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• The Night Ocean Penguin Press (New York, NY), 2017

1. The night ocean LCCN 2016043484 Type of material Book Personal name LaFarge, Paul, author. Main title The night ocean / Paul La Farge. Published/Produced New York : Penguin Press, [2017] Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9781101981085 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3562.A269 N54 2017 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Paul La Farge Home Page - http://www.paullafarge.com/

  Paul La Farge is the author of four novels: The Night Ocean (The Penguin Press, 2017); The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001), and Luminous Airplanes (FSG, 2011); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter (McSweeney's Books, 2005). He is the grateful recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2013-14. He lives in a subterranean ‘annex’ in upstate New York, where he is almost certainly up to no good.

• Wikipedia -

  Paul LaFarge
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Not to be confused with Paul Lafargue.

  Paul B. La Farge (born November 17, 1970)[1] is an American novelist, essayist and academic. As of 2017, he has published five novels: The Artist of the Missing (1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), The Facts of Winter (2005), Luminous Airplanes (2011) and The Night Ocean (2017), all of which, particularly Haussmann, have earned positive critical attention. His essays and reviews have been published in outlets such as The Village Voice, Harper's, and The New Yorker.

  Contents

  1 Biography
  2 Novels
  3 Bibliography
  4 Notes
  5 External links

  Biography

  A native of New York City, La Farge graduated from Yale University and has taught writing at Wesleyan University on and off since 2002. From 2009 to 2010, he was a Visiting Professor of English at Wesleyan.[2] He has taught writing at Columbia. He was the 2005 winner of the fourth annual Bard Fiction Prize [3] bestowed by Bard College, where he is on the MFA faculty. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been chosen as artist-in-residence at artists' colonies MacDowell and Yaddo. From 2016 to 2017, La Farge was the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.[4]
  Novels

  La Farge's first novel, The Artist of the Missing, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in May 1999, and illustrated with surrealist images by cubist artist Stephen Alcorn.[5] The novel takes place in an anonymous, modern-day city in which people go missing on a regular basis. Frank, the titular character, paints portraits of the missing, among whom are his parents, his brother James and, eventually, even his romantic interest, enigmatic police photographer Prudence, whose job it was to take pictures of corpses. Reviewers compared the debut work to those of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges and categorized him among "literary wizards" and "fantasists".

  Two years later, his second novel, Haussmann, or the Distinction (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, September 2001) purports to peel layers from the mysterious private life of Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891), the flawed genius city planner who, in the 1860s, masterminded the carving up of Parisian streets into modern boulevards, of which the Champs-Élysées is the most renowned example. In his review for The New York Times, Edmund White called it "imaginative — indeed, a hallucinatory — approach, one that ends up by transforming his supremely practical subject (for Haussmann was above all a systematic worker) into an elegant and sometimes grotesque fairy-tale hero".[6] The novel's insistently presented premise (that the author, Paul La Farge, is merely the translator of an obscure French-language text by a forgotten minimalist metaphysician named Paul Poissel) extended to the "reproduction", in the opening pages of the book, of the title page of the "posthumously" published in 1922, "first (and only) French edition of Haussmann, or the Distinction", and the inclusion, in the afterword, of daguerreotypes, the first of which depicts a female whom the caption identifies as "Yvonne Dutronc, ca. 1872", a character which does not even appear in the main narrative, but is mentioned only in the afterword, in La Farge's own (fictional) footnote and (apparently) on the dedication page—"for Y." The second image purports to be that of "Paul Poissel in 1880" and both are described as having been "found" by the afterword's veritable author, Paul La Farge, himself, in the archives of the French national library, Bibliothèque nationale. An elaborate website, The long sad life of Paul Poissel, which expands the conceit, assigns June 4, 1848–November 17, 1921 as Poissel's dates, along with myriad details about his life and times. The entire website functions as satire, including, at one point, the accusation that the American author "masquerading" under the French name "La Farge" had the audacity to put his own name on front cover, as if he was the actual author. Other parts of the website include quotations, such as an excerpt from a 1934 letter Walter Benjamin "wrote" to Gershom Scholem, in which he makes a deeply complicated observation about Poissel, and also MP3 files featuring early archival "recordings" of Poissel's voice, reciting (in French) portions from his own "works". Haussmann, as a whole, also serves to display the depth of La Farge's scholarship into the period of the Second Empire as well as his playfulness with language (the putative front page of the 1922 work indicates that it was issued "à Paris, chez les Éditions de cire perdu", or by "the Paris Publishing House of Lost-Wax Casting").

  The "Poissel" name extends to and, to a degree, arrogates La Farge's third book, The Facts of Winter (McSweeney's, June 2005) which, on its front cover, states, "by Paul Poissel, translated by Paul La Farge". It is also set in Paris, although the year is now 1881, a decade into the Third Republic. The reader is privy to "a series of short dreams, each dreamed by people in and around Paris, which is to say that it is a fictional account of the imaginary lives of people who may or may not be real". Again, La Farge's command of French is featured, as the dream accounts come to the reader in both French and English, and the descriptive language is hauntingly poetic. The scholarly "afterword" strives to elucidate further the work and thought of the "unjustly neglected" author of this tome, Paul Poissel.

  His book Luminous Airplanes is the humorous story of a young man with two mothers who learns a family secret while cleaning out his grandfather's house in upstate New York. The book was published in 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and features immersive text. A description of the book appears here. It was listed as one of "the Most Criminally Overlooked Books of 2011" by Emily Temple in Flavorwire.

  In March 2017, La Farge publishedThe Night Ocean, a novel about a doctor investigating the relationship between horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and a teenage boy. The novel, published by Penguin Press, was listed as one of "28 books to read in 2017" by Jeva Lange in The Week. [7]
  Bibliography
  This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

  La Farge, Paul (Jun 2010). "Utopia & dystopia : perfect worlds are games to be played by following the rules to the letter". Bookforum. Retrieved 2015-10-11.
  — (Mar–Apr 2013). "Noise-cancelling headphones : a mole's-eye view of the novel, its pleasures and inconveniences". The Believer. 11 (3): 3–8.
  "Colors: Black", essay by La Farge for Cabinet
  "The History of The History of Death", short story by La Farge for Conjunctions
  "Beach Ploys: Thomas Pynchon revisits the California of too-easy living", review by La Farge of Pynchon's Inherent Vice for Bookforum
  The Artist of the Missing, 1999, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, winner of the California Book Award
  Haussman, or the Distinction, a New York Times Notable Book
  The Facts of Winter 2005, McSweeney's
  "Puk, Memory", article by La Farge for The Village Voice
  "Arda, or Ardor", article by La Farge for The Village Voice
  "Head of the Class", article by La Farge for The Village Voice
  "Snow Jobs", article by La Farge for The Village Voice
  "Wind-Down Bird", article by La Farge for The Village Voice
  "Lose and Seek", article by La Farge for The Village Voice
  "Hearts of Darkness", article by La Farge for The Village Voice
  "Invisible Citizen", article by La Farge for The Village Voice
  "Stop Time", article by La Farge for The Village Voice
  "The New World: or, How Frederic Tuten Discovered a Continent", article by LaFarge for The Believer
  "Idiots!", article by La Farge for The Believer
  "The Little Nicholson Baker in My Mind", article by La Farge for The Believer
  "Destroy all Monsters", article by La Farge for The Believer.

