Well, it took a lot more work than I’d anticipated, but I’ve finally revamped and completely rewritten the old book and given her a new face [note: the actual size was too big to upload here, so I had to truncate the cover a little. Sorry, baby; but you’re beautiful still]:
Back cover:
An incomprehensible admission, a horrifying deed … A secret with the power to destroy, and a superhuman father with beast-like brilliance …
At age thirteen, five years after his mother’s death, Joel Gasteneau is beaten so brutally by his father that he almost doesn’t survive. Yet he makes himself live, his strength of will extraordinary even then, and he runs away from home.
Alone and comforted only by running and the bloodless beauty of math, he makes his own way, rising eventually to the Green Berets: an elite athlete who nevertheless cannot quite outdistance himself from the torments of his childhood.
Now, at thirty-three, consumed by doubt and a growing sense of hypochondria, he resolves at last to follow through on an idea he first thought of when he was a child: to seek out a piece of evidence that shows with certainty God’s hand at work upon the earth. But in seeking this evidence, he’s stricken by an enigmatic illness that almost kills him: and there, inside the fevered meat of his brain, he unearths a memory so chilling that his life is forever altered.
One of the most challenging novels of the last decade, Pale Criminal is at its core an inquiry into godless morality and human virtue, an exploration of how we live, part mystery story, part literary crime novel combing the surreal imagery of Nabokov with the psychological complexity of Dostoevsky — a metaphysical thriller of mind-spinning intrigue and a philosophical odyssey into the most fundamental questions.
This book is an inquiry into human virtue.
The title is a direct reference to a chapter from Nietszche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra — and the idea of the Pale Criminal indeed appears, in context of Nietszche, in Chapter 10 of the novel.
The original version of this book took me nearly nine years to write — the rewrite took another year — but I’ll be eternally grateful if YOU, reader, with your confounding, beautiful, golden silence, download loaded it now (for free through Wednesday, September 25th).
I read the following from my friend Jacinda, who posted it on her website:
I finished reading Ray Harvey’s More and More unto the Perfect Day more than a year ago – for the third time. I had intended to write a review of the book immediately following each reading, but couldn’t gather my thoughts into a neat pile. Instead, I was left with crooked, overlapped, often torn conclusions of how the book had affected me. I have taken notes. I have made an outline in order to follow the storyline. I still find myself unable to write a standard type review, so instead, I’ll submit to my visceral reactions…as a human being; not as a writer, critic, or editor.
First, it pissed me off because it attempted to challenge the beliefs that I have held dear for the entirety of my 38 years. For this, I commend it. A religious man’s faith is tested. The pages where this occurred in real-time are now filled with dry gorges — valleys that were formed by the weight of my tears. Old tears.
Second, the crooked, yet parallel, line it draws with my own life had me looking over my shoulder with the turn of every page. From things as provocative and significant as sourceless anger and spontaneous illness to spooky similarities like Cherokee heritage, acne scars, stretch marks, the names and appearances of family members…I experienced what I would call a one-dimensional, reflective haunting.
Here’s where I stop counting and fall into what flirts with a search for words. This book reached deep within in me. I am a deer that is not yet dead, but being prematurely field-dressed due to her poacher’s anxiety, guilt…something. A hand grabs at my trachea, cuts off the air, and pulls downward, to a place outside my own body. This book has found places within me that have been injured. Some of them have been healed. Others are now bleeding.
I’m not a philosopher, and don’t wish to be. I’m not an intellectual, though I sometimes envy those who are. That’s why it’s so difficult to qualify how and why this book affected me so profoundly. I’m still not sure I understand all the material. Maybe I never will; maybe it’s not intended to be fully understood.
I have found myself wishing I had never read it. Yet, I have read it numerous times. I have attempted to rid my mind of the images it imparts. Yet, I revisit them and curl up into the places they have hollowed out for me. Its lyrical prose is like a song. Its imagery is dark, shapely, and at times, far too real.
