The Infernal

November 17, 2014
In Doten’s artfully deranged debut novel, the “war on terror” is revisited as a feverish science-fiction odyssey starring disfigured versions of Osama bin Laden, Condoleezza Rice, and Mark Zuckerberg. In a desert in the Middle East, a possibly divine child with burned flesh sets a kaleidoscopic series of monologues in motion. “The traitor” Jimmy Wales is sent, as part of an amorphous conspiracy, to extract the boy using the Omnosyne, a destructive machine consisting of pure information. Bin Laden leads his “Blood Youths” in an increasingly bizarre series of experiments determined to unravel the boy’s secrets. Adopted siblings Rice and L. Paul Bremer long for each other within the reaches of the sprawling American-occupied Green Zone. Roger Ailes rants about turtles. Folded into these transmissions is Zuckerberg and Nathan Myhrvold’s Nintendo-esque struggle for “the cones of power,” the vaudevillian misadventures of two survivors of a drone strike, and, most significantly, the poignant story of an American soldier missing a leg. Doten frames his post-historic “memory index” in virtuosic, antic prose, but his goal is neither purely satire nor surrealism for its own sake. Rather, his novel constructs a new language to confront atrocity and becomes in the bargain a story that truly thinks outside the cage.

Starred review from January 15, 2015
Doten makes his fiction debut with a semihistorical novel-the kind of book people label "postmodern" because they don't know what else to call it.In the shadow of the Iraq War, the world seems a little strange: Jay Garner puts Paul Bremer in a chokehold on the way to the Green Zone; Osama bin Laden argues with his "students" in a cave while a dialysis machine keeps him alive; Jimmy Wales is a murderer; Mark Zuckerberg seems trapped in a digital landscape called the New City; and Condoleezza Rice was once a photographer who shot unused production stills for Chinatown. What's going on here? Doten's book-a stylish, surreal portrait of a 21st century gone mad-will make you scratch your head. Parts of it recall Coover's The Public Burning, in which a crazed Uncle Sam hurls invective at Richard Nixon; other parts recall Infinite Jest's plurality of voices (though in Doten's novel, the voices are filtered through-and sometimes garbled by-a database). This book is a considerable achievement, not of storytelling-there's not really much of a cohesive plot here-but of nerve, scope and ambition. Perhaps Doten is too brash: This is one of those books where you find yourself thinking less about the characters than about the author's fireworks. (Doten, an editor at Soho Press, seems to acknowledge this by casting himself in the novel as "the man who runs a Big Six New York City publisher.") But in certain moments, Doten drops his narrative pyrotechnics and plays it straight. Consider a character named Tom Pally, a veteran adapting to life at home: Yes, there's the surreal detail of him throwing up maggots, but otherwise, his chapters tell a powerful story of displacement. Doten's dazzling novel shows off his intellect and facility with language.

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March 1, 2015

In the Akkad Valley early in the Iraq War, a U.S. soldier encounters a boy burned nearly beyond human recognition who is promptly made a prisoner, as it's believed that he possesses vital information. A discredited scientist with a "terrible apparatus of extraction" is then brought in, and the visions that spill from the boy in the voices of Osama bin Laden, U.S. officials, and more are recorded in computer documents invariably marked . VERDICT Something as utterly surreal as this narrative might be the only way to shed light on the ugly truth of war, as we see that for most of these players, the stage they strut on matters more than the tragedy of burned children. Challenging for all but sophisticated readers yet a brilliant imagining of what fiction can do.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2014

In Iraq, an interrogator with an exacting instrument of torture elicits voices from a badly burned boy (including those of Osama bin Laden and Condoleezza Rice) that together capture a world remade by the war on terror. Soho Press senior editor Doten's work has appeared in venues like Conjunctions and New York magazine.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.