While the great modernist poet William Butler Yeats is topping the charts (yet again) with his visionary and portentous lines about rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem and the worst being full of passionate intensity, Paul Smart’s bracing and weird new novel Overlook: A Rock & Roll Fable puts me in mind of another of Yeats’ oft-quoted stanzas, this one from “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop:”
‘But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’
Overlook is, from one angle, a pretty high-minded, hero’s-journey myth of underworld passage, return, and redemption, sourced from traditions as various as evangelical Christianity and Dante, Jungian archetypes, Kerouac, Arthurian legend, Classical mythology, and what can only be called a pop, rock, and blues theology playing continuously (on car radio and eight-track) in the novel’s background.
From another angle, Overlook is a teeming Beatnik litany of all that is rent: acutely observed rust, grime, clutter, spoiled wood, lived-in car interiors, abandoned communities, broken people, and a studious taxonomy of states of defeat and intoxication. Page to page, Overlook combines pan-theological spiritual musing and a debased, journalistic grit not just in equal measure but in some kind of metaphysical equation.
For most of this novel, the corporeal and the ethereal are indistinguishable, caught in a liminal game of transition. Overlook takes off from one documented, historical moment: the morning of the great musician Richard Manuel’s death in a Florida motel room in 1986. But from there, regarding what is real and what is spectral and hallucinatory, all bets are off. Manuel, in this narrative, breezes right past that significant life milestone, carrying on with his day–a big day for him on which he decides to leave the Band in the lurch and return to Woodstock to make amends to his personal wronged, especially his young son–only gradually made aware that he may have died.
Meanwhile, in the hills above Woodstock, a gold-hearted and entirely dysfunctional and self-thwarted, music-obsessed mountain hermit by the name Klokko makes his own stand and attempts his own ill-fated journey toward wholeness—the quest to reconnect with his stunted, emotionally and physically distant father, the only remaining member of his family after the death of his charmed and addicted brother in an accident and, forthwith, his dear mother of a broken heart. All Klokko knows of the man today is that he is currently hiding—of course—in Florida. In this way, Smart sets in motion a twinned father/son, son/father north/south colliding pilgrimage that turns out to be a bit of a tease, as Overlook’s real thematic intersections lie elsewhere.
The two narratives—Manuel’s in the first person and Klokko’s in the third—alternate in short chapters as the lines converge. Awash in symbolism, deep themes, exquisite local color, and a wide river of (north) American music, Overlook is a rich, mysterious joyride that is simultaneously tragic and weirdly unsettling. It is the latest title presented by Recital Publishing, an imprint of the mid-Hudson-based Strange Recital podcast, which specializes in the weirdly unsettling. Overlook joins Recital’s growing list of literary (and often local) novels and short story collections in which reality as we experience it habitually is undermined and exposed, usually beyond repair.
Mr. Smart of course is well known to Hudson Valley readers for his long career as a regional journalist, creative writer, and critic. He resides now in Mexico, where he makes films and continues to write.
John Burdick: Overlook arrives with its own cabin creation myth. The first draft was written in a short burst, as if in a vision. And it is indeed that kind of story, full of visionary things, ambiguous realities, and mythic subtexts left and right. When dealing with a “creative event” of this kind, how did you balance the writer’s impulse to revise, clarify, refine, and develop with that Beatnik holy sense of the whole thing being a divine delivery, to be respected?
Paul Smart: The biggest element I worked with here, a true luxury after a life of complex deadlines, was time. I finished the book in that single week-long writing rush almost a quarter century ago and fiddled with it for a few years when I’d go on a writing retreat to a Maronite Monastery in Massachusetts every other month. Managed to shift the narratives to what they are now, one subjective and the other omniscient, which was sort of like moving a ship in a Greene County creek. But then life swept me up with a kid, new newspaper projects, several moves, a pile of radio work.
Finally, this past year Brent [Robison] at Recital, who I’d hired years ago to do an edit on the book, asked if I could give it another go. I’d just published my Covid memoir, With Different Eyes, in a prose-poem style helped by the talented editor Kenneth Wapner. Went through the manuscript with a similar eye for whittling but then realized what I had in Overlook was very different, and of piece. So I worked slowly over a period of about six months in coffee shops around the Bajio here, honing what I had while respecting what I had originally channeled. The final push to completion came with the help of lawyers who noted that I could not quote any lyrics, which the original manuscript had been filled with, which freed me up to misquote, lending everything an extra sheen of originality that ended up enhancing what I’d originally written.
JB: So In some ways, this novel marks a (long delayed) career transition for you, away from the journalist’s life, returning to a purely creative calling. One of the underlying themes of the novel is honoring/squandering “the gift.” Was that a particularly resonant theme for you as you finalized Overlook and prepared it for publication? Doing honor/justice to some things in yourself you may have lost track of?