Thank you, Mr. Harvey. I don’t know if you intended to do this to me, but it has been done. I doubt I will ever read another book like yours, but if one comes along, the will power to keep my hands off of it will have to be strong. Thank you for demonstrating how good literary fiction distracts the conscious mind while implanting belief systems into the subconscious and unconscious minds. You have reminded me why I love the written word and why I am addicted to its effects – even if those effects are those which I’d rather not endure.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is NOT impressed by predictability, pedestrian prose, shallow characters, and ignorance as an ultimate form of contentedness. If you fit the profile, hold on. There’s no telling how deep this one will take you.
Jacinda is a beautiful lady and a beautiful writer, as you can see. When you read something like that about your own work, you’re left a little staggered.
The book divides people. Many hate it, and I’ve been surprised at the amount of hate-mail I’ve gotten over it. It is flawed — I see that now — and it’s also explicitly philosophical. Yet it took me almost a decade to write, and I really typed my soul into it. I believe that for all its flaws, it succeeds on the level I most wanted it to, and that its thematic point is important — a case for godless morality. There are a certain number of readers, however few, who hook into what I was after, and I thank you.
Bizarre things are beginning to happen to Joel Gasteneau. A strange illness has left him feeling weak and haunted by vivid dreams, and he feels that he is being followed. Exhausted and fearful, he decides to abandon his life as a pensive drifter and focus on a long-neglected project: To find a durable proof for the existence of God.
This pursuit will run Joel through a gauntlet of self-discovery, one that will challenge the very limits of his mental and physical endurance.
In a solid telling of a complex story of mystery and intrigue, author Ray Harvey assumes the role of master illusionist. Clues abound, but can Joel trust them? What is he really experiencing? Viral fever flashbacks? The eruption of long-buried memories? Reality? More questions than answers emerge as the reader is drawn into another world, where mysticism and philosophy tangle and clash across a stunningly-rendered, often other-worldly landscape.
The novel is stocked with well-developed, fascinating entities. Joel’s father, Neil, a brilliant and deeply ascetic man, has a weakness for violence and his own definition for the word “blood.” Has he killed in the past? And, if so, will he again, and soon? Another entity is a stranger that Joel encounters called Tom, a sort of human/alien hybrid, who seems to know too much about Joel’s past. Along with these characters are oddly-shaped, silver clouds that seem to be keeping a watchful eye on Joel’s whereabouts.
He trudged into the desert, taking almost
nothing with him but water and a ghost-
ly old photo
of a lady beside the ocean.
That first night,
he lay above a dry creek bed. Below,
he heard vipers moving through the sand
with a side-winding motion,
and
he did not sleep.
He’d grown obsessed with the notion
of walking deep
and deeper into the wilderness. By
the third day, his lips were swollen and dry.
Now he was completely isolated,
surrounded by a desert that dominated
with its glittering sand
and
not high above, a sky so huge and blue
that it scared him to look too long upon.
There was nothing new
now under his sun. By now, his water was gone.
Day five, he quit moving altogether
and sat instead for hours, with his photo and leather
flask, coughing in the cool valley of a dune,
watching the daytime moon,
gibbous and gorged, roll by like an eroded stone.
The sky was biblical. The sun was white as bone.
Finally, on the evening of his sixth day,
when his strength had all but slipped away,
a willowy woman in a white dress appeared.
She had long black hair, which stirred in the xeric
air, and though his eyes were watery and bleared,
he knew for certain who it was. And so
it was that she beckoned him. He rose, sure but slow,
up from the ferric
and rust-colored sand,
as if this is what he’d been waiting for all
along. And,
leaving his shoes and other belongings
behind, he followed her into
the drifted dunes, beneath a sky of melting blue.
And that was it. Days later when they found his things,
they saw the photo half-buried in the sand.
It was a black-and-white of a black-
haired woman, very elegant, tall,
whose short life,
two years back,
had been eaten away in a strange
Patagonian land, below a mountain range.
That woman was his wife.
The following questions were submitted to me some time ago by Mr. Maxwell Hoaglund, of Slagheap magazine, which unfortunately closed its doors before this penetrating Q & A appeared. I publish it here with Mr. Hoaglund’s full knowledge and permission. Q: Congratulations on the success of your novel More and More unto the Perfect Day. Where can we read an excerpt?
Ray Harvey: At my website.
