“Major Arcana” by John Pistelli
Busting out of the prison of this world
Absolute genderlessness, absolute womanhood – whatever was absolute, Ash del Greco would pursue it forever. She would never detransition because she would never cease to transition. Her whole life was nothing but transition.
Having started this site with a pair of re-reads, I’m now going to review a book so new I haven’t had time to read it more than once. But I think it’s necessary to get the word out now, for reasons I’ll explain below.
I’ve been a regular reader of John Pistelli’s literary criticism and essays, both at his old site and at his current Substack. When I saw he had just published a big, ambitious new novel, I grabbed it. I did so even though there were things about the book that caused me some misgivings.
First, the size. When Amazon dropped this Bleak House-sized tome on my doorstep, I wondered if it would be worth the considerable investment in time. Luckily, it turned out to be printed in a large font. Its 753 pages would probably be somewhere in the 500-600 range with a more conventional font. Still hefty, but not necessarily overlong.
A more serious concern was the subject matter. Major Arcana is many things, but most of all, it’s a novel about comic books and the people who create them. Yes, I know we’re supposed to call them “graphic novels” nowadays, but I just can’t keep up with the jargon, because I have zero interest in this art form. However, what matters is not the raw material but what the storyteller does with it, so I dove right in.
It’s a good thing I did. This is a fascinating and gripping piece of work. It travels the roads of satire while skirting the potholes inherent in the form. It immerses itself in the issues of today, but with the cool detachment of an outside observer. This is a story in which terrible things happen again and again, but humor is abundant. Pistelli manages to be funny when he’s being serious, and when he’s being funny, there’s a serious edge to it. This duality, and the skill required to pull it off consistently, are ideally matched to his subject matter.
Major Arcana opens quite literally with a bang: the public suicide of a college student, recorded on video by fellow student Ash del Greco, the mysterious character who will come to the fore in the book’s second half. After that event, we are shot several decades into the past. Most of the story that follows is backstory: the outlandish characters and circumstances that lead up to that shocking event.
The first half is dominated by the comic-book creators. Chief among them is the legendary Simon Magnus, the genius behind such immortal characters as Overman, Ratman, and Marsh Man. Yet Simon Magnus is not a man, despite having the biological equipment of one. Nor is Simon Magnus a woman, or even a “they.” Simon Magnus is beyond any pronouns at all. Simon Magnus, as a unitary self, represents the next avant-garde of the gender revolution. In stylistic terms, this means that we get a lot of sentences like this: “Let us turn the lens on Simon Magnus SimonMagnusself, not that Simon Magnus currently conceives of SimonMagnusself as a male self.”1 (Don’t worry, you’ll get used to this style, though it’s awkward at the beginning.)
In Parts One and Two, we follow the creative journey of Simon Magnus and Simon Magnus’ collaborators. It’s a trip in more ways than one, with drugs, alcohol, various experiments in living, savage artistic and personal disagreements, and romantic triangles (or squares) that set the stage for the book’s second half. One thing that almost all the characters have in common is a history of trauma. Their pasts are a record of poverty, crime, broken homes, and other misfortunes that make them feel out of sync with the world. Their aesthetic obsessions are a way of coping with their past and present miseries.
Parts Three and Four shift the focus to Ash del Greco, the youthful YouTube-ing “manifesting coach” who may or may not be the biological daughter of Simon Magnus. Ash del Greco, having been scarred by the material world early in life, becomes obsessed with proving the superiority of mind over matter, an obsession that produces some shocking results.
Though Pistelli brings a strong satirical edge to some scenes, I don’t think Major Arcana can properly be considered a satire. Satire has a way of turning its subjects into mere targets, and Pistelli doesn’t do that. Like a novelist should, he fully inhabits his characters; you see and feel what’s going on beneath the surface; his true subject is humanity, not the trends of the moment. He does what realistic novelists are supposed to do – although if you believe that “realism” is a meaningful term, Simon Magnus would like a word with you:
“Realism doesn’t exist,” Simon Magnus was saying. “All art is fantasy. Realist art is just a dull, unimaginative artist’s idea of the real – which usually doesn’t impress anybody else as terribly realistic, since we all live half in dreams and half in emotions anyway, and not at all in what you label reality. You call Balzac’s hallucinations realistic, fueled by 50 cups of coffee a day and an immersion in Swedenborg?”
As I said above, Major Arcana is a lot of things; but taking a broad view, I would say it’s a story about the quest to overcome limits. Biology imposes certain limits, like the demands of the body and the inevitability of death; aesthetic trends and the laws of the marketplace impose their own limits; society, language, technology – everywhere you look, something dares you to bend it or break it. And overcoming those limits is perceived as the way to happiness. As one of the book’s YouTube influencers says, “there’s absolutely no reason to tolerate a single thing you don’t want.” The main characters struggle obsessively to smash these limits. The biggest obstacles of all – the physical death of the body, and the laws of time – are the ones that haunt the second half of the book.
The irony is that in smashing one obstacle, you come up against a new one. Simon Magnus, once praised as a radical, transgressive figure, eventually finds SimonMagnusself accused of being “problematic” because of certain aspects of Simon Magnus’ comics that haven’t aged well. The cool kids of the high school Rainbow Alliance find themselves upstaged in coolness by Ash del Greco and her friend Ari Alterhaus, who have taken their gender radicalism one step further. As Yevgeny Zamyatin suggested in his dystopian novel We, no revolution is final, to the chagrin of revolutionaries who can’t imagine another revolution following (and possibly reversing) their own. The radicalism of today becomes the establishment of tomorrow, giving the new radicals something to revolt against.
The best thing Pistelli has done here is create fascinating characters. A long novel can survive a clumsy style if it has great characters, but even a great style can’t save a novel that has boring characters. A while back I tried to read a couple of Jonathan Franzen novels. Both of them failed my personal 50-page test, and for the same reason: the characters were too boring and insubstantial to sustain a big book. Pistelli has a style that’s a pleasure to read – detailed, elegant, and slightly old-fashioned, with numerous literary and artistic references – a story that tackles the concerns of the present day with the seriousness they deserve, and most importantly, great characters.
The book’s publication history is worth mentioning, because it may tell us something about the publishing world of today. Major Arcana is a self-published novel. I don’t know whether Pistelli tried to get it published traditionally, or if he ruled this out from the beginning. Whatever the case may be, it was initially serialized on his Substack for paying subscribers, then published in book form (in a manner similar to the way large novels were published in the 19th century). Now comes the word that a small press has picked it up for publication next year. One wonders if this path to publication will become more common. But what it means for you, the reader, is that if you want to read this book this year, buy it now, because it will soon disappear until sometime next year, when the “traditional” version is scheduled to come out.
However you want to do it, here’s the upshot: this is one hell of a reading experience. By the time you reach the end, you may find yourself wishing you could throw a dinner party and invite Simon Magnus, Marco Cohen, Ellen Chandler, and the two del Grecos (Ash and Diane). Sparks are guaranteed to fly, and you might want to bring some mace for your own protection; but the conversation would be unforgettable. If you’ve been shunning the unimaginative non-genre genre that literary fiction nowadays too often is, with its dull characters and timid storytelling, Dr. Pistelli has provided you with an antidote: buy yourself a copy of Major Arcana.
There is an aspect of the book’s nomenclature that puzzles me. Not only is Simon Magnus always referred to by Simon Magnus’ full name, so is every other character. Thus it’s always Ellen Chandler, never Ellen; always Diane del Greco, never Diane. I can only speculate as to what this means: is the author trying to “harmonize” the characters in some way? Does he just like the official, hyper-formal feeling it creates? Your guess is as good as mine.