Eric Blix’s incandescent novel, The Prodigious Earth, is divided into three sections, “The City,” “Old World,” and “Ruin,” an ABA format in which the third section picks up the first’s characters and plots, as well as its structure of very short numbered chapters, many of which are appropriated quotations from such figures as Teddy Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and land artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt. The narrative that most firmly moors the first section is the search for a sex worker who vanished from an establishment called the Black Rose. We spend significant time with Silvia, who is another sex worker, and an alcoholic private detective named Romano. A patron nicknamed Billy the Kid, who makes bricolage musical instruments from desert objects, is suspected by some of the crime. As in other postmodern detective novels, like Stephen Graham Jones’ The Bird Is Gone, both the victim and any hope of solving the crime give way to less familiar searches.
There are many chapters that have no initial or no obvious link to the Black Rose story, the relationship of the pieces rhizomatic in nature, mirroring networked systems and their breakdown in the desolation of the desert. Also making frequent appearances are references to Highway 50, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, conceptual art, earth art, gardens, plastics, gold, entropy, and taxonomic systems. Taxonomy often surfaces in the racist and eugenicist views of famous people: Washington Irving, H.G. Wells, Teddy Roosevelt, and John Wayne, for example.
Several texts existing within the novel’s narrative could be read as containers for some or all of The Prodigious Earth’s content. At one point, Romano goes through the disappeared woman’s laptop: “She liked to frequent a set of deep web image boards populated with slivers of conspiracies mostly about the desert […] There are lists of demands, alternate histories dating to the supercontinents Vaalbara and Ur, something called the Paraboloid Microkingdom.” This is a reference to the novel’s interstitial quotation chapters that come from United Microkingdoms: A Design Fiction. Additionally, a character named Pancho, who is writing a sprawling online manifesto called introduction to post-politics, and Itsumi, who is writing the “exegesis” of that manifesto, are at one point described as “the two and only members the Paraboloid Microkingdom.” Pancho steals items from a Target, uploads photos to his manifesto, and sells the goods from a shipping container.
There is no simple eureka in possible connections both between the missing woman and Pancho/Itsumi and between The Prodigious Earth’s varied textual pieces and these characters’ online activity. What’s more pronounced is a running comparison between the desert as a space Pancho and Itsumi are traversing as they join the search for the missing woman and the internet as a space of interconnected networks and disarray. “She has her say,” one section describes Itsumi’s exegesis, “she leaves a record of herself in the form of oblique and shadowy comments that collectively form a disbanded enterprise, a fragmented theory of codes, semblances, and waste spaces distributed across many websites.” Other characters whose artistic ambitions resemble those of The Prodigious Earth itself are Henrik, whose photographs of plastics removed from the stomachs of fish go viral, and Leo, whose sprawling cowboy novel subverts many conventions associated with the genre.
The second section, “Old World,” continues The Prodigious Earth’s exhibition of atrocities as well as its fragmented nature, but in other ways it’s an outlier. The premise is stated straightforwardly in the opening sentences: “A man named François Bernier once traveled around the globe experiencing the different peoples it contained. Based on a summary of his observations he proposed a new division of the earth according to the distribution of its inhabitants.” There are two images from the 1507 map by cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, Universalis cosmographia, the first map to name the New World “America.” In the third section, Pancho will remember coming across this map as a boy in his father’s study. Details such as this one lead to almost-connections, like “Old World” must be Pancho’s manifesto—connections that never quite remain fully operational for the entirety of the novel.
After providing evidence that connects Bernier’s work to racism and systems of racial categorization in the contemporary U.S., Blix suggests a further link between classifying humans and classifying works of art. “[Bernier’s] division of human variety, they say, reconciled the individual to the immensity of the past, no longer explicable in terms of sin and redemption” is followed by, “The same function Lukács gives to the novel centuries later.” This connection helps give us a generative way of approaching the text’s myriad difficulties. Generic taxonomies are no more “natural” than racial ones, and such delineations are usually or always the result of ideological motives and biases (c.f. W.J.T. Mitchell’s essay “Space and Time; Lessing’s Laocoon and the Politics of Genre”). By refusing to play by the rules of genre, The Prodigious Earth is reinforcing its critique of anthropology, of taxonomic impulses bent toward empire’s exercise of power.