[Editor’s note: You can also hear an excerpt here:
Q: If your finger isn’t typing, where is it?
Ray Harvey: It’s on the pulse of the people.
Q: Are you really a bartender?
Ray Harvey: Yes.
Q: What is your signature cocktail?
Ray Harvey: The Harvey Fingerbanger.
Q: It sounds fantastic.
Ray Harvey: You have no idea.
Q: What all’s in it?
Ray Harvey: Two parts finger, three parts banger. The rest is secret.
Q: Working in the food and beverage industry — has it made you into a foodie?
Ray Harvey: Perish the thought!
Q: Do you have dietary restrictions? Vegetarian? Vegan?
Ray Harvey: No, no, no. Not that which goeth into a man can defile him but only that which cometh out; for out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. Gourmandizing of any kind is one of the surest signs of stupidity. The food snobbery of the vegan or the food snobbery of the vegetarian or the food snobbery of the organic-only cult, no matter how shabbily dressed, is every bit as beastly as the food snobbery of the rich and famous.
Q: As an anti-environmentalist —
Ray Harvey: I’m not primarily an “anti-environmentalist.” I’m primarily an anti-authoritarian. Environmentalism is just one of many species of the genus Authoritarianism, nothing more, nothing less.
Q: As an anti-statist, are you stalking your victims? If so, doesn’t your tendency to shoot from the hip startle them?
Ray Harvey: On the contrary, it lulls them into a false sense of security.
Q: Your article on Postmodernism, including the comments, created a small sensation in our office. What, may I ask, is reality? Can you prove existence?
Ray: Reality is existence. And existence is that which exists. Reality is that which is. The only alternative to existence is non-existence. But non-existence does not exist. There is only existence. In the words of Victor Hugo: “There is no nothing.” Regarding whether we can prove existence: yes. Proof, by virtue of what it is, assumes existence. How so? Existence must necessarily come before proof, because of what proof actually is: i.e. the preponderance of evidence which admits no other alternative. Evidence means that something exists. The very proof of existence is existence itself, to which there is only one alternative: non-existence. But non-existence does not exist. Only existence exists.
Q: Where do thoughts go when one is not thinking?
Ray Harvey: Where does the wind go when it’s calm? Said Voltaire.
Q: Who or what have been your biggest literary influences?
Ray Harvey: Karl Shapiro, Dostoevsky, Blood Meridian and Suttree [by Cormac McCarthy], Nine Stories [by J.D. Salinger].
Q: More than once, you’ve been accused of declaiming, as you’ve also been accused of ribaldry.
Ray Harvey: Paraphrasing Nabokov, Conventions and cliches, particularly of the sexual variety, breed remarkably fast: the blotchy buttock, the bulbous breast, the baggy balls, phony moans of bliss, the endless talky-talky of dick this, ass that, vagina this, oral that — it’s worse than primitive: it’s boring. The lack of style in these discussions of various copulation techniques is enough to wilt the most tremendous of boners.
Q: What is the real difference between Democrats and Republicans?
Ray Harvey: There is no real difference: the difference is purely superficial. Death by taxation, or death by so-called tradition; death by property expropriation, or death by middleclass morality. Take your pick.
Q: I see —
Ray Harvey: But I’d like to say a little more about that, if I may: if you’re going to call yourself liberal, or if your going to call yourself conservative, fine. At the very least, though, have the decency to refrain from calling yourself a proponent of freedom. Freedom is one thing and one thing only.
Q: Yes?
Ray Harvey: That absence of compulsion. Freedom does not does not guarantee wealth. It does not guarantee success. It simply means that you are left alone. Freedom means no entitlements, no minimum guarantees, no help (or hindrance) at all, no public education, no “free” health care, no drinking laws, no illegalization of drugs, and so on.
Q: What exactly do you mean?
Ray Harvey: I mean that everyone believes in freedom — until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. Then no one believes in it. Freedom does not mean “freedom until it comes to legalizing drugs.” Nor does it mean “freedom until it comes to doing away with speed limits.” It does not mean “freedom until it comes to recycling.” It does not mean “freedom until it comes to a woman’s right to decide what happens to her own body, and what lives off that body.” Freedom does not mean “freedom until liquor stores are open on Sunday.” It does not mean “freedom until it comes to no drinking-age laws.” Freedom doesn’t mean “freedom until a war breaks out, at which time you can lawfully be drafted.” None of that is freedom.
