Lost Empress by Sergio de la Pava
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gazing Down the Plughole

It takes an exceptional talent to sustain comedic prose in so many distinct voices for over 600 pages. It also takes real dedication to persist in reading those 600 pages. The witty ripostes, the sarcastic asides, the pithy literary allusions by commercial geniuses, medicos with nous, and self-aware but larcenous offenders eventually are normalized so that the reader is thrown back to the story - which frankly ain’t that great.

A misogynistic cast of corporate types try to keep the sassy protagonist out of her family inheritance of managing an NFL football team. This is the central gyre into which everything else is eventually sucked. Meanwhile lots of NYC types, mostly felonious or incompetent, buzz around adding local colour and guided tours of cultural centres like Paterson, New Jersey and Rikers Island. It’s entertaining but is it art?

Of course it’s art. “Humanity’s best unnecessary invention is art.” And Lost Empress is entirely unnecessary. So I take it back. The story is irrelevant. What matters are the various stories that make up something different - not necessarily more than, just different - from the whole.

The book is a literary toy - with lots of moving parts. The whole doesn’t do anything productive. The point though is to watch the moving parts, which are fascinating. Each part spins or blinks or pulsates perfectly. That they engage with each other is incidental except that in total they form a ‘thing’.

The thing in question can be described as Sophisticated Street Trash. Urbanely clever in a detached sort of knowing, disregarding regard, the genre isn’t intended to evoke anything but the satisfaction of recognition. It’s a big inside joke shared round: Too bad, how sad, never mind. Nothing to see here but the usual absurdity. It’s a tough job but...

No, no, that’s not fair. From his perch above the fray, de la Pava has created a tribute to the dignity of human stupidity. Or is it the stupidity of human dignity? His book sends everything up - including itself - so perhaps it’s both. I love it.

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