NEO PHOBE
by Jim Feast with Ron Kolm.

When writers write about writing there is a particular theme that always emerges: that the act of writing is singular. This is the theme in Hemingway's 1954 Nobel Prize speech when he says, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life…For [the writer] does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.” This is what Graham Greene means when he calls writing “the most private of all the arts.” Shortly after reading Jim Feast and Ron Kolm's Neo Phobe, I was reading Joan Didion's "Can't Get that Monster Out of My Mind" on the subway, and not being able to get Neo Phobe out of my mind myself, when I read Didion's claim, “I think we would all agree that a novel is nothing if it is not the expression of an individual voice, a single view of experience” I could only smile. 

You see, before Neo Phobe there might have been a nod of the head, or my eyes might have just casually moved along the words while my brain filed them in the mental cabinet I like to keep for writers writing about writing. But after Neo Phobe there is only a smile, like the smile of a person who knows a dirty little secret. Neo Phobe is essentially writers writing about writing. The novel follows an underground collective of writers, the Neo Phobes, in an effort to solve the "Demon Lover Rapist" case in order to write a best-selling true crime book. Their investigation leads them through a complex network of Pro-Life evangelical Christians and technology corporations, all while trying to land a book contract, arrange readings, organize Le Bal Des Artistes, and discuss a rabbit's involvement in the Kennedy assassination, whether Poe's or Dickinson's case of necrophilia was worse, and the central problem of the modern era—temps.

As a novel, Neo Phobe is singular in its plurality. In its very title, Neo Phobe resists the singular, oneness. This, after all, is not the single word neophobe, one who fears change, technology, and social transformation. What is this two-word Neo Phobe? I like to speculate that the anagram for "one" that The Matrix has already sent into our collective consciousness here coupled with phobe (phobia, fear, aversion) suggests the retraction, the pulling away from oneness that characterizes the novel. In dealing with a collective of writers collaborating, Neo Phobe challenges this sense of the singular voice and the single view of experience. Just as the writers try to figure out how these disparate women became victims of the same crime, the reader throughout the novel is trying to figure out how this disparate group of people will ever solve the mystery and become authors of the same true crime book, surviving each one's claim to be doing most of the work, their different and fluctuating attitudes toward the project and toward their fellow Phobes.

Dealing with the hot-button issue of abortion is difficult. The tendency is to reduce both or either side to simple caricature or to become too didactic. While Neo Phobe does not deny itself the fun of caricature, it paints a richer, more complex portrait of the debate and its many—not just two—sides, sustaining a number of views on the issue (Deacon Thistle struggling with his Pro-Life beliefs, haunted by the face of the dead girl he turned away from the abortion clinic, Marcus Riley struggling with his Pro-Choice position, thinking of abortion in connection with racial genocide and the history of sterilization, traditional Chinese views on infantile death and aborted fetuses). 

Beyond the multiplicity of characters and views are the various issues of genre. Neo Phobe defies a single genre. It does not fit too snugly into the conventions of detective fiction. In fact, by S.S. Van Dine's 1928 outline of twenty rules for detective fiction, Neo Phobe is not detective fiction at all (cite that there is more than one detective and criminal, cite the giant talking animal at the end, cite anything in the book, really). It makes a nod to science fiction with sound retractors, memory implanters, Rayograph Bibles, and Astral Projector holograms invading the streets 'beheading' people. Interludes of erotica, episodes of the thriller, various genres come into the novel. And into what single genre can you put the conversations the Phobes get into at the Bull and Shamrock? About five different languages come into Neo Phobe, and the novel also breaks down its archetypical oneness in its very form. It seems the novel itself cannot bear the story and has to mine other literary forms to move it forward.

Unwieldy conversations seem to call in the help of dramatic format, for example:
Riley: “Say what?”
“The medulla is the brain space[…].”
Uranus: “What's that got to do with what we're talking about?”
Poetry takes on the role of direct speech with a machine, and the novel ends with an interchange of prose and poem. 

Having read Neo Phobe it is hard to look at the novel the same. All those accepted generalizations on the novel and writing are called into question, and Neo Phobe itself is called into question. Is Neo Phobe the anti-novel in its rejection of the singular voice and its sense of collaboration and crowdedness in what is supposed to be private and alone, or is it the ultra-novel in its maximizing on the dialogic and heteroglossic character that Bakhtin found peculiar and central to the novel? For those interested in the fate of the novel and where the novel is going, Neo Phobe is essential. Does the breaking down of the singular and the rampant plurality suggest a cancer and the imminent death of the novel? Or does it suggest the expansion of the novel into a new literary age? While we, indeed, must deal with the defining problems of literature in our times, leaving aside these more weighty questions for a better form—a conversation—I conclude that Neo Phobe is ultimately a strange, fun, and enthralling read. Jack Uranus towards the end of the novel half laments that books are collaborations, that there are no more “hermetic geniuses” producing literary masterpieces. “Whole groups must come together,” he says, “to make one great authorial voice.” The question remains after reading Neo Phobe, would you have it any other way? 

 --Anitta Santiago