Q: What is justice?
Ray Harvey: Justice is the legal recognition of the fact that each and every human being, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, is individuated and sovereign, and no human or government institution may therefore infringe upon another’s property or person.
Q: Why is justice important?
Ray Harvey: The path of the just is as a shining light, which shines more and more unto the perfect day. But what is the alternative? Only injustice. We are each born free. Freedom is a birthright.
Q: Gordon Gano once said “Happiness is a word for amateurs.” Do you think that’s true?
Ray Harvey: No, I do not.
Q: What is happiness? A chocolate turtle?
Ray Harvey: Yes.
Q: Would it be fair to say that you see life as a funny but cruel joke?
Ray Harvey: No, it wouldn’t fair. That question has the unmistakable shimmer of inanity. Life is neither inherently silly, nor inherently angst-ridden. The only alternative to life is death. I suppose you could say death is what gives life meaning in the sense that death is what life constantly strives against. But it’s not the other way around: from the perspective of the dead, life obviously doesn’t carry any particular relevance. I think you may be confusing me with the walleyed Existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, or one of his ventriloquist dolls.
Q: Where is The Good located?
Ray Harvey: The Good ultimately resides inside the human brain, which is conceptual by nature and operates (therefore) by means of choice. There can be no good nor evil if there is no choice. Thought is not automatic. Thought requires effort; it requires an act of will. Quoting the psychologist Rollo May: “When we analyze will with all the tools that modern psychology brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or inattention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of will is really effort of attention; the strain in willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, i.e. the strain of keeping attention focused.” That is where The Good resides. That is ultimately the source of all good and all bad behavior: the choice to pay attention or not. The rest is just an elaboration on this.
Ray Harvey: BartenderThe following interview, which was brief but I think penetrating, was conducted January 27, in Aspen, Colorado, and appeared in the February issue of Cunning Stunts. The questions were put forth by the interviewer, Ms. Eileen Appleton, who has graciously allowed me to reprint it here:
If he’s anything — and there does seem to be some question about that — he’s difficult to pin down. We finally caught up with him outside a Starbucks (not that one, the one down the street), near 31 Flavors, whereupon he invited us in for what he calls a spot.
It was 3:00 pm on a wintery afternoon in late January, the sky overcast but luminous. He prefers to sit inside these days, basking, he says, in that artificial air. When asked why, he demurs, a lackluster backhand, and then more or less says that he’s not one of the people who eats and drinks uncompromisingly al fresco. We believe him.
Muscular, mid-to-late thirty, Harvey has repose; he never touches his face. We sit near the slablike window that commands a view of the outlying plains. The telephone poles fall away into an intricate horizon. Distant semis flash….
Q: First things first: Bon Scott or Brian Johnson?
Harvey: Bon Scott.
Q: Why?
Harvey: Because he’ll win the fight.
Q: Ronny James Dio or Ozzy Osborne?
Harvey: Ronny James Dio.
Q: Why?
Harvey: Because he’ll win the fight.
Q: How was your trip in? We heard rough.
Harvey: Actually, I found it tame.
Q: Many readers have noted a sort of subterranean preoccupation with the ribald in your writ—
Harvey: The what?
Q: The ribald.
Harvey: Sex in movies, sex in books, sex in blogs — I find it all really too tedious to talk about. Let us, for once, beg off.
Q: Okay. If, as you’ve said, “there is no order in the universe apart from what man himself puts there,” how, then, do you explain the symmetry of the universe?
Harvey: Order is an epistemological word; it applies only to the conceptual mind. The universe is neither orderly nor disorderly. Man imposes order, like legends on a map. The universe simply is. It could be no other way.
Q: No?
Harvey: Yes. Matter does not possess a will. Matter, therefore, must act as it does.
Q: Your name–
Harvey: Yes?
Q: In many people’s mind, it’s inextricably associated with the fight for freedom.
