Mark Axelrod—Mad Diary of Malcolm Malarkey

can't get you out of my head

Dalkey Archive. Jan 10, 2023. 265 Pages

(If you want to read extremely good long-form criticism, check out Cleveland Review of Books, the magazine I publish and work on with a “dedicated and brilliant” staff.)

I haven’t read funky, hyper-self-conscious, high-brow or high-brow adjacent meta-fiction in a long time. This took me back to Salvador Plascencia’s People of Paper or “pick literally anything” by John Barth. Malcolm Malarkey, our hero and literature professor at “Citrus City College” in LA (maybe Occidental College in disguise? idk), will be knee-deep in an anecdote about ordering a cocktail at his favorite bar (a bar named after Flann O’Brien, of course, and kind of annoyingly so) and then zoom out and be like “yo reader, here’s why this chapter is typed in this font instead of the courier new I used in the previous chapter. Malarkey is pure rumination, and Axelrod, whose mind seems to be ruminating at overdrive level, constantly spewing out intellectual tropes (even Malarkey’s name is a reference to Ulysses) and para-literary references, is a loving God. Axelrod’s mind and Malarkey’s patience are seemingly at a constant combustion point, that is only avoided by Axelrod’s continued writing. And there is a bit of self-hatred to Axelrod’s zoom-outs, his meta-turned-invasive insertions, his addiction to references and writer-name-dropping, a self-hatred that makes these meta-fiction cliches not just bearable but enjoyable. He’s not doing it to prove anything. It’s a miracle that the end result isn’t just a coherent story despite the what could be seen as unnecessary extra-textual concerns, but is improved, and indeed a fantastic story about a recently divorced (and cucked, literally and metaphorically via the academy (a dean asks him to consider retirement, and then a sabbatical, as he is a quasi-violent presence to his “incompetent” customers…I mean students)), trying-to-be-a-good-father, self-hating, dating-a-grad-student guy. It’s great, and I’m really happy that Dalkey Archive is putting stuff like this out there after the death of their legendary long-time publisher, John O’Brien (RIP), who championed post-modern, formally inventive metafiction (Gass etc.) in America that was still substantive and good (most of the time), while also introducing countless foreign masters to our shores via innumerable “X Region Literature” series.

While Axelrod scoffs at the notion of the book being solely a “campus novel” (which it is, but it’s not just that; it’s got a strain of Coen Brothers’ “A Serious Man” to it), his satire regarding college administrators runs deep especially now, after the firing of the adjunct professor at Hamline College in Minnesota sparked a national debate about academic freedom vs. the neoliberal choices administrators make in the face of public scrutiny and finances (even as administrator’s jobs remain high, and as more and more positions get created, against the trend of universities (I’ve heard plenty of talk surrounding my alma mater, Oberlin College, which has an absolute shitshow of an administration while continuing to buff up their ranks, in number and in “creating jobs with titles” that imply rank and reinforce an arbitrary hierarchy) having financial difficulties, especially in the humanities. As I mentioned, Axelrod goes hard on the classic “students are customers” line (“the customer is always right”, Malarkey cites a dean as saying while he is venting about students feeling like an injustice has been done to them when they don’t automatically get A’s). He zooms in on the phenomenon of administrators forcing out “older” professors at younger and younger ages, preferring to rely on an over-flooded precariat work force that demands less dignity and pay. Regarding titles, he notes that Rabinowitz, a professor relieved from his duties as a department chair, got an admin job as “Assistant Dean of Gender Equity and Eccumenical Flaggelation.” The college has early Christian roots, after all. Needless to say, colleges have a lot of Deans and Vice Presidents these days. The variegation is astounding. For that matter, mention “gender equity” as a 6th grade teacher in Ohio and you’ll get fired. Yet that same dean could fire a professor for showing a painting of the Prophet Muhammad. Idk man, it makes my head spin. The gender equity point is kind of moot, I don’t have anything wrong with having that in a title, and obviously it’s dead-seriously important to promote gender equity / Title 9 stuff at campuses (especially given the prevalence of rape culture almost everywhere), but I have a particular hatred for deans and college administrators. If I were looking for a job in academia right now tho, I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying that. The precariat.

Anyways, Malarkey and his mistress grad student Liliana also go “White Lotus Mode” in Italy, which is fun. It’s curtailed by his book, The Mad Diaries of Malcolm Malarkey, getting rejected by FSG (Fortz, Shikker, and Ganif) (I like imagining that my friend Ian at FSG rejected it. Or that he read it and liked it and fervently fought for it to be published only to be denied by “the projections”).

Look, I’ve gone on for awhile. But maybe it’s time for there to be a “meta-fiction” revival. “John Barth Mode.” Idk. Maybe it’s not time for that. But John O’Brien and Gilbert Sorrentino and William H. Gass worked really hard for this type of fiction to have a place in the literary imagination from the ~70s~ or so, and it’s worth revisiting this era. This book lives up to that tradition, and if you take anything from this review, it’d be to use this book as entry-point to Dalkey Archive’s history, what they’ve been doing for like 50 years, a tradition that I was skeptical would be carried on in good faith but clearly is. A publisher that the most notorious snob out there, Jonathan Franzen, dubbed “too high-brow” when he was advocating that fiction should be written for an imagined readership. Well, Axelrod literally addresses the reader directly, for all its experimental on-the-surface solipsism. The brow is, indeed, high, the end of experimental meta-fiction seemed quasi-nigh, but it’s a strong tradition, with dusty books you can find at used bookstores staffed by “a type of guy.”