From reviews of Gloucesterman
Gary Grieve-Carlson, Professor of English, Lebanon Valley College, and author of Olson's Prose
Gloucestermas:
"The world so vividly imagined in the earlier fiction of
Jonathan Bayliss is brought here to a fully realized, fully rounded
close.
"Gloucestermas connects many of the disparate ideas
developed in the other novels, deepens the story of Caleb Karcist in
unexpected ways, and offers some of
the most remarkable conversations in all of American fiction.
"Jonathan Bayliss’s fiction sets a standard for the 'novel of
ideas' that recalls the work of Herman Broch or Thomas Pynchon
without the paranoia...
"These are novels in
which everything matters: party politics, Christianity, dogs, being
a spouse or parent, business
efficiency, love, dance, myth, sex, growing old and dying—all pulled
together by the special
topos that is Gloucester, Massachusetts.
"The action unfolds in a world that is at once recognizable but
altered: Gloucester is called Dogtown, Boston is Botolph, Democrats
and Republicans are Catholicrats and Protesticans. This re-naming
bumps the real world off its foundation just a few inches, with the
result that we see things from a sharper, more incisive perspective.
Lying behind it all is the adumbration of an enormous system
encompassing all art, science, and technology—a general theory of
culture whose shape the main characters are in their various ways
working toward discerning. These are novels that imagine what it
might mean to live a genuinely human life, rooted in a particular
place. They occupy a special place in literature."
Prologos:
Prologos is among the most significant experiments in narrative form in the last fifty years of American fiction.
Gloucesterman:
In its formal virtuosity, in its brilliant, experimental systemization of plot and setting, in the deep seriousness with which it lays out ideas of tragedy, gender, work, religion, desire, moral responsibility ... Bayliss's tetralogy [Gloucesterman] stands as a signal accomplishment in American letters."
Stuart Miller, author of The Picaresque Novel
Gloucesterbook:
"... a learned, intellectual, and demanding work - although it is never obscure, opaque, or capricious. The author is not trying to puzzle us. He takes us, rather, on a highly controlled exploration . . . There's a vivacity, a profusion of intellect, style, detail, an exuberance and plenitude that recall Melville's or, at other moments, Whitman's."
Gerrit Lansing, author of Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth
Gloucesterbook:
"Gloucesterbook is a genuine achievement, a literary work of true originality. The real hero here is Place."
Peter Anastas, author of At the Cut and Broken Trip
Gloucestermas:
"Gloucestermas brings to a close Jonathan
Bayliss’s monumental trilogy of novels about Gloucester,
Massachusetts in the 20th century.
"One comes away from this extraordinary narrative feat, completed
just before the author’s death, humbled by the force of Bayliss’s
intelligence, the range of his imagination and the play of his
nimble mind.
"Gloucestermas — indeed, the entire tetralogy, beginning
with Prologos, which was Bayliss’s lifelong project—is what the art
of the novel has always aspired to: the exploration of how we come
to be who we are, on the very ground of our being.
"In an age of waning literacy Gloucestermas offers a challenge to be
better than our troublingly escapist times, to reach beyond our
foreshortened expectations to discover through Bayliss’s
uncompromising vision what the narrative is truly capable of
achieving.
"James Joyce gave us the living, breathing Dublin through the prism
of myth; Jonathan Bayliss’s “counterfactual” Gloucester is no less
vital, and his understanding of local and national political life is
equally profound. Though set in the recent past and brilliantly
weaving together all the narrative threads of the earlier books,
Gloucestermas projects the reader equally into the future,
charting the progress of our civic and sensual lives and the life of
the American novel itself."
Gloucesterbook:
"With its narrative energy and totality of vision, Gloucesterbook is an important contribution to the art of the novel. Groundbreaking European fictions, such as Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers and Musil's The Man without Qualities, come to mind as comparisons . . . It returns the novel in English to its experimental roots, with the wit and outrageous inventiveness of Tristram Shandy. Jonathan Bayliss uses language in a way that makes our native tongue come alive for us as though we were experiencing it for the first time in all its freshness and hard-edge originality."