Harvey: I don’t know that that’s true, but I have no objection to it.
Q: But what is freedom? Isn’t it just a word?
Harvey: No. Freedom is the absence of force. I am opposed to force, in every manifestation. I believe only in the voluntary, the consensual, the chosen.
Q: What’s force?
Harvey: Force is a fist up your motherfucking ass.
Q: Do you really loathe environmentalism as much as you say, or is it partially put on?
Harvey: The truth is, I loathe environmentalism more than I could ever say.
Q: Why so?
Harvey: Because environmentalism is a lie. It’s bandwagon thinking. It’s non-thinking. Environmentalism — and I once, clear back in high school subscribed to it and so I know — is at its root a bastard philosophy, very seductive to some, but predicated upon entirely spurious premises. Environmentalism is repackaged Marxism. Surely everyone knows by now that Marx has been discredited.
Q: By whom?
Harvey: History has discredited him.
Q: In what way?
Harvey: Every communist regime has failed; no socialist regime has ever flourished. The only societies that have truly flourished are those that have been free, or relatively free — by which I mean: to the extent that a society is free, both economically and politically, is the exact extent to which they flourish.
Q: Others have commented upon your conspicuous concern with the lyrical, even as you rail politically.
Harvey: What of it?
Q: It has struck many of us as incongruous and almost quaint. Is there anything you care to say about that?
Harvey: Yes. Poetry is language at its best. It is concentrated speech. Poetry is style. It is density of expression. Poetry is writer’s writing. Poetry is advertising — in good faith.
Q: Who is your favorite poet?
Harvey: Karl Shapiro.
Q: What is your favorite novel?
Harvey:The Possessed.
Q: Who is your favorite character in literature?
Harvey: Stavrogin.
Q: How do you feel about form in poetry?
Harvey: Form is technique, and prosody is skill. Scansion is symmetry. To say that form is an artificial construct is like saying that chess is artificial because it has rules. I feel very good about form.
Q: But where are the rules for poetry? Are they in the sticks and stones? The sea? The sky?
Harvey: The rules “live in the masterpieces,” as Shapiro said. Rules are rooted in the nature of the human mind, which seeks order.
Q: How does one learn to write?
Harvey: Imitate.
Q: Where do you write? In what sort of space?
Harvey: Standing near the window, where the light is strong. You could say I write in a cold sweat, or a whitehot fever.
Q: And yet?
Harvey: And yet? Yes. And yet. And yet I love the nighttime, when the moon rages and the lovers lie abed with all their griefs in their arms.
Q: Rewriting?
Harvey: Writing is rewriting.
Q: Haiku?
Harvey: You can make it tough.
Q: What is beauty? Is it anything?
Harvey: It is everything. Beauty is symmetry. Beauty is the bah-bah in black sheep. It is the esthetically pleasing, it is the lovely. Beauty is not, finally, ineffable, but it is elusive.
Q: Some have said you’re obsessed with the body human. Would you say that characterization is true?
Harvey: The body human is my deepest obsession. Why? All that’s born, dies, and as the flesh without spirit is dead, so is the spirit without flesh dead. The spirit is a wind that passeth away and cometh not again. Therefore, whatever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest. And remember: Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Q: Is human talent innate?
Harvey: No. It is completely willed.
Q: Come, now! Completely?
Harvey: Yes. You decide, you act. Or not.
Q: What is your opinion of vigilante justice?
Harvey: Relatively low.
Q: Speaking of which, are you yourself highbrow, as you’re sometimes accused?
Harvey: Hardly.
Q: By default?
Harvey: If at all.
Q: You would agree, though, man’s understanding of the eternal, is iffy at best–
Harvey: No, I wouldn’t. There’s no real mystery about the eternal, even though it’s made out to be so very mysterious. Time, like order, is epistemological. It happens inside the human brain. As such it only pertains to humans. Time is specifically the human way of measuring movement. Take the human brain out of the equation and there is no such thing as time: there’s only movement. Movement of what? Things. Planets, particles, dust, matter — all these things do not truck with time. The universe is out of time in the literal sense. It is non-temporal. It is timeless.
