A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man by Pierce Day – PART ONE OF FOUR

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man (Screenshot Books, 2024) is available from Metalabel

PART ONE: I WOULD HAVE SOLD MY DIRTY SOUL TO WRITE THIS BOOK

I’ve been coming back and forth to this post/review/digressive essay for several weeks.

Pierce Day’s 2024 modernist novel, A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man, it is fair to say, has been haunting me…

Every time I think I have written down every thought I could have had about it, I end up writing more, editing less, and expanding and expanding and expanding.

Pierce Day sent a physical copy of the book to me from New Zealand, and has checked in on my progress in both reading it and then writing about it, responding to it, a few times since. Which is fair enough – this is clearly a book that is effortful, passionately put together and – for me at least (so far) unforgettable.

And every time Day emails I have to hold my hands up and say that I’m not quite there yet with collating and finalising my thoughts.

I’m not done with it yet.

And I do worry – even as I now track back to the start of this mess of notes and ideas and quotations and thoughts that I’ve amassed – that, even now, this won’t be it…

Even today, as I commit myself to finally getting through this edit, I worry that I won’t be able to do it.

A few days ago, I sent Pierce Day some interview questions that were meant as a short follow up to the in-progress review, but even as I tried to formulate just a handful of the questions I had about his novel, I found myself spinning and spinning and spinning words and theories and opinions and had an email of questions-cum-comments that quickly exceeded 1,000 words.

I didn’t know you could even write emails that long in the gmail app…

I worry that A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man and this post about it is going to end up taking over this blog.

I fear that I am going to have to split what is currently below this introduction into two, into three, into four separate pieces… (EDIT: Yes, this is PART ONE of FOUR)

Maybe A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man will end up as something I can never stop writing about.

Maybe this will be what TriumphOfTheNow.com ends up being for the rest of its existence.

Maybe I will be writing and thinking about A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man for the rest of my life.

–///–

Why has it stuck to me?, you might be wondering.

Is it because I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever read in my life? Something I loved with a passion and a fire and felt was an uncriticisible work of flawless literary art? Bluntly, over-simply: No.

But it wasn’t something I could dismiss or forget about or see as drowning in misdirected potency either.

No.

I was wondering for a while, too, why I couldn’t quit you, A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man, but I did eventually figure out the reason.

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is the novel I would have wished I had written, when I first started writing prose and fiction with energy well over a decade and a half ago.

Yes.

This is a riff on Ulysses.

It is an extended piece on internet culture.

On sex and politics and literature and art and relationships and humanity and, again, on Ulysses.

It is bombastic and it is huge, it is complex and it is something that feels both raw and laboured.

It displays a clear and sheer sense of its own intentions, it evokes a person and a milieu and a world and it is uncompromising in its difficulty, in its stylistic choices and in the decisions that have been made as a creative venture.

It is intelligent, it is serious, it respects and trusts itself as a text, and it is clearly an achievement that has been hard won.

But was it all worth it? That’s what I’ll be exploring, in great length, on TriumphoftheNow.com over the next few days…

–///–

Is A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man the best book I’ve ever read? No.

Did I love it, in its entirety? No.

But I also didn’t hate it in its entirety, and there were moments, chapters, sections, that I genuinely felt were transformatively breathtaking and a spectacular execution of what the novelist was attempting to do.

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is colossal, it is complex and, yes, it is self-indulgent (but what, when you really get down to it, is worth doing that isn’t?).

But it’s also so ambitious, so enthusiastic and so full of energy and interest and question and thought that it’s difficult to put it down and think straight for hours afterwards.

Rarely have I read something that so much cares about books, about novels, about literature. This is not a book that seeks to be easy, that seeks to be simply understood or even cares, very much, about comprehension.

Good.

Things don’t have to be easy.

Everything I have written has been easy. Because I don’t have the intellect or the talent to make something complex, easily.

But did I want to write something complex..?

Did I love to read complex things and did I see complexity as a virtue, as something to chase and something to praise and something to be awed by? Yes, yes, I did.

When I quit my office job in my early-mid-20s to go back to university, in the gap between employment and education, I went and spent two weeks travelling around Morocco, reading Ulysses and Infinite Jest and journalling and turning down sexual advances.

I was that sad, young, literary lad, committed to giant books I struggled to understand and to being sad and being creative and not being anything else…

Back then, would I have thought A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man was the best book that could ever have been written? Absolutely. Without a shadow of a fucking doubt.

I would have devoured this, and every time I felt that something in it didn’t quite work, I would have presumed that a) it did work and that b) I just didn’t understand it and c) because something happened in the book I didn’t understand, that meant the book must be excellent.

–///–

A Phone of the Artist As a Young Man haunts me, with its complexity and its intellect.

With its complexity and its intellect, yes, I could never have achieved this, but its ambition – to revolutionise literature, to write the definitive generational novel – OH I SHARED IT.

When I was a floppy-haired bohemian partyboy, **cking **** for **** and having heart palpitations from the start of every working week until Wednesday afternoon, typing up literary sex and literary scat scenes in the Great Eastern Street Pret A Manger on the lunch breaks from my shit copy-writing job…

I would have sold my soul a thousand times over to pound out a manuscript like this on my MacBook.

Reading A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man was like entering into an alternative world.

If I was from New Zealand, if I had put more time into writing than I put into partying, if I’d been a little bit happier and more self-assured, if I’d been a little better educated, if I’d had intellectual guidance for longer, if I’d had more wit and more intelligence and more confidence and more self, this is the book I would have written.

And Pierce Day did it.

This is the fucking real deal, here.

Yet… by the time this paperback arrived in my hands and in my desk, the scott manley hadley that would have wanted to write this had been dead for longer than my dog has been alive (and my dog is so old now that my pet insurance costs more than my sister’s car insurance)…

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is colossal, complex, self-indulgent yet so ambitious, so enthusiastic and so energetic.

This is what a youthful love of literature leads you toward.

This is what anyone (everyone?) with a dick who’s regularly reading their own poetry to someone they barely know, naked, would want to have written.

This is what we (and I knew (and have known) plenty of other people like the me I once was) all wished we could have written.

This is the distillation of it, the absolute pinnacle of it. This is not the product of too much Infinite Jest, this is not the product of too much free time, or too much self-confidence or too much intellect.

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is absolutely what’s it’s trying to be.

Pierce Day has fucking done it.

Pierce Day is the ultimate post-19th century literary young man.

So, yes, whatever you read in the next few posts, however this ends up concluding – when, if ever, it concludes – remember that there is a big part of me that is, ultimately, envious of Pierce Day.

My literary young man novel never saw the light of day. And, even if it had, it wouldn’t have been this. It would have been toddlerwork compared to this.

THIS IS IT.

So, no matter how my older, wiser, calmer, happier, more stable, less medicated, more sober, better read, better informed, more responsible, more cared for, more loved, more liked, more mature, self may have to say about the execution and the ideologies and the frustrations of A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man, do not forget this key and critical fact: I would have sold my dirty soul to write this book.

It’s available to order now:

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man (Screenshot Books, 2024) is available from Metalabel

READ PART TWO OF THIS COMMENTARY HERE