• New Yorker - http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-complicated-friendship-of-h-p-lovecraft-and-robert-barlow-one-of-his-biggest-fans

  The Complicated Friendship of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, One of His Biggest Fans
  By Paul La Farge March 9, 2017

  In 1931, a young fan named Robert Barlow wrote to the weird-fiction writer. Thus began a fertile and unusual relationship.
  In 1931, a young fan named Robert Barlow wrote to the weird-fiction writer. Thus began a fertile and unusual relationship.PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY JOHN HAY LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY

  On June 18, 1931, a young man named Robert Barlow mailed a letter to the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s stories about monstrous beings from beyond the stars were appearing regularly in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, and Barlow was a fan. He wanted to know when Lovecraft had started writing, what he was working on now, and whether the Necronomicon—a tome of forbidden knowledge that appears in several Lovecraft tales—was a real book. A week later, Lovecraft wrote back, as he nearly always did. It’s estimated that he wrote more than fifty thousand letters in his relatively short lifetime (he died at the age of forty-six). This particular letter was the beginning of a curious friendship, which changed the course of Barlow’s life, and Lovecraft’s, too—though almost no one who reads Lovecraft these days knows anything about it. Who keeps track of the lives of fans?

  Lovecraft was well known in the world of “weird fiction,” a term that he popularized: it was an early-twentieth-century genre that encompassed supernatural horror stories as well as some of what would now be called science fiction. He had a reputation as a recluse. He’d been married, briefly, to a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant named Sonia Greene, and he’d lived with her in New York, but by 1931 he was back in his native Providence, living with his aunt and making a meagre living by revising other writers’ work. Barlow, meanwhile, had grown up on military bases in the South, until his father, an Army colonel who suffered from paranoid delusions, settled the family in a sturdy and defensible home in central Florida, about fifteen miles southwest of the town of DeLand.

  Barlow didn’t know anyone in Florida, and where his family lived there weren’t a lot of people for him to meet. There certainly weren’t many who shared his interests: collecting weird fiction, playing piano, sculpting in clay, painting, and shooting snakes and binding books with their skin. “I had no friends nor studies except in a sphere bound together by the U.S. mails,” he wrote in a memoir about his summer with Lovecraft, published in 1944. Letter by letter, Barlow drew Lovecraft into that sphere. He offered to type Lovecraft’s manuscripts. He told Lovecraft about his rabbits. He wrote stories that Lovecraft revised. Finally, in the spring of 1934, Barlow invited Lovecraft to visit him in Florida, and Lovecraft went. Barlow hadn’t mentioned his age, and he was reluctant to send along a photo of himself, because, he said, he had a “boil.” Lovecraft was surprised to discover, when he got off the bus in DeLand, that Barlow had just turned sixteen. Lovecraft was forty-three.

  So there they were, the older writer, in a rumpled suit and with a face “not unlike Dante,” according to Barlow; and the young fan, slight and weasel-faced, with slicked-back black hair and glasses with thick round lenses. Barlow’s father was visiting relatives in the North, and Lovecraft ended up staying with Barlow and his mother for seven weeks. What did they do, in all that time? Barlow tells us that they gathered berries in the woods; they composed couplets on difficult rhymes (orange, Schenectady); they rowed on the lake behind Barlow’s house. Lovecraft found the Florida climate stimulating. “I feel like a new person—as spry as a youth,” he wrote to a friend in California. “I go hatless & coatless.” He liked Barlow, too. “Never before in the course of a long lifetime have I seen such a versatile child,” he wrote.

  Literary critics have speculated that Lovecraft was secretly gay, but the salient feature of his sexuality really seems to be how indifferent he was to it. His ex-wife, Sonia, described him as an “adequately excellent lover,” a phrase one could take in a variety of ways; after his marriage ended, Lovecraft had no intimate relationships that we know of. In his letters, he was quick to condemn homosexuality, and he would later discourage Barlow from writing fiction on homoerotic themes. But Barlow was not the first young man he’d visited. That honor belongs to Alfred Galpin, who was twenty when Lovecraft went to stay with him, in Cleveland. While he was there, Galpin brought him around to see the poets Samuel Loveman and Hart Crane, both of whom were gay—though this may be a coincidence. Galpin was straight; Lovecraft wrote a number of teasing poems about Galpin’s infatuations with high-school girls.

  Barlow, on the other hand, was actively if not openly gay as an adult; even at sixteen, he knew in which direction his desires lay. There’s a telling line in his 1944 memoir: “Life was all literary then,” the published version reads. But in the typescript, which is in the John Hay Library, at Brown, you can see that he crossed some words out: “Life, save for secret desires which I knew must be suppressed, and which centered about a charming young creature with the sensitivity of a was all literary then.”

  Lovecraft returned to Florida in the summer of 1935, and stayed for more than two months. He and Barlow explored a cypress jungle near the family house, and worked together on a cabin on the far side of the lake. The next summer, Barlow went to Providence, but Lovecraft was busy with revision work and seemed to resent his presence. When the two of them took a trip to Salem and Marblehead, towns which Lovecraft had mythologized in his fiction, another of Lovecraft’s young protégés, a sixteen-year-old named Kenneth Sterling, who was about to enroll at Harvard, came along, too. If Barlow was in love with Lovecraft, he had a lot of suppressing to do.

  You can feel his yearning for something in the last story he gave Lovecraft to edit, in the summer of 1936. It’s called “The Night Ocean,” and it’s about a muralist who rents a cottage on the beach to rest his nerves. He swims, he walks, he goes into town for dinner. Then, one day, he sees mysterious, not-quite-human figures swimming in the ocean. He waves at them, but he never figures out what they are or what they want, and, in the end, he can only conclude that “perhaps none of us can solve those things—they exist in defiance of all explanation.” It’s as if Barlow himself had come close to something—a consummation or an encounter with another realm of being—but left with a mystery, and an abiding sadness.

  Lovecraft died of cancer in March, 1937. He named Barlow, the devoted fan who’d typed so many of his manuscripts, as his literary executor. This was intended, presumably, as an honor, but for Barlow it was a disaster. Lovecraft had a couple of professionally minded disciples, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, who wanted to collect their master’s stories in a book. They were not amused when Barlow published Lovecraft’s commonplace book in a letterpress edition of seventy-five copies. They demanded Lovecraft’s papers. They spread rumors that Barlow had pilfered books from Lovecraft’s library. The weird-fiction community was small in those days, and word got around quickly. The macabre writer and artist Clark Ashton Smith sent Barlow a note: “Please do not write me or try to communicate with me in any way,” it read. “I do not wish to see you or hear from you after your conduct in regard to the estate of a late beloved friend.”

  The effect of the letter, Barlow wrote, “was of cutting out my entrails with a meat cleaver.” He had been exiled from the literary universe that had been the focus of his life. He thought about killing himself, but instead he went into anthropology, enrolling at schools in California and Mexico before ending up at Berkeley, where he studied under Alfred L. Kroeber, whose work with Ishi, the last of California’s Yahi Indians, had made him famous. In 1943, Barlow moved to Mexico and began a period of furious activity that lasted for the better part of a decade. He travelled to the Yucatán to study the Mayans, and to western Guerrero, where he studied the Tepuztecs. He taught anthropology at Mexico City College, founded two scholarly journals, and published around a hundred and fifty articles, pamphlets, and books.

  Barlow had already given Lovecraft’s manuscripts to Brown University; now he tried to convince the school to accept the remnants of his weird-fiction collection, requesting, in exchange, a printing press, on which he could publish a Nahuatl newspaper, so that the descendants of the Aztecs could read in their own language. He travelled to London and Paris to consult Mexican codices. He was named chair of Mexico City College’s anthropology department. The poet Charles Olson got hold of some of Barlow’s writings in the late forties, and called them among “the only intimate and active experience of the Maya yet in print.” It was as if Barlow had finally forsaken fantasy for reality—though, to anyone who has read Lovecraft’s stories, the Aztec gods, with their scales and plumes and fangs and wild round eyes, look eerily familiar. Perhaps Barlow had found Lovecraft’s horrors in the Mesoamerican past.

