A first time novelist parodies Ronald Sukenick's classic fiction of the sixties
Fetishists, dreamers, voyeurs, internet porn addicts, granola-heads, drug dealers, dorks, liars, layabouts, workaholics, sex maniacs, TV junkies, compulsives, neurotics, intellectuals, idealists: graduate students, all. In this book about the complicated experience of pursuing a Ph.D., Matthew Roberson details the curious world of a group stuck between childhood and adulthood, idealism and surrealism, representation and reality.
What he wants he thinks is to screw things up. If you screw things up they fall apart. If things fall apart then you're under the skin of the world. And when you reemerge when things come together again they come together differently. Different than before. So what does this mean it means he wants to fail. Believe it or not. He aspires to failure. It's possible however he realizes to fail at failing. Or to make of it a howling success.
In this, his first novel, Roberson rewrites Ronald Sukenick's classic fiction of the sixties, 98.6, simultaneously parodying earlier experimental life and art, while exposing present day vacuousness and alienation. It's a hilarious send-up of American narcissism, wherein Roberson brilliantly reveals video culture and the web-cam as nineties embodiments of metafictional self-fascination.
Fetishists, dreamers, voyeurs, internet porn addicts, granola-heads, drug dealers, dorks, liars, layabouts, workaholics, sex maniacs, TV junkies, compulsives, neurotics, intellectuals, idealists: graduate students, all. In this book about the complicated experience of pursuing a Ph.D., Matthew Roberson details the curious world of a group stuck between childhood and adulthood, idealism and surrealism, representation and reality.
What he wants he thinks is to screw things up. If you screw things up they fall apart. If things fall apart then you're under the skin of the world. And when you reemerge when things come together again they come together differently. Different than before. So what does this mean it means he wants to fail. Believe it or not. He aspires to failure. It's possible however he realizes to fail at failing. Or to make of it a howling success.
In this, his first novel, Roberson rewrites Ronald Sukenick's classic fiction of the sixties, 98.6, simultaneously parodying earlier experimental life and art, while exposing present day vacuousness and alienation. It's a hilarious send-up of American narcissism, wherein Roberson brilliantly reveals video culture and the web-cam as nineties embodiments of metafictional self-fascination.
‘I wouldn't have thought it could be done.’
—Ronald Sukenick
Trying to successfully bring off a novel-length homage to a work as formally audacious, influential, and truly peculiar as Ronald Sukenick's mid-seventies avant-pop masterpiece, 98.6, would seem to be a task best undertaken by writers who are either fools or fearless major talents. Fortunately Matthew Roberson clearly belongs to the second category. ’
—Larry McCaffery
Matt Roberson's 1998.6 is a funny and intelligent avant-pop appropriation and recapitulation of Ronald Sukenick's landmark innovation from the seventies. The result is an extraordinary exploration about how everything and nothing has changed.’
—Lance Olsen
Matt Roberson is a Brittain Teaching Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has a Ph.D. in English from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an M.A. in English from Pennsylvania State University. He has won the Milwaukee Fiction Award and worked as Editor-in-Chief for Cream City Review. His book Musing the Mosaic: Collected Essays on Ronald Sukenick is forthcoming from SUNY Press. 1998.6 is his first book of fiction.