PS: You know, we never lose track of such things, of “the gift.” These projects wake us in the early morning, fill our thoughts as we drive around, slip into the stories we get paid to write. I had never not honored my other work, I just hadn’t given myself the time to practice revision, the deeper practice of really writing. Moving away from the busy-ness and stress of American life, where I could actually retire from work and live comfortably on social security income, freed my days in a remarkable way. As did my new life in a place where I couldn’t understand any of the small talk around me. I found that my years building journalistic disciplines could be used in new ways. It made writing fun again, in increasingly fresh ways. I shifted away from being the breadwinner, the most professional of my friends’ group, to being on an equal level, arts-wise.
JB: There are several levels of mythology and symbolism operating at all times in Overlook. And the sources are all over the map. That dimension of the novel is delirious fun—trying to catch all the references and thematic sub-structures and knowing that I am probably actually missing most of them.
PS: I remember studying art and literature in high school and college and wondering how in hell’s name writers and painters and filmmakers fit so much complex stuff into their work. Did they chart it out on maps, keep endless note cards, hire assistants? But then I realized that I had actually been doing such things for years in the stories I wrote, making them more fun to write by adding elements of subtext as I typed, or in the newspapers I edited through means of bricolage and use of different voices. I believe the themes we find, and you mention, are not applied but uncovered. The Odyssey, Oedipus, Icarus, Jung… they’re inherent themes in life. That’s why they resonate.
That’s something I learned from listening to pop music my whole life and eventually realizing that a Dylan just remembers things and changes them by misquoting. That Ray Davies just mixes what he knows. That those men and women were too young to be the kinds of geniuses we wanted them to be; they channeled and everyone else embellished. One of the key things I’ve learned since moving to Mexico has been the naturalness of surrealism, and its roots in the idea of a Super Realism that accepts the intermingling of symbols, be they Christian, nature-based, pop, philosophical, superstitious, or merely personal-history-based. The world exists in all totality within all of us. And so it exists, as well, in all our songs, in every gesture we make.
JB: Richard Manuel, damn. Everyone loved that man’s gift, not just as a singer. On those first two Band records, his writing contribution was the secret sauce, to my ears, and what was missing later. Jawbone sounds like Aaron Copland to me. Manuel had big ears, and his talent made people weep, even when he was alive. Tell me about your history with this man, the Band, and the music.
PS: The first concert I ever saw was The Band. Their first tour, when I was taken to see them by my parents in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had revered Music from Big Pink, and then The Band came out just before the concert and they played the whole album, both of them, pretty much note for note. It took me a while to learn who was who from their pictures, but right from the start I could tell Richard Manuel’s voice. Whispering Pines and Lonesome Suzie, as well as We Can Talk and Jawbone, became my life at the age of 12, 13. I couldn’t wait until I could grow a beard, move to Woodstock… And then I was here. But the year after Manuel’s death. I saw Rick playing a lot, and caught up with Garth when he was part of the IBM Big Blue Big Band, as well as his Wednesday Eventide performances at St. Gregory’s. Got to know both of them a bit. Attended Levon’s events and said hello once or twice. Seemed to meet every post-Grossman manager there had been. But Richard Manuel himself? Someone suggested I ghost-write a biography for his first wife, Jane. I got lots of stories, did a lot of research. But I found myself moving beyond write-for-hire dreams. And I got tired of all the would-be agents around Woodstock who look for the likes of me to bring their get-rich-quick ideas to fruition. Eventually, I figured that by pursuing get-rich-slow dreams, and then fucking them up with some regularity, I was actually readying myself to actually become Richard Manuel. At least for the purposes of this book, in conjunction with that other part of me I have since named Klokko.
JB: I was expecting the local element to be more Woodstock village-centric—like, famous bluesmen passed out at the Joyous Lake. But it is definitely rural, mountain myth with a keen eye for decaying communities and invisible eccentrics. That’s one of the real rich dimensions of this novel.
PS: I used to edit a newspaper deeper into the Catskills called The Mountain Eagle. My best friend, my cartoonist of a quarter century plus, was the eldest son of the late Senator Pat Moynihan. The Senator and I, and his son, would talk regularly about something I labeled “rural marginalization.” The ideas gelled around my endless drives around Delaware, Greene, Schoharie and Ulster counties, my coverage area, and all I was observing. I felt that was my oeuvre, that Woodstock and the Hudson Valley were more city-bound than The Catskills. And hence less original.
I also found an affinity for those musicians, artists and writers who would move “Upstate” and then go deeper than expected into the mountains: remember, the Isley Brothers lived up near Andes for a while. Same with John and Yoko. Dvorak. Twain. Larry Poons. A host of lesser-known names who became close friends, whose yearning work inspires me to this day. I’ve long been drawn to the otherness of that marginalized world, especially as it has shrunk due to digital advances and city dwellers deeper dives into the hills. And even more so now that such marginalized populations, rather than grounding forces for the leftists of Roosevelt’s day, or our nation’s roots, have become Trump troops. I’ve always loved the bittersweet, I guess, especially in landscapes that undulate eternally without structure or citified meaning.
For more information, and to purchase Overlook: A Rock & Roll Fable, visit recitalpublishing.com.
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