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Nog
On the cover of this new edition of Wurlitzer’s underground classic is the declaration from Thomas Pynchon: “The Novel of Bullshit is dead.” Forty years after its initial publication and dozens of Da Vinci Code rip-offs, it’s hard to agree with Mr. Pynchon. But we’ll take the point: Wurlitzer is working on some strange, big stuff that only novelists in the ’60s—and Denis Johnson—were allowed to do.
There’s not much point in explaining the plot, but we’ll give it a shot: At the outset, the protagonist owns only a truck and an octopus, kept in a bathysphere in the flatbed. After being “wrenched out of two months of calm” by the sight of a woman stooping for seashells, the man embarks on a course through the West, Southwest and down into Central America. He has almost no memories, so he’s not exactly on a search to discover his past. In some sense it’s a quest for identity, though the guy—possibly named Nog—doesn’t know it. Instead, he canvasses the weird and wild American West the way all of those ’60s writers liked to do, with an open mind and a flair for self-awareness. Just before hitchhiking to San Francisco, he writes: “I ran down to the sea. I took off a shoe and shoved a foot in. There was a quickness, certainly, a sudden delirium, as if I were about to be sure of something.”
One can’t ever be sure of anything in Nog, except that the delirium has aged well.
