| Review | Four New Messages by Joshua Cohen | The Coffin Factory

The four stories that make up Joshua Cohen?s new book, Four New Messages, do not share characters or a narrative thread to link them.? What does run through them all are themes of emotional and creative decay.? In the worlds of Four New Messages, with settings that jump around time and place, we see a spoiled, Ivy League-educated upper class disconnected from a majority who is left to prostitute themselves in order to survive?as drug dealers and porn actresses, or as copywriters for pharmaceutical companies and creative writing teachers at small Midwest colleges, far away from the success of New York.? Happiness is a luxury most of these characters are unaccustomed to, where even a father taking his daughter to visit colleges is more concerned with revisiting his own past traumas than with his daughter?s excitement.? Cohen?s characters here are either too dull to dream of anything better or else smart enough only to realize that a better life is out of reach.

Perhaps the most integral chain wrapping up the stories in Four New Messages is language.? Cohen seems to relish these stories as opportunities to swim through sounds and syllables that pull at the tide of events.? Writers of some sort appear in each story to be used in his exercises of English, acting as Cohen?s surrogate wordsmiths, speaking the dizzying tangles of vocabulary and syntax that he has crafted.

While two stories, ?Emission? and ?The College Borough,? follow more traditional three-act storytelling, the other two, ?McDonald?s? and ?Sent,? are more loosely structured explorations of the depressing themes that run through the book, told in Cohen?s stream-of-conscious wordplay that, while clever and technically deft, ultimately becomes more important than the themes or the stories.? Characters and settings are muddied, blended together, and then ripped apart.? For Cohen, these stories appear to be vehicles used to explore the avenues crisscrossing the language centers of his mind.

?McDonald?s? is the pinnacle of this trip through language and creativity.? The narrator, a flailing writer, is trying to develop a story around the image of a dead woman being tossed around the back seat of a moving car?an image, we are told, that represents time, ?like the secondhand of a clock.?? But he is unable or unwilling to focus long enough to complete his story and his mind jumps around, like the dead woman in the car, to thoughts about his own life, a job that eats away at his time to write, to consumerism that eats away at creativity, and to his parents who aren?t interested in his stories.

As ?McDonald?s? progresses the narrator?s story and life become so interwoven that to the reader they are essentially one and the same:

?All around him was Vacancy with the vowels themselves vacant, Vcncy: the local errata of burned connections, burnt bulbs, Free Cable TV! as if in advocacy?what was cable locked up for this time? (That?s a line I?d been saving.)? Didn?t we already pass this pass, Mom? make that exit or eat that meal?? Did we take our meds or no? and if so, shouldn?t they have been taken with a meal?? Light blinking lights.? Mom, does a light blink on or off? or does just saying It blinks cover both?? This was what I thought about for a week.?

The metafictional layers of Cohen writing a story about someone writing a story become sandwiched to where it?s difficult not to see this as Cohen?s own struggles with storytelling?the time and creativity it requires.? There is almost as little plot developed in ?McDonald?s? as is developed in the narrator?s abortive attempts at a story.? But Cohen is content with raging against creativity?s decline and playing with language rather than building a narrative foundation to work in.? And when he does build stories with a more cohesive narrative, in ?Emission? and ?The College Borough,? Cohen still seems less interested in story than in language.? Both began with enough intrigue to have sustained a longer interaction but wrapped up more quickly than I wanted them to, as if Cohen had grown bored and was ready for the next verbal transgression.

Cohen is a gifted craftsman of language and Four New Messages is an impressive display, but readers may find it difficult to have as much fun playing in these morose stories as Cohen has.

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Reviewed by MacAdam Smith

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Graywolf Press, August 2012

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