The End of Being Known
Michael Klein
This book is critic-proof.
The phrase is usually applied to the most formulaic commercial fare: by-the-numbers romances, serial killer thrillers with dozens of bite-size chapters, celebrity-authored kids' stories. In those cases, it means the book will initially sell by the pallet-load, whether or not it's got any real intellectual or entertainment value. At the other end of the publishing spectrum lies another sort of critic-proof book: the volume so singularly styled and structured, so original in its processing of thought and language, that it defies critical framing and categorization. Michael Klein's The End of Being Known—teasing and inscrutable from its title onward—is a book of this provocative stripe.
A blockbuster comes with an easy-grip handle attached. The reader gets it, even before she reads it. The End of Being Known—like Klein's stunning previous memoir, Track Conditions—provides fuel for endless billows of rich analysis when you ignite it with the match of your mind. But there's no getting a grip on smoke. You'll either be mesmerized by the book's evanescent whorls and infinite shades of gray, or be frustrated by its shape-shifting recursion and elusiveness. The End of Being Known is a book that will provoke radically different responses from reader to reader. I thoroughly enjoyed wandering and wondering through its pages. I have no idea if you will.
In "Something Else Is The World," the first of nine thematically and chronologically overlapping sections in the book, Klein acknowledges what he's up to: He wants to "write books that have never been written before.that don't feel like you're just reading something." Indeed, working one's way through The End of Being Known is an active challenge. Klein resists conventional storytelling in his prose, flickering back and forth between remembered events, remembered dreams, and conscious inventions.
It's remarkably difficult to quote anything from this book without taking it out of context. Assonance is a quality not just found Klein's prose, but in the stories and perceptions he presents. Every line feels built upon every line before it. By weaving together his life's details in the order he chooses, Klein is making meaning. Plucking something back out causes meaning to unravel.
Klein lets us listen in on the echoes between his recent and long ago past. He invites us to join him in trying to notice the cryptic connections between his childhood and his adult romances, the conflicting senses of fullness and emptiness he finds in spending time alone, and his confusion about the very meaning of love. Everything is tightly—sometimes painfully—intertwined.
"I don't know how iridescence works," Klein writes early in the book, "I don't know how the process that finishes the iridescent material gives it the double color sense of being alive. But it does." Many narrative threads are woven into Klein's iridescent prose. Among the most prominent are reflections on his bonds with his father, stepfather, and identical twin brother. Like his father, Klein has been addicted to alcohol, and—in one of only passages from the book that reads well out of context—he writes beautifully about it:
"People who never drank aren't sober: they're just alive. I can't compare being just alive and sobriety. I can't compare sobriety to what I was like, or what it was like. The world was something and something that happened to the world. Like me. I was a writer who drank. And it took a while for writing to come back when I stopped drinking, because writing makes you disappear. In the beginning of the sober life, you are too busy appearing to disappear. Disappearing isn't mindful. You're afraid to disappear because you haven't felt this alive for a long time, and you don't want to miss life anymore. You feel good about living. You just live. That's what you do without alcohol. You live without alcohol. You live and live and live. Then, in moments of love or suffering, you remember living."
The alcoholism within Klein's family, and the author's troubling childhood sexual relationships with his brother and stepfather thrum relentlessly through The End of Being Known. Perhaps part of what's behind his iconoclastic writing style is an attempt to fight off some resultant sense of insanity. When conventional family life goes mad, perhaps all things conventional become tainted with madness; radical unconventionality becomes the flipside—a strange and beautiful pretension to sanity. Like an insurance policy written for himself, Klein's work boldly denies pre-existing literary conditions.