  But this didn’t make up for what he had lost. “When I have a period of free time and the choice of activity, I am most discontent,” Barlow wrote in a fragmentary, unpublished autobiography. “I invent a thousand sham-pleasures to keep me otherwise occupied, or I exhaust myself so that no activity can be thought of, but only blank sleep.” By the end of the forties, he was constantly exhausted, and his eyes, never good, were failing. When a disgruntled student threatened to expose him as a homosexual, Barlow had had enough. On January 1, 1951, he locked himself in his bedroom and took twenty-six Seconal tablets. He left a note on his door that read, “Do not disturb me, I wish to sleep for a long time.” It was written in Mayan.

  August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, meanwhile, had published a book of Lovecraft’s stories, which was followed by another Lovecraft book, and another. By the mid-forties, Lovecraft’s reputation as a master of horror had grown to the point where Edmund Wilson felt the need to deflate it a bit in the pages of The New Yorker. “The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art,” Wilson wrote. But his words didn’t deter people from reading Lovecraft, who is more popular today than ever. “The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft” came out in 2014, and even the slightest and most ephemeral of his writings remain in print — to say nothing of the crawling chaos of Lovecraftian fiction, films, video games, bumper stickers, T-shirts, and tea cozies in the shape of Lovecraft’s best-known creation, the octopus-headed Cthulhu.

  Barlow, on the other hand, has been almost entirely forgotten. Even “The Night Ocean,” to which Lovecraft added at most a few sentences, is attributed primarily to Lovecraft now. Barlow’s life, which encompassed the worlds of weird fiction, experimental poetry, and anthropology—in English, Spanish, and Nahuatl—is hard to tell: according to the scholar Marcos Legaria, nine people have attempted to write a Barlow biography so far, and all of them have given up. Barlow’s obscurity may also reflect a persistent anxiety, among weird-fiction fans, about Lovecraft’s reputation, which was imperilled by suspicions of homosexuality, in the fifties, and which is now imperilled by a growing awareness of Lovecraft’s racism.

  Of course, Barlow didn’t invent Cthulhu. He lived in Lovecraft’s great dream, but he never became a great dreamer himself. Until he got to Mexico, he was a serial abandoner of projects, who set out to do everything but left most of it unfinished. He was also too interested in reality: where Lovecraft had sublimated his fears and desires, Barlow had sex and saw the world. Rather than imagining dreadful Others, he took note of what other people were actually like. The fact that all his activity was ultimately to his detriment does not reflect well on reality; but, on the other hand, Barlow did end up having a strange influence on the world of fiction—and not only on account of Lovecraft.

  After the Second World War, Mexico City College attracted a number of students on the G.I. Bill. One of them was William S. Burroughs, who’d come to Mexico with his wife Joan Vollmer, to escape drug charges in Louisiana. In the spring of 1950, Burroughs took a class on Mayan codices with Professor Barlow, who was, apparently, a gifted teacher. (He had “a facility of expression that brought to life long-dead happenings,” a friend recalled.) Mayan imagery shows up again and again in Burroughs’s novels: in “The Soft Machine,” where the narrator flaunts his “knowledge of Maya archaeology and the secret meaning of the centipede motif”; in the form of Ah Pook the Mayan death god, in “Ah Pook Is Here”; as the Centipede God in “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s nightmarish vision of a world of death-haunted “control addicts” is, among other things, a transfiguration of what he knew about the Mayan theocracy—and he learned at least some of what he knew from Barlow. “Ever dig the Mayan codices?” one of the characters in “Naked Lunch” asks. “I figure it like this: the priests—about one percent of population—made with one-way telepathic broadcasts instructing the workers what to feel and when.” The telepathic priests weren’t Barlow’s idea, as far as we know. But given Barlow’s history with weird fiction, they could have been.

  Burroughs didn’t credit Barlow with anything, nor was he especially moved by the news of Barlow’s death. “A queer Professor from K.C., Mo., head of the Anthropology dept. here at M.C.C. where I collect my $75 per month, knocked himself off a few days ago with overdose of goof balls. Vomit all over the bed,” he wrote, in a letter to Allen Ginsberg. “I can’t see this suicide kick,” he added. Nine months later, Burroughs got drunk and shot his wife in the head. Writers take what they need, and maybe they have to do that, in order to make all their wonders, and all their horrors. But Barlow’s story reminds us that there is just as much wonder, and horror, in the damaged world they leave behind.

  Paul La Farge’s latest book is “The Night Ocean,” a novel, published by Penguin Press.

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• Unbound Worlds - http://www.unboundworlds.com/2017/03/interview-paul-la-farge-author-night-ocean/

  Interview With Paul La Farge, Author, The Night Ocean
  By Matt Staggs
  March 2, 2017

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  Cover detail from The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge/Penguin Random House ©

  How do you write a Lovecraftian novel without monsters? Making H. P. Lovecraft one of the characters is a great way to start. In Paul La Farge’s new novel The Night Ocean, Lovecraft is but one of several characters in a decades-spanning mystery. I recently spoke with the author about a missing chapter in Lovecraft’s life and how it came to inspire his novel.

  Unbound Worlds: The Night Ocean was inspired by a curious friendship of H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow, a poet. While I’ve been a fairly avid reader of Lovecraft on and off throughout my life, I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never heard of Barlow, or their friendship. Who was Barlow, and how did you learn about their relationship?

  Paul La Farge: Don’t be ashamed! I too was an avid Lovecraft reader when I was a kid, but I didn’t learn about Barlow until the spring of 2005, when I met the poet and novelist Robert Kelly. He told me the story of Lovecraft and Barlow, who was a young Lovecraft fan. He wrote letters to Lovecraft, and they became friends through the mail; then, in the spring of 1934, Barlow invited Lovecraft to visit him in central Florida, and Lovecraft went. He stayed with Barlow for about six weeks, which was very unusual, both because Lovecraft (who has the reputation of being a recluse) didn’t spend that much time with anyone, and because Barlow had just turned 16 in the spring of 1934, and Lovecraft was 44.

  UW: The Lovecraft/Barlow friendship became an obsession for Charlie, the missing and presumed dead husband of protagonist Marina Willett. I can’t possibly imagine that you became similarly obsessed with this episode in Lovecraft’s life, but clearly it was interesting enough to you to spark a novel. In a life as unusual as Lovecraft’s, why this?

  PLF: The truth is, I was fascinated by Barlow. He hosted Lovecraft in Florida — twice, it turns out, for six or seven weeks each time — and he was Lovecraft’s literary executor for a brief period in the late 1930s. Then he went on to live several other lives, as an experimental poet in the San Francisco Bay Area, and as an anthropologist in Mexico. He was brilliant and complicated and sad, and the more I learned about him, the more I wanted to write a novel about his life.

  UW: The real Barlow, a teacher, committed suicide after his students threatened to expose that he was gay. How does one best handle a tragedy like this in a fictional context? Did you feel the need to tread lightly in any way?

  PLF: My novel sidesteps the narration of Barlow’s suicide in a way that it’s maybe better not to talk about here, but your general question is a good one. How to write about someone, Barlow, who was the victim of homophobic persecution, not only in Mexico, but also in the United States, where he was vilified by Lovecraft’s friends, who wanted to take charge of the Lovecraft estate? It’s a fraught situation, but unfortunately, for a novelist, I don’t think there’s any way to tread lightly. You can’t worry about saying the “right thing” in a work of fiction. You try to imagine your characters as fully as you can, and with as much empathy as you can; but beyond that, you have to follow the impulses and the momentum of the story itself, and see where it goes.

