I don’t usually do this, but: let’s start this off with a short excerpt from Jesse Kohn’s the book of webs. It might be the best way to open discussion of this impossible-to-describe book:
“Good sport,” said the doctor. “You’re quite a trooper.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I was one once actually.”
“One what?” said the eye surgeon, and Paul said, “A trooper. I was in the army. During the uprising.”
“You don’t say,” said the doctor. “What side?”
“Good question,” said Paul.
Looking at that short excerpt, you might be inclined to believe that the book of webs—the lowercase spelling is important, for reasons I’ll get into shortly—is set in the aftermath of a military conflict, possibly a civil war, where issues of trust and community are paramount.
That is indeed one thread that can be found within Kohn’s novel. Some of the others are wildly distant from it, however. This is a novel that opens with two characters in conversation as they recuperate from certain injuries in a dark cave, which effectively makes Plato the Checkhovian gun on the mantelpiece for this entire book. But it’s also much, much stranger than that. Characters change identities every few pages, with ages and genders up for grabs and significantly different power dynamics to boot.
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the book of webs
In Kohn’s acknowledgements, he describes the book of webs as “essentially a 420-page-long typo,” but also cites the works of Antoine Volodine as an influence. For those unfamiliar with Volodine, his fiction includes different layers of reality. The author who writes under that name has also published work using the names of some of their fictional characters; there’s a general sense of constant flux, one part surrealism and one part “yes, and”—all of which is to say that some readers are going to swear by this book for years to come and others may well grow furious with it.
What are some of the other directions this novel veers in, sometimes as recurring motifs and sometimes as one-offs? Well, there’s a mind-wiped would-be assassin known as either “Amy the Attempter of Assassinations” or “Amy the Attender of the Coronation.” There are characters entangled in massive spider webs. And there’s also a book called The Book of Webs, which should not be confused with the book of webs—either the book being read or a book that exists within it.
One character describes a place that’s “a small autonomous region whose unusually mutable geography changed endlessly in perfect coordination with some innocuous watermark or legend“—and you think that those references don’t sound like they could be descriptors of this novel as well, you might just be on to something.
Alternately, if you took Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler and the Adult Swim video Too Many Cooks and launched the two at each other at high speeds within a supercollider, the book of webs is what might emerge from the wreckage.
This is a formally dizzying novel, with the nestled narratives often incorporating chapter titles, creating a further sense of a world in which boundaries between different narratives are breaking down. Even so, the aspects of this book that recur—including an uprising that involves (possibly) Burlington, Vermont offers one lens through which to view this novel. Or this might be a book about people menaced by giant spiders. (This aspect of the novel left me thinking about this Forrest Wickman article about the film Enemy and its use of spiders.)
Kohn’s novel is a lot to take in, and over 400 pages of constantly changing landscapes, stakes, and characters were occasionally overwhelming. But on a grander scale, the blend of playfulness and menace felt like a perfectly accurate funhouse mirror of circa-now social interactions. There’s something about a world in which consensus reality has broken down—a pet theme of Philip K. Dick, who’s also cited in Kohn’s Acknowledgements—that feels especially relevant here. It isn’t always the easiest novel to reckon with, but it’s also a hard book to shake.
the book of webs is published by the University of Massachusetts Press.
Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the novel Reel (Rare Bird Books).