And the devastating results. A main thread of the third section, “Ruin,” belongs to Itsumi, a peripheral character in section one. We learn that she was married to Brad, who she met in Hiroshima in 1995. Later, they both worked in the World Trade Center, Brad in the “impact zone.” Following his death, Itsumi’s grieving process involves going broke, taking a job well below her training, watching endless Westerns, and contributing to Pancho’s manifesto. Hideki, a character from the first section whose ambition was to “film time,” and his wife Yasuko, click into place as Itsumi’s concerned parents. The final chapter of The Prodigious Earth is the longest and—despite covering an event “for which no language exists”—the most traditionally coherent. Most of it takes the form of an email from Itsumi’s reserved father, relating his experience of the Hiroshima bombing as a boy. It also covers the years that followed, including messy feelings of ambivalence toward both the U.S. and Japan (expressed through the obsession with John Wayne movies we now know his daughter inherited), and a decision to pursue photography that he eventually learned might have been rooted in witnessing Little Boy’s detonation from afar:
A doctor once told me, after I had complained of years of intense sensitivity to light and sound, that the explosion had literally burned itself into my neural pathways. My mind, and with it my very idea of reality, is branded with it in a very strict sense. My basic existence is therefore a prolonged act of memory that is at the same time very complex and very simple. To state it in plain terms, my view of the world is organized around that sudden flash. It did not occur to me in the Kyoto days that I was reenacting that original flash every time I snapped a photo of a pagoda, an orchid, or a tourist wearing a kimono.
He goes on to frame his vocation in what might be the novel’s final self-referential gesture, “I have spent my adult life studying texts and images, gathering testimonies, and raking my own memory in order to develop some kind of document that might help to explain the suicidal drift of our species” (emphasis mine). It was his daughter’s birth, he tells her, that led him to attempt to resolve his ambivalences into some kind of coherence.
What’s so vital to recognize is that whatever is coherent and cathartic and traditionally gorgeous about the novel’s final chapter is counteracted by the glimpse that the novel’s nonlinear structure has given us of Itsumi’s “response” to her father’s attempted therapeutic gesture: continued depression, conspiracy theories, travelling the desert mutely with Pancho, searching for a murdered sex worker who might not even exist. For now, she is living her father’s most restless fear: “I am no longer certain whether I know anything or not.”
The Prodigious Earth makes inventive use of non sequitur, its chapters’ disparateness often mirrored on the paragraph or line level. Sly but abrupt commentary also frequently interjects itself in passages of objective information. “Curation of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is global, dispersed, and unmotivated,” one section see-saws a sentence between the volitional “curation” and the seemingly contradictory “unmotivated.” It goes on, “Plastics decompose in part by the application of light and air. The name of this process is photodegradation. The light can be steady and prolonged. It can be sudden and unimaginably severe.” What? And why? And who? Like Hideki’s neural pathways, even something so simple as a textbook definition is branded with our species’ greatest sins. The effect is that of an impish guide, one who doesn’t so much know more than us but who understands more devastatingly our inability to access full knowledge on matters of such all-encompassing destruction.
Or matters of anything. One moment simply reads, “The bar looked different in the daylight.” Indeed it would.
On the Waldseemüller map, the land beyond the Rocky Mountains is labelled INCOGNITA.
The Prodigious Earth, by Eric Blix. Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England: Erratum Press, October 2022. 263 pages. $18.39, paper.
Joe Sacksteder is the author of the short story collection Make/Shift (Sarabande Books) and the novel Driftless Quintet (Schaffner Press), both published in 2019. His album of audio collages, Fugitive Traces, was released by Punctum Books in 2017, and his novel Hack House is forthcoming from Astrophil Press. Recent work can be found in The Offing, Michigan Quarterly Review, DIAGRAM, and Iron Horse Literary Review.
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