  UW: There are several other real-life authors who appear in the novel, but I don’t want to spoil that for readers. Instead, let me ask how you might enjoy being portrayed after your own death in another author’s novel? Would there be a particular kind of novel you could see yourself appearing in?

  PLF: It would have to be a very strange novel. But actually I’ve already made an appearance in a novel! Brian Evenson wrote a book in the Aliens series, and he included a character named La Farge. I was an android, and I was violently dismembered. No complaints.

  UW: Speaking of very touchy subjects, Lovecraft fandom can be very intense. Have you heard from any of them?

  PLF: I’ve heard from a few people, directly and indirectly. Peter Cannon, who is both a Lovecraft scholar and the author of some works of Lovecraftian fiction (among them the hysterical Lovecraft/P.G. Wodehouse mashup Scream for Jeeves) reviewed The Night Ocean for Publishers’ Weekly, and I was very glad that he liked the book, and thought that it did a good job on the whole of representing Lovecraft’s milieu. On the other hand, S.T. Joshi, who wrote the biography of H.P. Lovecraft (I Am Providence: it’s more than 1000 pages long), sent an email to say that while he found The Night Ocean compelling, he couldn’t approve of the way in which I’d characterized Lovecraft himself, and in particular the way I’d represented Lovecraft’s racism. Well. It’s a complicated subject — there’s no question that Lovecraft expressed some racist beliefs; but reasonable people can disagree about how seriously he meant them (Lovecraft certainly didn’t act on those beliefs, so far as I know) and how much they ought to color our thoughts about his writing. On the whole, I’m pleased that Joshi took the time to read my book at all.

  UW: The events of the Night Ocean cover many years, and this is a novel with a lot of levels. What kind of challenge did that present for telling the story? It occurs to me that there must have been a lot of options about how (and when in the timeline of the novel) to reveal something to the reader.

  PLF: The biggest challenge in that regard was to keep track of all the characters and events of the novel, which I did with a long timeline and about 40 pages of single-spaced capsule biographies. But the question of when to reveal what got decided fairly early on. I don’t always outline books before I write them, but I had to in this case, and I knew from the start more or less where the story would go. That said, I did have to keep reconciling myself to the strange decisions I’d made. Was I really going to tell the story this way? Really? I didn’t stop asking that question until the galleys showed up.

  UW: This is a novel without squamous, cyclopian, eldritch, tentacled abominations, but do you think that fans of science-fiction and other works of imaginative literature should try it anyway? What do you think they’d get out of it?

  PLF: I do hope that fans of imaginative literature will take a look at The Night Ocean, even though there’s nothing supernatural in it, nothing otherworldly. My goal in writing the novel was to tell a Lovecraftian story — with Lovecraft as a character, no less — without using any of the props of the Lovecraftian universe: the tentacles, the lost cities, the crypts, the cultists, etc. (There is a forbidden book, but it’s anything but magical.) I wanted to create an atmosphere of horror and of mystery within the limits of the ordinary world, which is horrible enough, and mysterious enough, too.

La Farge, Paul. The Night Ocean
Lawrence Rungren
142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p72.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/

La Farge, Paul. The Night Ocean. Penguin Pr. Mar. 2017.400p. ISBN 9781101981085. $27; ebk. ISBN 9781101981108. F

In 1934, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft stays two months in Florida with a young fan named Robert H. Barlow. In this expansive tale, skillfully blending fact and fiction, the nature of their relationship becomes a subject of speculation after the discovery of an erotic diary that may or may not be Lovecraft's record of the visit. Only Barlow knows for sure, and the secret goes to the grave with him after his supposed suicide in 1951. Years later, writer Charlie Willett believes he has evidence Barlow is alive in Canada. He visits "Barlow," writing a book that reveals the truth about the diary. However, it's discovered that Charlie has been duped. With his reputation ruined, he also commits suicide. Four years later, his widow, Marina, a New York psychotherapist, meets with "Barlow," also known as L.C. Spinks, to learn the secret he revealed to Charlie on his last visit. VERDICT It can be difficult to tell at times whose story this is, moving as it does from Lovecraft to Barlow to Charlie and finally to Marina. Yet, in the end, it's clear this is ultimately about stories; how we shape them, and their power to shape us in return. [See Prepub Alert, 9/12/16.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rungren, Lawrence. "La Farge, Paul. The Night Ocean." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 72. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301209&it=r&asid=3536ca6a8397fc0c53a176cf95dc1e0b. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A479301209
La Farge, Paul: THE NIGHT OCEAN
(Dec. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

La Farge, Paul THE NIGHT OCEAN Penguin Press (Adult Fiction) $27.00 3, 7 ISBN: 978-1-101-98108-5

A many-layered literary mystery about identity, obsession, and science fiction. Marina Willett's husband, Charlie, is gone. After a scandal involving a book he's written, Charlie leaves a mental hospital in the Berkshires and--presumably--walks into a lake to drown himself. But Marina, a psychologist, isn't sure he's really dead. For one thing, his body has never been discovered. For another, before his death, Charlie had become obsessed with an anthropologist named Robert Barlow--who Charlie believes faked his death after a scandal. And so begins the labyrinthine plot in which Marina narrates the back story of her marriage and explains how first Charlie and then she, once Charlie goes missing, became obsessed with an elderly Canadian who may or may not be Barlow in disguise. The analytical Marina is the ideal narrator to ground readers through the vertiginous narrative, which covers nearly 100 years and uses New York, Florida, Providence, and Canada as its backdrops. The breadth of La Farge's research and the specificity of his historical details are impressive: we enter the worlds of science-fiction fandom, internet trolls, literary hoaxes, and ancient Mexican civilizations as La Farge (Luminous Airplanes, 2011, etc.) deftly weaves in famous figures like H.P Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov, and William S. Burroughs. Only a virtuoso could pull off a story so intricately plotted and so full of big ideas about morality and truth and have the effect of not being ponderous. La Farge is this virtuoso, folding stories inside stories with ease. But even more important than the meticulous craft evident in each sentence is the depth that La Farge achieves in creating even minor characters. No matter how messy the moral choices, or how frustrating the character motivations, La Farge's gift is such that we feel we understand these characters as well as we understand the people we see every day. An effortlessly memorable novel.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"La Farge, Paul: THE NIGHT OCEAN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652445&it=r&asid=6c406f4dbf8e979fcf9138edc9b90f5a. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A473652445
The Night Ocean
Peter Cannon
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p120.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

* The Night Ocean

Paul La Farge. Penguin Press, $27 (400p) ISBN 978-1-101-98108-5

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Was H.P. Lovecraft, the great American horror writer, gay? That's the question at the start of this ingenious, provocative work of alternative history from La Farge (Luminous Airplanes). All the evidence, including Lovecraft's voluminous correspondence and the firsthand accounts of those who knew him (notably the woman to whom he was briefly married), indicates that he was not. In his letters, he called homosexuality a perversion, but then he dismissed human sexuality in general as a lower form of animal activity.

But what if this was all a pose? Lovecraft, who lived most of his life in Providence, R.I., did spend the summer of 1934 visiting a teenage fan, Robert Barlow, at the Barlow family home in central Florida. Barlow, who would later become a professor of Mexican ethnography, committed suicide in Mexico City in 1951 to escape blackmailers who were threatening to expose him as a homosexual.

In the present day of this novel, New York freelance writer Charlie Willett, an avid Lovecraft fan, manages to locate a copy of the Erotonomicon (a play on Lovecraft's fictional Necronomicon), which purports to be the erotic diary Lovecraft kept during his time in Florida. Coded prose using names from Lovecraft's invented mythology records his sexual exploits ("did Yogge-Sothothe in my [hotel] room"). While retracing Lovecraft's steps in Florida, Charlie learns that Barlow may have faked his death and could still be alive. In the end, Charlie secures a substantial advance for a book about Lovecraft as a closet homosexual. Unfortunately for Charlie, he gets some critical facts wrong. He becomes a pariah and later disappears from a psychiatric hospital in the Berkshires, which is where the book's action begins.

