Weak in Comparison to Dreams

By James Elkins

Unnamed Press. 607 pp. $36

- - -

Working in books journalism, it's rare to come across a recently published novel for which you have not a single shred of preconception. But that was my purely innocent state when I spied a copy of "Weak in Comparison to Dreams," by James Elkins, a longtime professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Advance ignorance can be useful for reading, watching, listening - expectation influences and sometimes even deforms reaction - but it was especially helpful in this case because the book is so very peculiar. Even having finished it, it's hard to place. Elkins, who is 68, has written many works of art history and criticism, but this is his first novel. A deeply unconventional debut, it's an invitation into a teeming imagination.

Samuel Emmer, the book's 40-something narrator, is a minor functionary in Guelph, a midsize city in Ontario, where he monitors the water supply for harmful bacteria. He's plucked from that job, absurdly, and put on the city's Zoo Feasibility Committee. "My task was to gather information on problematic animals," he says, "especially disturbed ones, that's how they put it, so that the zoo they wanted to build wouldn't have issues." The job requires him to travel all around the world assessing zoos, a task for which he has zero expertise. He worries about being found out, but most of his hosts on the tours are happy to chatter on about their own experiences and advice.

If this setup makes the book sound comical, it isn't, though it does have moments of very wry humor, especially in some of Samuel's earliest interactions with zoo officials. But it's clear from the first sentence ("That winter ruined any hope I had of experiencing my life as a story. . .") that Samuel is relating something that he experienced as dislocating, even cataclysmic. "Reason is like aspirin," he thinks. "Everyone takes it, because it's supposedly a wonder drug. But if your headache is serious enough aspirin won't stop it." The sudden change in his "wonderfully routine life" is a "disaster." The zoo project, he thinks, is "either waking me up and showing me my life, or pushing me over some edge."

Samuel is something of a problematic animal himself. His memories of growing up in New York state (not far from Ithaca, where Elkins was raised) include "something I'd told myself years ago, when I used to play in the woods in Watkins Glen. I'd told myself trees meant more to me than people." His difficulty interacting with others eventually results in a crisis.

The stories of his experiences at zoos - in Tennessee, Estonia, Helsinki and elsewhere - are each followed by chapters recounting dreams: "First Dream," "Second Dream," a dozen in all. In the dreams, he's driving at various distances from a fire. "At first it seemed the road would lead directly to the fire, but it wound up and through the mountains, and I saw the fire from another angle, still many miles away. . . . When I looked patiently and attentively I could see the billows changing shape, but over the course of several hours the fire hardly changed, as if it was painted onto the landscape, as if those mountains had always been on fire, as if the entire scene was a picture hung in my imagination."

Elkins is, according to his bio, a "recognized authority on the experimental use of images" by writers such as W.G. Sebald and Teju Cole. Sebald's influence - at least visually - screams through much of the book, in lo-fi pictures of empty zoo enclosures and in the photos in each dream sequence that show mountainside forests and meadows in various states of calm and conflagration. But Sebald, like many influences once exotic, has become a common reference point for recent writers, his approach now experimental only in the routinized way of the 10th-grade chemistry lab. Elkins goes further, though, peppering the book with charts and graphs, including one of a hyena's repetitive steps around a pen. ("The point was just to remain in motion. Its path was the shape of its unhappiness.")

As the book progresses, the charts (and Samuel's thoughts) get more intense, more recursive. One of them obsessively maps changes in the arcs of the narrator's route as he paces around his apartment. Another shows the orbit of Venus around the sun. If this novel should find a naturally limited but highly interested audience, there might still be times when even amenable readers skim past a few visual moments for sanity's sake - moments that are less Sebald and more "Gödel, Escher, Bach."

With about 100 pages to go, the novel has one last trick up its long sleeve. The perspective shifts, and we find Samuel at a different stage of life, with a different view of what's come before. That section retains the book's characteristics - it's filled with images of sheet music and melancholy thoughts on experimental classical compositions - but just when it had seemed that the story might terminate in a kind of brainy black hole, these pages lift it onto a ruminative, more emotional plane. "Now I see daylight differently. I understand the world isn't a puzzle."

The general mysteriousness and complexity of Elkins's novel deepened when I visited his website after reading. There he explains that "Weak in Comparison to Dreams" is the third part of a five-volume series, the four other installments of which await a publisher. The site includes, you won't be shocked to learn, complex visuals that accompany his explanation. "First," he writes, "here is a timeline of the characters in all five books. This is a large spreadsheet, which prints out at about two by three feet." Several other charts follow, including one "showing which parts of the book represent forms of sanity, and which show forms of irrationality or insanity."

If Elkins weren't such a prolific and visible figure in the field of art history, one might read this novel, see these charts and imagine him a monomaniac in a cellar. As it is, he has managed to suffuse this book with an unsettling essence, partly borrowed from its dreams and partly from its hypnotic interest in humans and other animals.