This essay by Robert Kiely will be included in the book To Unearth the Bruises Underground: The Fanatical Oeuvre of Steve Aylett (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2014), edited by D. Harlan Wilson and Bill Ectric. You can also check out Aylett’s latest project at UNBOUND.
The essay begins:
Speed engenders the unexpected. It is often considered a pleasure in and of itself, or a drug, an intensifier. It is difficult to read the work of Steve Aylett without some level of bewilderment – this work puts us on the alert, strains our nerves. This prose is uncompromisingly fast – the rapidity exceeds our ratiocination, and in what follows I want to think about how his texts figure their highly self-conscious speed. One of the primary methods for doing so is to approach it negatively, by lambasting other novelists for being slow – in Atom (2000) the hapless victim is John Updike.[2] Ernest Hemingway comes in for a similar berating in Bigot Hall (1995), which I will subject to some analysis. When these texts complain about slowness, they seem to equate originality with speed and volume of content. Aylett’s books are baroque in their density, speed, and finely crafted detail; they are overcrowded, they dazzle and distort rather than producing a coherent picture of their narrative world – and this is one of their unique selling points.
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