Lovecraft's novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward likewise opens with the disappearance of a major character from a psychiatric hospital, a connection made explicit by La Farge naming the first five section titles after those in Ward ("A Result and a Prologue," etc.). The whole novel is framed as the account of the efforts of Charlie's devoted therapist wife to find her husband. Like Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu," the novel consists of several sub-narratives, ranging widely in time and place. But instead of a revelation about humanity's diminished place in an impersonal universe, La Farge delivers insights into the human need to believe in stories and the nature of literary fame, while consistently upsetting readers' expectations.

Other notable recent Lovecraft-related fiction includes Victor La Valle's The Ballad of Black Tom, a redo of Lovecraft's racist tale "The Horror at Red Hook," and Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, in which a black family contends with racism and supernatural forces in 1950s America. La Farge also touches on racial themes (Charlie's father is black, his mother white), but he outdoes his predecessors with this crafty mix of love, sex, and lies. (Mar.)

Peter Cannon is a PW senior reviews editor and the author of The Lovecraft Chronicles, a novel.

Cannon, Peter
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cannon, Peter. "The Night Ocean." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 120. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225030&it=r&asid=eb8a760b4d1bbd8a18fa5de342c8c6de. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225030
Book World: Paul La Farge's 'The Night Ocean' will suck you into the vortex of H.P. Lovecraft
Jon Michaud
(Mar. 3, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Byline: Jon Michaud

The Night Ocean

By Paul La Farge

Penguin. 389 pp. $27

---

Though this year marks the 80th anniversary of H.P. Lovecraft's death, the purveyor of baroque dread and menace remains very much alive in the imaginations of a host of American novelists. Last year, Victor LaValle published "The Ballad of Black Tom," a reworking of Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook." Other novels include Matt Ruff's "Lovecraft Country" and Peter Cannon's "The Lovecraft Chronicles." Now comes "The Night Ocean," by Paul La Farge, a booby-trapped doozy of a book that's as challenging and confounding as one of the many-tentacled alien beings in Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.

"The Night Ocean" begins simply and promisingly enough with a mystery. Our narrator is Marina Willett, a psychiatrist, whose husband, Charlie, has escaped from a mental hospital in Massachusetts, apparently to drown himself in a nearby lake. Charlie was a journalist and a grade-A nerd. He collected "Star Wars" action figures, played Dungeons & Dragons, and, yes, admired the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.

Charlie's trouble began when he came across the (true) story of Robert Barlow, Lovecraft's literary executor. As a young fan, Barlow had struck up a correspondence with the author and, in the summer of 1934, Lovecraft (then in his 40s) spent two months visiting with the 16-year-old Barlow in Florida.

At this point - barely 30 pages into the novel - things get a lot more complicated. Charlie had interviewed Barlow, written a book about him and become something of a literary celebrity until members of the Lovecraft community began questioning the accuracy of his reporting. The unraveling of his story sent Charlie to the mental hospital, and that, in turn, is the starting point for Marina's investigation of her husband's descent into madness.

The result is a novel composed of narratives and counternarratives, texts and subtexts. It is both homage to and a sendup of Lovecraft and the 19th-century Gothic fantasies that inspired him. The layering is dizzying. Within Marina's account lies Charlie's account of Barlow's retelling of his relationship with Lovecraft. Within Charlie's story there are further sources: diaries, letters, recordings, transcripts - some of them red herrings and hoaxes and others seemingly true. La Farge, who adorns his book with cameos from William S. Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, Edward R. Murrow and others, carries it all off with breathtaking skill and panache.

Because many of the characters in "The Night Ocean" are writers and editors, they frequently analyze and examine the stories that are told in the book. The result - somewhat frustratingly for a reviewer - is that La Farge has written a self-critiquing novel that seems to anticipate every possible complaint a reader could have. Such cleverness is in evidence throughout, along with a wicked sense of humor. For example, all of the sex acts described in Lovecraft's purported diary, the "Erotonomicon," are named after creatures from his fiction, which results in sentences such as this: "Perform'd 3 times tonight ye YOGGE-SOTHOTHE."

As entertaining as the novel is, its complex structure results almost inevitably in the lack of a true center. I couldn't decide who the main protagonists were: Lovecraft and Barlow? Charlie and Marina? Or the troubled fan who published the "Erotonomicon." His life story turns out to be the most moving in the book. The fact that it may not be entirely true doesn't diminish its power.

Indeed, the vexed question of truth, so much in the news these days, is central to "The Night Ocean." Among the legion of Lovecraft fans, there will doubtless be some who will painstakingly parse out the warp of facts from the weft of lies in this novel. Early on, I did my best to keep track, but soon I came to understand that it didn't matter - that I was falling into La Farge's trap, the same trap that drives Charlie mad. Above all else, "The Night Ocean" is about the transformational uses to which stories can be put. "This is how transmigration works," one character notes. "Words take you over and you inhabit others in the form of words."

It's worth noting that Charlie Willett's name is derived from two characters in Lovecraft's long story "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." As Marina observes, that tale, about a man who becomes obsessed with one of his ancestors, is "a parable on the perils of research." My advice is to spare yourself the trouble of trying to divine what's true and what's fiction in "The Night Ocean" and just go along for the ride.

---

Michaud is a novelist and the head librarian at the Center for Fiction.

Jon Michaud
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Michaud, Jon. "Book World: Paul La Farge's 'The Night Ocean' will suck you into the vortex of H.P. Lovecraft." Washington Post, 3 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483851764&it=r&asid=14e7c0bf7e7f1b4bb9f1ed77cec5aad1. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A483851764

Rungren, Lawrence. "La Farge, Paul. The Night Ocean." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 72. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA479301209&asid=3536ca6a8397fc0c53a176cf95dc1e0b. Accessed 25 May 2017. "La Farge, Paul: THE NIGHT OCEAN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA473652445&asid=6c406f4dbf8e979fcf9138edc9b90f5a. Accessed 25 May 2017. Cannon, Peter. "The Night Ocean." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 120. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA475225030&asid=eb8a760b4d1bbd8a18fa5de342c8c6de. Accessed 25 May 2017. Michaud, Jon. "Book World: Paul La Farge's 'The Night Ocean' will suck you into the vortex of H.P. Lovecraft." Washington Post, 3 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA483851764&asid=14e7c0bf7e7f1b4bb9f1ed77cec5aad1. Accessed 25 May 2017.

• Chicago Review of Books
  https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/03/08/the-night-ocean-brings-lovecraft-back-from-the-dead/
  Word count: 806

  ‘The Night Ocean’ Brings Lovecraft Back From the Dead
  Posted on March 8, 2017 by Amy Brady

  Night OceanThis year marks the 80th anniversary of the death of H.P. Lovecraft, the notorious horror writer inspired by the ornate craftsmanship of Edgar Allan Poe and renowned for his ground-breaking—if rather nihilistic—perspective on humanity’s place in the cosmos. His writings have been enjoyed, rebuked, and analyzed by fans and scholars for decades, but Lovecraft the man remains in some ways as unknowable as the ancient god-like beings that dominate his mythos. Here’s what we do know: He died young, at the age of 46 in 1937, and wrote approximately 60 short stories, three long enough to qualify as novellas. We know that despite possessing a vibrant imagination, he couldn’t see past his own perceived racial superiority. We know that his marriage was troubled and that he was good friends with a writer and anthropologist named Robert Hayward Barlow.

