A Review of Forgotten Work by Jason Guriel
By Steven Knepper
Jason Guriel, Forgotten Work. Biblioasis, 2020.
Review by Steven Knepper
Jason Guriel’s verse novel Forgotten Work begins “around 2007” with a band half-rehearsing, half-arguing about prospective names. The guitar player Lou argues for “Lout”: “A word that clubbed you like a cord of wood. / It’s dumb, said Lou, but arty dumb, like blood- / smeared dolls deployed as drumsticks…” The keyboardist Jim suggests “The Dolphins,” for a 1967 Fred Neil song with a long afterlife in covers. This name gets struck down, so he instead suggests “Pale Fire” for Nabokov’s novel, “half poem, half prose.” After erudite discursions from his fellow band members, the taciturn bass player Hal suggests that “Pale Snob” might be the most fitting band name. The band ultimately settles on “Mountain Tea,” after Peter van Toorn’s cult classic of Canadian poetry. They go on to produce one two-song vinyl album titled The Dead.
This album becomes the “forgotten work” of the novel’s title (or, since the novel is a meditation on forgotten or obscure work in general, The Dead becomes the novel’s central instance of such work). Guriel’s novel takes us across the middle decades of the 21st century, as The Dead becomes a legend of musical perfection with only a handful of surviving copies. By 2064, when the novel ends, perhaps no copies survive at all. (Warning—minor spoilers ahead, but no big reveals.)
The legend of Mountain Tea and their lone album takes off when Patti, a reporter for MOJO magazine, discovers archaic recording technology (an iPod) that turns out, first, to still work, and second, to contain The Dead: “The MOJO writer, awestruck, judged this start / Not just a strong debut: this work was art.” Patti is stunned that The Dead is not on the Internet—or, the Zuck, as it is called in Forgotten Work, where the Meta magnate seems to have monopolized the tech world (Zuber, ZuckTube, Zweets, etc.). One wonders if Guriel had published his novel in 2024 instead of 2020 if he would have chosen “Musktube” or, in some post-cage-match merger, the “Xuck.” Only a few copies of The Dead ever existed, and apparently whenever someone tried to upload it, diligent copyright bots scrubbed it immediately. So, Patti writes a “Buried Treasure” column on Mountain Tea for MOJO, igniting interest in the band. More literal ignition happens soon after. It so happens that Patti is not only writing for MOJO. She has also been writing pseudonymous critical reviews for a rogue magazine called The Hatchet Job, and she has been found out by the terrorist group Artists for a Safer World, who go after any critic who dares to write a negative word. They blow up her apartment and the iPod with it. (Guriel has been known, as a reviewer, to sharpen the hatchet on a whetstone himself.)
In the wake of Patti’s article, an online community, The Gordian Knot, forms to track down The Dead or at least to speculate about it. At every turn, the Knot’s founder is foiled by the ultra-wealthy “Edmund H,” who buys up the rare copies of The Dead that do go on sale but then refuses to play them due to some sort of obsessive fixation. Eventually, Edmund H decides to play the album at a celebrity event on his yacht. But someone apparently hacks his trusty sailor bot and ends up destroying all of H’s accumulated copies of The Dead and stabbing H to death. Bot mishaps are one of the ever-present dangers in Guriel’s mid-twenty-first century, as are teleporter accidents—the car crash of the future—which can grotesquely scramble up the flesh of people who teleport together. Such an accident claims the lives of two members of Mountain Tea. In the closing chapters of Forgotten Work, a bookstore owner named Poe and a middle schooler named Cat rappel into the depths of a crater left behind when Montreal was struck by an American missile gone astray. They are pursuing the legend of Mountain Tea into one of the few places on Earth where the Zuck can’t reach.
Christian Wiman’s cover blurb for Forgotten Work reads, “This book has no business being as good as it is.” By this, Wiman might mean that many prospective readers will be skeptical of a sci-fi verse novel written in heroic couplets, heavily enjambed but with only sparing use of near rhyme and wit caps at the start of each line. If you are one of these skeptical prospective readers, set your doubts aside and give it a try. It really is good. The story is highly entertaining, by turns witty and dramatic, with vivid characters, zany antics aplenty, and some creative sci-fi worldbuilding. (Guriel’s animal-plant hybrid pets are a particularly nice touch.)
The verse is tight and frequently ingenious. Can Guriel write a bad couplet? Sure. How couldn’t there be a few clunkers in 216 pages? Does the novel drag in places? Only in Chapter 6 for me, and even that chapter has a doozy of an ending. The subsequent chapter, about the final days of Edmund H’s lonely butler bot Jennings, is one of the best in the novel. Does the sci-fi world-building get a little too hokey at times? I am not sure about this description of the sailor bot that turns murderous on Edmund H:
…Cut back to H’s yacht The man himself up on the stage, a bot Beside him, man-sized but without a pilot- The sort of model that can thread an eyelet, On a sail, with cordage, or spot stars To steer by, or tend main-deck tiki bars, Or tie assorted sailor's knots, or speak When spoken to. It's made of oiled teak And sports a blue-and-white-striped naval shirt, Plus white capris. It seems to be inert.
Regardless, throughout the vast majority of the novel, Guriel turns in a rollicking performance. He pushes it right from the get-go. Lines five and six of Forgotten Work rhyme “Rollins” (as in Henry Rollins) and “Dolphins.”
And the novel is more than verbal pyrotechnics, knowing allusions, sci-fi special effects, and wit. There are moments of genuine insight and wisdom:
Of course, he knew that those who brood the way Fellini's privileged male director does Ignore the drones enabling them, the buzz Of labour on the set. And yet he felt The self behind each scene. The cult band Felt, The poet Frost, Fellini-Hubert knew Their work expressed their souls, which passed clean through Our sieve-like theories. Souls were real, the art They made the proof...
Forgotten Work is also a meditation on what is lost in the age of digital plentitude. Already in 2024, most albums and books are available instantaneously on the Internet. The Zuck of 2063 is even more all-encompassing. In such a future, it is precisely the inaccessible album that captures the imagination and fuels passion, that brings together committed fans, that provides anticipation and excitement. These are concerns of Guriel’s excellent 2022 nonfiction book On Browsing, a defense of (and in places an elegy for) the real-world search for books, music, and movies. Along with its many stand-alone merits, On Browsing is a kind of commentary on the themes of Forgotten Work. (I recently reviewed On Browsing for The Lamp magazine.)
Guriel was an accomplished lyric poet before he turned to epic verse novels. In a 2020 piece for Lit Hub, he describes his decision to turn to the longer form:
By the spring of 2017, it had begun to occur to me that it might be time to try something harder, something more ambitious than short lyric poems (which I wasn’t writing anyway) or ephemeral prose.
It’s been a good move for Guriel (though I hope that he’ll still write the occasional lyric). He followed up 2020’s Forgotten Work with another, even more ambitious verse novel, The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, which is a kind of werewolf Moby-Dick. (Maybe a review of it will turn up on our little corner of the Zuck in the months to come.) In general, it is gratifying to see the recent boom in verse novels. (If you missed it, be sure to check out Jonathan Geltner’s recent NVR review of Michael Weingrad’s Eugene Nadelman: A Verse Tale of the 1980s.) Word on the digital street is that Guriel has started yet another. May the couplets continue to come fast and furious.
Steven Knepper edits the New Verse Review.
You can check out a substantial excerpt from Guriel’s Forgotten Work at The Walrus.
