and mayhem. There was the Sea Crest Diner incident, a rampage of unimaginable proportions; there was Ricky Kasso, the devil-worshiping “Acid King,” who killed his childhood friend in the woods of Northport; there was the Angel of Death, Richard Angelo, a homicidal nurse who administered lethal doses of Suxamethonium chloride to some of his patients; there was Amy Fisher, the Long Island Lolita; there was the fiendish serial killer Joel Rifkin, who murdered at least 17 prostitutes; and there was the Katie Beers kidnapping, with its nightmare dungeon and unspeakable acts. These crimes, among others, culminated in a 1993 New York Times feature speculating on what, exactly, made Long Island haywire.
This gothic side of Long Island is another avenue that McGonigle explores, and as a travelogue, Patchogue is a perverse spoof—its lurid depictions of sex, racism, and suburban alienation filtered through the twisted consciousness of a tour guide who might be best described as a cross between Jack Torrance, Céline, and Larry David. So unhinged is the narrator (“protagonist” is too dynamic a term for what is essentially a consciousness) that he peppers his exercise in curdled nostalgia with outlandish set-pieces that culminate in a grotesque testimonial dinner that brings to mind something out of a Luis Buñuel film. The raw, unflattering sketches of Patchogue are reminiscent of Max Frisch in his existentialist novel Stiller, in which the eponymous narrator lambastes his native Switzerland to the discomfort of 1950s literary Zurich, and again, Thomas Bernhard, whose over-the-top excoriations of his native Austria enraged then-president (and ex-Nazi) Kurt Waldheim. Neither the narrator nor McGonigle would ever impress the acquisitions editors of Lonely Planet or Rough Guide.
Patchogue detours abruptly in its last chapter, sending the narrator to Europe—Bulgaria, Turkey, Dublin, and Italy—where his wanderings are nearly as eccentric and open-ended as his encounters in Long Island. In this final section, which juxtaposes the quotidian and the surreal, Patchogue thematically coheres, portraying the restless and rootless existence of a man whose unsatisfying journeys also seem to reflect Beckett: “I have never in my life been on my way anywhere; but simply on my way.”
If the first two chapters of Patchogue challenged verisimilitude, the last chapter obliterates it completely: McGonigle writes in a permanent present tense, a literary simultaneity, mixing dates, locations, and events. As the novel reaches its anti-climax, it offers no epiphanies, no grand statements, and no character arcs—only a dejected narrator who begins to imagine an apocalyptic future that encourages him to postpone suicide for one more year. “There are no enemies, that I know of, gunning for me,” he says. “Assassins I carry within myself.”
Disorienting, difficult, disturbing, Going to Patchogue shows that McGonigle, along with Rudolph Wurlitzer, is the last American high modernist, a unique if unsentimental voice too long unheard.
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