  That friend helped him write “The Night Ocean,” a 1936 psychological horror tale about a man who stays at the beach long past the summer season. The terror he experiences after an encounter with mysterious, shadowy figures leaves him so mentally incapacitated that he can’t fully describe the event in human language. “Now that I am trying to tell what I saw I am conscious of a thousand maddening limitations,” he laments.

  In his beguiling new novel, The Night Ocean, Paul La Farge extends that short story’s themes of loneliness and disorientation into a spinning vortex of reality that further throws into question our ability to understand the world around us. But instead of pondering the existence of monsters, La Farge’s characters speculate about far more human matters: Was Lovecraft in love with his friend Barlow? Did he ever document their relationship? And is it possible that Barlow is still alive today, despite a record of his death in the mid-twentieth century? The book is a work of fiction, of course, but Lovecraft and Barlow both make appearances, as do William Burroughs, Ursula K. Le Guin, and S.T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s real-life biographer. Fact and fiction are mostly useless categories in this perplexing tale of forbidden love.

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  The mystery begins with the death of Charlie Willett, a freelance reporter and husband to Marina. He committed suicide, we learn, by drowning himself in a lake near a psych ward where he’d been living under the care of mental health professionals. The reason for his suicide isn’t hard for Marina to explain: A tell-all he’d written about Lovecraft’s homosexuality turned out to be based on two unreliable sources: the alleged diary of Lovecraft that detailed his love affair with Barlow and which Lovecraft had titled, of course, the Erotonomicon; and an interview with Barlow himself—a man who was supposed to be dead. When both critics and readers reject his work, Charlie begins to doubt not only his talent, but his sanity—that Barlow, after all, had seemed so convincing—and his downfall comes quickly. Following Charlie’s death, Marina embarks on a hunt for the truth about what happened to her husband—and to Barlow and Lovecraft. She’s entranced by the stories she uncovers, but every time she thinks she’s discovered the truth, it slips away, like a furtive sea creature diving under the water just as you look its direction.

  The Night Ocean has no center. No single character dominates the story, and no one event serves as a foundation for all others. The plot unfolds like a series of Russian nesting dolls, and thrillingly so: Like the best of Lovecraft, this novel questions the capacity of language to describe reality with accuracy.

  It also doesn’t shy away from racism. Like last year’s The Ballad of Black Tom, a Lovecraftian mystery by Victor LaValle, The Night Ocean criticizes Lovecraft as much as it celebrates him: Charlie, who’s biracial, fears what racial epithets Lovecraft fans might sling at him during readings, and Barlow (if it is Barlow!) finds himself torn between feelings of love for the author and disgust at his bigotry. In a world continuously haunted by the real-life horrors of racism and xenophobia, The Night Ocean proves to be more than a great read—it’s a timely meditation on the challenge of separating artist from art and the limits of human understanding.

  FICTION
  The Night Ocean by Paul LaFarge
  Penguin Press
  Published March 7, 2017

  Paul LaFarge is the author of five books: The Night Ocean; The Artist of the Missing; Haussmann, or the Distinction; Luminous Airplanes; and The Facts of Winter. He’s also a regular contributor to The New Yorker.

• Culture Trip
  https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/paul-la-farge-night-ocean-book-review/
  Word count: 1469

  In Paul La Farge’s 'The Night Ocean’ a Lovecraft Biographer Falls Prey to a Hoax

  JW McCormack
  Updated: 17 May 2017

  The protagonist of the American novelist’s newest work disappears after investigating the romantic history of the famed horror writer.
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  The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge would almost certainly be the finest horror novel to extemporize on the mythos of Howard Phillips Lovecraft—the Providence author of “weird fiction” and the inspiration behind hundreds of eerie stories and metal bands, whose xenophobic politics still cast a shadow over his fandom—if it qualified. But this novel is its own beast, not so much because it resists the hoary grimoires, alien netherworlds, and reliably arcane vocabulary that define the genre, but because it returns Lovecraft and his ambiguous legacy to the world as we know it, which is, oh yes, much more horrible than any “Colour of Space” or squamous Cthulhu.

  Our narrator for most of the book is Marina Willett, a psychotherapist specializing in trauma, whose husband Charlie has disappeared following the publication of a book in which he alleges that the “old gent” Lovecraft had an affair with a younger man named Robert Barlow and even cohabitated with his family in Florida for a time in 1934. Charlie Willett’s work is based on the infamous Erotonomicon (counterpoint to the infernal Necronomicon of Lovecraft yore), a diary where Lovecraft recorded his affair with Barlow, then sixteen, who would go on in his adulthood to chair the anthropology department at Mexico City College. It was there, on the second day of the new year in 1951, that Barlow, rather than risk being outed as homosexual by a young student named William Burroughs, took his own life. What Charlie’s book presupposes is—maybe he didn’t? Staking his reputation on his discovery of the real Barlow, who he claims has been living in a Canadian resort town under the name L.C. Spinks, Charlie winds up with more than enough rope to hang himself (so to speak). After his apparent suicide, it falls to Marina to pick up the trail and try to separate the facts from the fakes in a world where the differences seems increasingly incidental.

  As synopsis, it is not inaccurate. But this set-up, as I’m giving it to you, sounds much more serpentine than it feels on the page. It leaves out the (scandalous) tenderness with which La Farge endows ur-weirdo H. P. Lovecraft, who calls masturbation ‘doing Yogge-Sothothe,’ gay intercourse ‘Ablo and the Nether Gulfs,’ and tells Barlow nothing they do can be wrong because all human beings are cosmically insignificant from the point of view of a visitor from Betelgeuse:

  “At your age, Bobby, you naturally imagine that what you feel is important. When someone slights you, you want to murder them! And when you think you’re in love…When you get to be the Old Gent’s age, however, you’ll understand that everything you feel has been felt before, over and over, until it’s as worn out as my 1917 overcoat. Really, it’s comical. Each of our so-called individual emotions is just a repetition of something that has been felt countless thousands of times before, by countless others. From that point of view, it’s hard to put much stock in feeling. Do you see my point?”
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  And yet, almost despite himself, tenebrous old H.P. is warmed into some late-onset humanity by his lover. He even contemplates giving up cyclopean grave-cities for a porridgey-sounding family chronicle to be written while he and Barlow live openly in Paris and tour Scotland (“I hear their castles are exceedingly ancient and gloomy,” to which Barlow replies, “We’ll find the gloomiest one.”) At the heart of the book is Barlow, who we receive piecemeal, potentially fabricated and yet always vividly placed in the mid-century carnival of dueling prejudices. One moment he’s a forcibly closeted hanger-on in the parlors and convention floors where science-fiction is being bombastically founded by Isaac Asimov and company; then, following Lovecraft’s death, he’s a foiled initiate to the lofty mysteries of pre-European Mexico. Effectively blackmailed by “Bill” Burroughs and a student acquaintance, who hope to finance an Ayahuasca trip to Colombia, Barlow recounts Bill’s pastime of drowning cats in a bathtub in order to gain “secret knowledge,” and reflects wistfully: “Howard had made an effort, however hopeless, to be human. Bill made no effort.”

  This question, regarding the costs of being human in the face of cosmic inconsequence and annihilating hatred, comes up again when, prior to his disappearance, Charlie finds the release party for his newly-published expose hijacked by a French writer named Gilles Baron who lectures on the superiority of jellyfish as a species: “if we wanted to see the future of humanity, we had only to study these translucent creatures, which built nothing, plotted nothing, but merely floated, and stung.” The book is briefly a success, until holes in Spink’s story begin to be uncovered by the press. As a literary pariah, Charlie is admitted to a psych ward, from which he escapes. When Marina, in the course of searching for him, comes across Internet trolls suggesting (out of some dark breed of Lovecraft loyalism) to sneak child snuff porn onto his hard drive, she thinks: “I was glad, then, that Charlie and I had never returned to that conversation about having children. It wasn’t just that I would have been afraid for their safety. I didn’t want to bring new people into this world.”

