“Shiiiiiit!” This word echoes through the book like a continuous scream, sometimes in simple spelling, sometimes in capital letters, sometimes in stretched form. The American writer Scott McClanahan has a weakness for everyday jargon, as well as for television series or neurotic structures. His sentences are somewhat reminiscent of the textual worlds of the Beat writers and their trust in constant movement and the “bare, limitless brain” – all with the aim of “renewing the syntax and rhythm of impoverished human prose”, as stated in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl ” called.
McClanahan, on the other hand, is less interested in the big cities than in the American province, especially the area around the town of Rainelle in West Virginia, where he was born in 1978. “Crapalachia” is the original name of the book, a bizarre amalgamation of the terms “Crap” and “Appalachia”. Like his other books, McClanahan wrote “Crap” closely based on the story of his own life. At the same time, he takes great pleasure in attaching ironically ornate notes to the chapters by noting what the differences are between the supposed reality and the reality of the book.
McClanahan calls himself, his family and friends a “bunch of freaks”
The reality of the book is the ordinary madness of Scott’s family. Scott is the narrator (or the narrator is Scott), and affectionately describes himself and his relatives and friends as a “bunch of freaks”. And because everything is different in this dark, sparkling book, Scott grows up with his grandmother Ruby and chooses his uncle Nathan as his surrogate father. Nathan suffers from cerebral palsy, he is in a wheelchair and is fed through a gastric tube.
For Scott he is the most lovable person in the world, even if his uncle has won every game of checkers against him. After Nathan’s death, Ruby moves in with a relative and Scott has to find a new place to live. He finds her with his friend Little Bill. There the madness continues, because Bill has obsessional neuroses, everything seems to go round in circles here.
What concerns McClanahan is the passing of time. Or in Scott’s words: “The subject of this book is a noise. It goes like this: tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick (…). One of the saddest noises in the world.” Memory is important for those who want to face the passage of time. Scott wants to stop time, he dreams that he can call his loved ones back to life and, for a moment at least, can remember them all together with his readership. Sad and happy at the same time.
Since the memory is fragile, erratic and often unreliable, it seems only logical that McClanahan made his narrator Scott just as contradictory and polyphonic. It’s no coincidence that his grandmother calls him Todd over and over again. And it is no coincidence that he tries out the most varied of pitches and is not surprised when Bill’s neurotic behavior and speech gradually spread to him. The writer Clemens Setz captured these different voices and ways of speaking beautifully in his translation.
“One thing after the other happens all the time, with no plan behind it.”
According to the memory movement, McClanahan tells in jagged images and scenes, without strict chronology, rather the short paragraphs resemble a loose structure that follows two premises, Scott’s clear statement “Fuck symbols” and Grandma Ruby’s idea of the way the world goes: “One happens all the time One thing at a time, with no plan behind it. And then something happens and it doesn’t mean anything. ” And so you listen to the phone pranks from Scott and his friends, only to stroll with him through the cemetery, read your memories of the Ruby dinner table and land on the story of West Virginia. To do this, McClanahan repeatedly uses formulations or entire paragraphs in capital letters, slips cooking recipes, lists of names and memorial cards between the lines.
In the course of reading you develop a great deal of sympathy for this family. And for the nervous limbo in which McClanahan keeps his world. As if on the side, he also creates a portrait, broken several times, of what was previously called the “working class”. Because almost all of the McClanahans once toiled in the local mine – even if Grandma Ruby likes to differentiate herself: “She is a farmer’s daughter and one shouldn’t associate her with all these coal-mining McClanahans who lived at the foot of the mountain.”
“The world is a joke,” said Scott once. To tell about death again immediately afterwards. Death connects all the characters in this book. And presumably it is his constant presence that brings about a second great movement: the search for a home. McClanahan makes this search contradictory and fragmented, without any kitsch. When Scott returns to the town where he grew up after many years, he finds Ruby’s house abandoned. So he starts to write his book. And tries to make the whole world a home. Of course he knows that his plan is hopeless. But he doesn’t give up: before every trip, he stuffs his pockets full of Crapalachia soil and then spreads it all over the streets.
Scott McClanahan: Crap. From the American English by Clemens Setz. Ars Vivendi, Cadolzburg 2021. 195 pages, 20 euros.