SOLEM-PFEIFER: Taylor’s debut novel reflects greatness of short stories

The moment Justin Taylor's debut novel "The Gospel of Anarchy" reached my hands (courtesy of his agent and the United States Postal Service) I was pretty psyched to read it; even amped, if you will.

Firstly, it's only 238 pages, which is a welcome departure from the 400-page novels I usually try to knock out on Saturdays.

But far more importantly, Justin Taylor is the first returning guest to this column (besides Nicholas Sparks who figuratively returns to this column nearly every time I write it and feel his hackneyed, melodramatic literary presence tainting the work of good writers everywhere).

When last we spoke of Justin Taylor, it was last September and in regards to his collection of short stories, "Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever." His tones were dark and his characters were customarily lost in a vividly, decaying vogues of their existences.

But as heavy and as gritty as the prose read, there was a form of refreshment to the disaster that the lives of the characters took on. It wasn't just an exercise in hand of creation invoking drama and distress into the lives of the characters, but all the misery and the numbness both moved and loitered, mixed with incorporations of religious imagery (Taylor is a practitioner of the Jewish faith) that I, as the reader, cannot pretend to fully understand.

"The Gospel of Anarchy" is a virtual extrapolation of those themes on to a long-form piece of literature.

The story of the protagonist, David, is set in Gainesville, Florida – a weighty, humid and above all, hot, setting that Taylor proved in "Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever" that he's quite adept at bringing to life.

The opening part of "The Gospel of Anarchy" is simply noted as "The Confessions." David is a young man drowning in the emotional filth of his failed college relationship with a girl named Becky. He works as a telephone survey taker, employed to pry into the lives of people who've lost their insurance. It's bleak – like the beginning of "Fight Club" or "Office Space," but with more emotional wreckage and Internet porn.

Yes, David's decadence is likely best surmised by his addiction to online pornography – downloading thousands of pictures out of habit and compulsion and no real enjoyment.

This is classic Taylor (somewhat curious terminology regarding a man with one collection of short stories and one novel). He employs metaphysical, philosophical and brilliant language to describe the world of Internet porn. It's like making Tennyson write a poem about your gutters or making him clean the mess himself (Go on. Make that uppity imperialist bastard build some character.)

Honestly, Taylor leaves me wondering how he taps so artfully into the psyche and the world of a character as far-gone as David. Yet he does, time and time again – bringing to life characters that leave us all feeling a little awkward by just how screwed up his characters can be.

But what's perhaps most startling is that despite our desire to stand back and gasp at the debauched characters, they're incredibly relatable.

Near the novel's beginning, David uploads to the web some nude photos that Becky once gave him when she was heading out of town to the internet in an act of vindication and weariness. Taylor writes:

"I was suddenly tired – exhausted, sick – of playing the vulture, the hyena of intimacy. Well, I had a life too, once, and here was the evidence. Let some other lonely asshole debase himself over my artifacts, my souvenirs."

It may seem depraved and we all may cry, "Never would a beacon of morality, such as myself, shame a former love by making symbols of our private life privy to the eyes of porn addicts." Good for us. We're all just great.

But David's spiteful, silent act speaks quite loudly to how humans behave when they feel stranded.

But the novel doesn't revel either. It moves rather nicely when David runs into an old friend and sets off a on a journey both of recovery and self-discovery. And it works quite well – not falling prey to the territory of preachiness. And avoiding such tropes over the long distance run, show Taylor's maturation from a writer capable of short stories to one capable of novels.

My every hope is that he's here to stay. He deserves it.

Chance Solem-Pfeifer is a sophomore news-ed major. Reach him at chancesolem-pfeifer@dailynebraskan.com.