  Ultimately, the big surprise of the book is that it is not really a Borgesian criss-cross. Its progression is not measured by plot twists, but by the kind of feeling from which escapist science-fiction is supposed to deliver us. For one thing, suicide haunts The Night Ocean —the title refers to an apocryphal story by Barlow and Lovecraft in which distant drowned bodies beckon an artist from outside his beachfront rental—but the real horror is the damage inflicted on the families suicide leaves behind. La Farge is similarly frank in his depiction of the sci-fi circuit, both its contemporary Facebook-commenter contingent and its Weird Tales heyday, where the petty feuds between the editors of Utopian-socialist fanzines and crypto-fascist neckbeards says much more about historical praxis than time machines and futuristic robots.

  This isn’t to say that La Farge is indifferent to the cause of prototypical pulp fiction—far from it! The scholastic detective story that encompasses much of The Night Ocean is immaculately researched and infused with care for the material. Since it is assembled by Marina, her annotations give a nice touch of insight, helpfully identifying dozens of walk-on cameos by the likes of fellow horror writer Clark Ashton Smith or fantasy novelist Fritz Leiber or explaining a sly reference to Lovecraft’s novella The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Real-world Lovecraft-biographer S. T. Joshi puts in an appearance, and while Gilles Baron might not be a dead ringer for Michel Houellebecq—who penned a monograph on Lovecraft—or Vilém Flusser—who wrote a book in praise of a species of vampiric squid—he’s an suitably dour approximation of the two.

  As in La Farge’s other books, notably his ersatz historical novel of the Parisian architect Baron Haussman, the line between research and fiction is so porous that it all but vanishes. Part of what emerges from bringing Lovecraft’s “lengthening shadow” into the light is how universally human his work really is. The reanimator Herbert West brings bodies back from death because he wants more from life; the fear of interplanetary interlopers in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is the recognition that you are somehow invisibly different from those around you; and the monster Charles Dexter Ward summons from its ancestral labyrinth is history itself. The Night Ocean’s cast of hoaxers and obsessed literati fight over the facts of Lovecraft’s life because each is in their way an outsider—a gay man in small town America, a morphine addicted veteran, a Communist under McCarthysim—who wants ownership of the dream; they too ‘imagine what they feel is important.’ But it falls to each of us, upon awakening, to find a reason to go on “having so-called individual emotions” in a world where either everything or nothing is real: “a planet-sized hoax,” as Marina puts it, “cobbled together from books.”

  THE NIGHT OCEAN
  by Paul La Farge
  Published by Penguin Press
  Hardcover | 400 pp | $27.00

• Bookshelf
  http://www.bookshelf.ca/article/view/602
  Word count: 1043

  REVIEW: THE NIGHT OCEAN
  Article By Andrew Hood
  Date: 12 Mar 2017
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  Related...
  The Night Ocean
  The Ballad of Black Tom
  Lovecraft Country: A Novel
  Children of Lovecraft

  There probably aren’t any real monsters. Beyond the historical misidentification of some animal bones and narwhal horns, monsters are just expressions of those thoughts, feelings, and actions of ours that feel so aberrant that we have to excise and exaggerate their qualities in order to make any sense of or peace with them.

  In a 20th century that saw the declawing and defanging of antiquity’s monsters by Hollywood, weird fiction author H.P. Lovecraft supplied ancient, eldritch, indescribable horrors that were the perfect companions to the hard-to-digest horror of the First World War and seemed to presage – Lovecraft died in 1937 – the inhumane, but also essentially human atrocities of the Second World War.

  In Lovecraft’s universe, humans are essentially insignificant in the context of the grand old cosmic horrors that rule just beyond our ken. Though not well regarded in his own lifetime, Lovecraft and his universe went on to become one of the most looming influences on writers of horror, his specific worldview still being one that contemporary authors inhabit and expand. The recent anthology Children of Lovecraft, for instance, makes for a fun survey of this ongoing occupation.

  The intersection of Lovecraft’s writing and his biography, however, makes his universe a fraught and complicated one to inhabit. By now it’s taken somewhat for granted that Lovecraft’s beloved conception of cosmic horror was seeded by the author’s own racism and xenophobia, that his influential pantheon of monsters were seemingly expressions of his own ugly insides. Increasingly, with books like Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, the real world, mirco implications of Lovecraft’s macro cruelties are being met head on. Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean, however, is one of the few instances (maybe the first instance) where Lovecraft, warts and all, appears as a character.

  The biographical axis of La Farge’s novel is the relationship between Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, the young fan who would go on to be largely responsible for cultivating the author’s posthumous legacy. Initially pen pals, the notoriously reclusive Lovecraft accepted an invitation to visit Barlow in Florida – the author was then 44, his admirer 16. Imagining that relationship – Lovecraft’s sexuality was also somewhat mindboggling – as well as imagining the imaginings of that relationship is the business of The Night Ocean, which presents the answers, or would seem to, in a lost Lovecraft diary, The Erotonomicon. (Not to be confused with The Necronomicon.)

  The Night Ocean will prove, by turns, both engaging and disappointing for Lovecraft devotees. (Those protective, disapproving fans will also find themselves as characters in the novel, too.) The prologue drops us into in a classic Lovecraftian scenario: our narrator’s husband, Charlie Willet, recently committed (willfully) to an asylum, has escaped and appears to have disappeared, naked, into Agawam Lake. The cause of Charlie’s unraveling would seem to be connected to The Erotonomicon and Robert Barlow, and the amorphous veracity of both. But as our narrator, the psychologist Marina Willet, explores the curious events and manuscripts that led to her husband committing himself, it becomes clear that La Farge – an underappreciated author of metafiction – hasn’t exactly set his novel as literally and egregiously in “Lovecraft country” as other fans/authors. The Night Ocean isn’t so much influenced by Lovecraft as it’s marinated in him.

  Instead of summoning the monsters occupying the far off without, La Farge – so deftly marrying fact, fiction, and all that fecund uncertainty in between – conjures those within. The inarguable facts of Barlow’s life – as an adult he became an accomplished poet and revolutionary anthropologist who committed suicide under threat of his students exposing his homosexuality – mixed with the founded, assumed, apocryphal, and spurious details of Lovecraft’s life, all of which is set against Marina’s drive to understand what happened to Charlie, makes for a story concerned with how love produces a quixotic drive to understand and reconcile all the difficult, troubling – sometimes horrifying – components of a person. In La Farge’s exquisite ideation, we’re all of us, like The Erotonomicon, manuscripts of uncertain composition and origin.

  I’m lately finding it impossible to shut out our current political fracas of seemingly unrelated things, so of course The Night Ocean seems especially relevant in a time when the extreme sides of the political spectrum are making monsters out of their opposites. Depending on which side you talk to, the world is either full of Nazis or full of Social Justice Warriors, each accused of being monomaniacally hell-bent on foisting their destructive agenda on the world. The vilification of each side makes no room for nuance, deals only in the binaries of right/wrong and good/evil. Maybe culture’s increasingly secularity makes supernatural monster making difficult, so we inflate and distort each other, a thought that kept cropping up during The Night Ocean.