Gloucestertide:
"What is
the American novel going to look like when it grows up?
"This is not a facetious question, considering
that the pure American product, based on native experience and
relatively free of European influence—Moby-Dick, for
example—is only about a century and a half old.
While there have been some amazing breakthrough fictions in language
and form during the past fifty years, our mainstream novels have
largely been realistic in conception, conventional in
characterization, and colloquial in diction.
"Jonathan Bayliss’s Gloucestertide, the second in
his three-volume sequence, Gloucesterman, turns all that on
its head. The sheer scope of Bayliss’s
achievement is nothing less than an American ambition as large as
Melville’s or Dos Passos’s—three volumes of 600-plus pages each,
encompassing what the novelist calls a 'counterfactual history' of
one American place, 'Cape Gloucester,' whose principal municipality
is 'Dogtown.'
"Equally, Bayliss’s language is not your demotic
American. In the author’s hands our native tongue
becomes a richer medium, precise yet imaginative, playful yet
knowing, 'not by simplifying the complexity of English,' as
Bayliss’s narrator explains, 'but by fixing more dimensions of
abstraction.'
"By the same token, don’t expect the plot of
Gloucestertide to disclose itself to you directly. Yet Bayliss’s story is not un-melodramatic. There’s love in these novels, even sex, and a great deal of
the kind of humor that you might find in Laurence Sterne’s The Life
and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. One of the more
hilarious scenes in Gloucestertide is a description of the novel’s
protagonist Caleb Karcist and his elusive sweetheart Lilian
Mooncloud 'parking' late at night on the wharf at the old Tarr and
Wonson Copper Paint Factory (Bayliss calls it 'Dogtown Net and Twine
Manufactory.')
"But I’m getting ahead of myself. What I want to say most importantly about
Gloucestertide is
that in calling his sequence of novels 'counterfactual history,' or
'what didn’t happen,' Bayliss, who has lived in Gloucester for 40
years, is creating a myth based on life in the community as he has
experienced it as an ordinary citizen, as a business analyst and
Controller at Gorton’s, as Mayor Leo Alper’s administrative
assistant, and, finally, as City Treasurer. This
is not a typical curriculum vitae for a writer of fiction.
Nor is Bayliss attempting to 'tell all' in these novels. There are no deep secrets about city government that he is
revealing, nor does he let us see behind the veil of a great
corporation’s daily transactions, although his insights into the
interface between corporate capitalism and cybernetics are incisive.
Instead, Bayliss gives us the larger truths—the myths—about
how people live in any human community. To him the novel is still
'our quintessential medium of experience.'
"In order to achieve this, Bayliss has created a
structure for his tripartite sequence (a third novel,
Gloucestermas, will follow). The novels are
the creation or 'transfiction,' of Controller Michael Chapman,
former resident of
"Much of the action of Gloucesterbook is
seen through Opsimath’s eyes; but the central consciousness of
Gloucestertide is that of Caleb Karcist, friend of Chapman and
Opsimath (a dog’s eye view of the action is also
provided by Karcist’s Viking Shepherd, Ibi-Roy).
Young Caleb is an associate at the Laboratory of Melchizedec and
Mesocosm, a local religious order and economic and social 'think
tank.' And one of the novel’s archetypal themes
is Karcist’s quest for the identity of his father. Caleb is also writing a play, The Tower of Gilgamesh,
about the legendary Mesopotamian ruler, who sought both his own
origins and immortality. The text of Caleb’s play
is folded into the narrative, offering a further commentary on the
characters’ actions and a key to the deep structure of this
innovative fiction.
"Like its predecessor Gloucesterbook,
Gloucestertide is a demanding novel. It
asks for the kind of patience and attention that many readers may
have lost the habit of. But it is also rewarding,
for Bayliss’s game of words and identities is only one level of the
play of his remarkable intelligence, an intelligence that has for
long been missing from most American fiction."