  Lovecraft could not exist today, would be deemed unredeemably vile. Yet, for all his bared flaws as a human, he’s still widely read and pervasively influential, his nastiness either overlook entirely, or always struggled with. The Night Ocean too struggles with Lovecraft, in its layers of perspective (the description of which would – sorry – spoil the book to describe) it tries to either reinvent or reconcile the facts and ideas of his difficult insides. It’s not quite this sticktoitiveness, though, that makes La Farge’s novel so compelling. On the surface, the interiority of The Night Ocean might alienate those Lovecraft fans who are drawn to that author’s populating the without with monsters. But once the full scale of the story is comprehended, the reader will hopefully see that that inwardness is just a different route to the inky, vast chaos beyond that, while tangible, is – very much in the tradition of Lovecraft – excruciatingly out of the realm of description.

• New York Times Book Review
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/books/review/night-ocean-paul-la-farge.html?_r=0
  Word count: 1495

  A Novel Dwells on the Loves of Lovecraft

  By D.T. MAXMARCH 7, 2017
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  H.P. Lovecraft: A homebody, a neurotic, anti-Semitic and sexually uncertain.

  THE NIGHT OCEAN
  By Paul La Farge
  389 pp. Penguin Press. $27.

  The past is another country, a more repressed one, and how happy it makes us all to poke around among its juts, crevices and cracks. What happened between Clara Schumann and Brahms on that trip down the Rhine? What did Mark Twain want with all those barely adolescent girls? Into this, our gleeful modern-day parlor game, jumps the talented novelist Paul La Farge, with his new novel, “The Night Ocean,” a many-voiced story about H.P. Lovecraft, his teenage acolyte Robert Barlow and the diary Lovecraft supposedly kept of their love life together.

  Lovecraft, to be sure, is ripe for exploration. At the time of his death from intestinal cancer, at the age of 46 in 1937, the writer had published stories only in a handful of horror magazines. His personal life was similarly provincial and straitened. He was racist, anti-Semitic, sexually uncertain, a homebody and a neurotic.

  What was Barlow’s role in that life? Up to a point, we know. He and Lovecraft were friends. Lovecraft, then in his early 40s, first got to know the boy, an aspiring 13-year-old writer and the publisher of a “weird fiction” fanzine, by mail. A few years later, in 1934, he went and stayed with Barlow and his family at their home in Florida. Barlow in turn came to see the reclusive writer in Providence where Lovecraft lived with an aunt. They collaborated on several stories, exchanged endless chummy letters, and soon after Lovecraft died.

  But what happened during these visits, only a handful in all? One might guess something fairly intense. Lovecraft, as one friend comments in “The Night Ocean,” “didn’t stay with anyone for two months. He was too attached to his precious old furniture, his books, his dear Providence.” And Barlow somehow wound up as Lovecraft’s literary executor. One story that Lovecraft helped Barlow with, also titled “The Night Ocean,” is about a man vacationing at an isolated beach house, plagued by the “darkly sinister impression” that there was something in the deep, “some strange and palpitant life,” calling for his attention. Surely even Lovecraft, although he decried the “popularity of ol’ Doc Sigmund,” must have glimpsed the allegory of sexual longing in the story.
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  The Night Ocean Paul La Farge

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  A stunted book-obsessed relationship is a good setup for La Farge. As a writer he seems to have two interests. One is metafiction. His early novel “Haussmann; Or, The Distinction” (2001) passed itself off as a personal history of the planner of modern Paris, which La Farge had merely translated from the French. The book that followed it, “The Facts of Winter” (2005), was a record of dreams collected by the made-up poet Paul Poissel, who supposedly also wrote the Haussmann history. La Farge loves intertextuality, nonexistent but real-seeming books, famous people lifted from the historical record and plausibly altered, the whole Borgesian shebang.
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  But he also has another side, one intrigued by the dull stuff of contemporary life, by ordinary relationships, especially of the failed kind. This taste for the missed connections that make us human came out most clearly in his 2011 novel “Luminous Airplanes,” in which a slacker computer programmer falls in love with a troubled young woman. Here there was no question whether the characters went to bed; the mystery was why.

  Metafictionist and novelist of sentiment, then, team up for “The Night Ocean.” At the book’s beginning, Marina Willett, a New Yorker and, in typical Lovecraft fashion, a committed rationalist (she is a psychiatrist), is faced with a mystery. Her husband, Charlie, a more impulsive type, a freelance journalist, has seemingly drowned himself in a Berkshire lake. The cause, she presumes, was despair, brought on by having been the victim of a hoax. Working on a book about Lovecraft, he had come upon a volume called the “Erotonomicon,” which appeared to be Lovecraft’s record of his sex life. As one would expect, it isn’t pretty. “In a Vile Shack in ye Warren-Streete (aptly named!),” Lovecraft supposedly writes, for example, on Feb. 24, 1925, “we tried a Lesser Summoning, but nothing Came. . . . The boy reek’d of Tobacco, a smell that pleases me not.”

  Charlie quickly discovers that the book has already been exposed as a fraud, the true author its supposed editor, a man named L.C. Spinks. But Charlie doubts that Spinks, a Canadian appliance repairman, was really responsible. “It’s the riddle of the Spinks,” he jokes to Marina. Digging deeper, he finds a more satisfying answer: The author of the “Erotonomicon” is none other than the adult Barlow himself, motivated by anger at the Lovecraft acolytes who spurned him. This goes against what is publicly known. Barlow never claimed authorship. He committed suicide in 1951 in Mexico City, where he was teaching, fearing exposure as homosexual.
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  Barlow is dead, then — a fact that seems incontrovertible, one of the few in this bubbling stew of a book. (La Farge even includes a photocopy of his death certificate.) But Charlie soon picks up a trail that suggests Barlow faked his death and is living quietly in the town of Parry Sound, Ontario, to which Charlie now goes for the scoop. He gets the true story of what happened between Barlow and Lovecraft. Charlie’s persistence pays off when HarperCollins buys “The Book of the Law of Love,” as Charlie titles his inquiry, for $200,000. On publication he becomes a celebrity, the toast of literary Manhattan. Marina alone suspects that the “story was too good to be true,” but spouse-loyal, she holds her tongue. Then things begin to unravel. Barlow is not who he seems; the author is not whom Charlie believes; disgrace and suicide follow.

  It is left to the wife to rereport her husband’s story, to make the same trip to Parry Sound and find out what is really going on. Partly, one intuits, Marina makes this effort because she too wants Lovecraft, creator of the weird, to have been less weird himself. “If he really did love Bobby, at least that would mean he was human,” one character comments. But she also goes on this journey to retrieve the man she loves. “This is not the story of our marriage,” she insists, though of course it is. And where there is love there is hope. No one, she points out, ever found her husband’s body. What if he too is faking his death? “There was a word for it in fandom’s argot,” she remembers Charlie telling her when talking about Barlow: “pseuicide.” There won’t necessarily be a clear resolution to this mystery — or to any of the other mysteries the novel poses — but then, resolution is precisely what this story seeks to frustrate. And the book’s five narrators (Marina, Charlie, Barlow, Spinks and Lovecraft) combine to tell a beauty of a tale.

  “The Night Ocean” is a book full of pleasures. Though La Farge’s prose is as postmodernly fervid as Lovecraft’s is nostalgically formal, echoes of the horror writer’s work abound. The name Marina Willett recalls Marinus Willett, the investigator of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” — itself a parable, as Marina notes, “on the perils of research.” Likewise, the novel “The Night Ocean” contains in its particulars a number of allusions to the Lovecraft story that gives it its name. La Farge is a capable mimic, capturing everything from the talk of prewar science fiction fanboys to the language of modern internet trolls. And he (I’m assuming it’s La Farge) has even put up a website that purports to sell the reissued “Erotonomicon.” Dashing, playful and cleverly imagined, “The Night Ocean” emerges as an inexhaustible shaggy monster, part literary parody, part case study of the slipperiness of narrative and the seduction of a good story.

  D.T. Max is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace.”

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