Review by Lucas Mancini

Object-Oriented Spine Cracking: on John Trefry’s Massive

I don’t have much time. I do have a news hook but one more day and it’ll straighten out completely. We’ve all been discussing difficult books and how to criticize them. If you’re reading this you probably know the reference,¹ which at least saves me finding an audience. My contribution to that discussion isn’t original, but it’s simple, comprehensive and comprehensible. Book reviews exist to do two things: sell more books and sell more book reviews. Any further debate is a matter of priority depending on who signs whose paychecks.

Critics love difficult books. See, the world as we knew it has been ending continuously for let’s say 100 years,² and novelists have been coping with this using cut-up and metatextuality.³ In short, the consensus in high literary art says that difficult times call for difficult works. The open argument is whether difficulty, offering more questions than answers, democratizes critique and makes the critic obsolete. For their part, critics have struggled deciding whether to spend time advertising or demystifying⁴ artists who could put them out of a job. This might sound ridiculous to anyone familiar with the great American television press prestige television. Doesn’t a truly great piece of art, high or popular, always demand more explanation?

It would be impossible to read 100% of Massive. As a critic this is great for me, and not to speak for all critics, because I’m lazy and kind of stupid. Maybe difficulty leads to democracy after all. With its braided columns of text and Chooseco LLC flows, Massive is an explanation-generator of transfinite potential. It’s collage, it’s concrete, it appears more opaque and abrasive by spilling its guts: list poetry, sinews of natural and architectural detail, state repression, cultic milieu, unnatural construction and inhuman voices. “There is nothing there, but everything is there”.⁵ The print-object very apparently began its life “composed of various notepad files [.txt] / all split into categorized folders”⁶ then shaved into ribbons, laid and overlaid to disorienting effect. This is, above all, a feat of word processing. Massive is an object-oriented novel.

Now we can tell for sure whether Massive is worth your time, which is running out, just like mine, without a doubt. Do you need to read further right now, then go out of your way and out of your pocket, maybe past a picket line, to come into possession of Massive?⁷ Did that phrase “explanation-generator of transfinite potential” upset you even a little? If yes, skip it. There’s much more egregious theoryspeak where that came from.

John Trefry has earned his jargon. Aside from building Inside the Castle as a labor of love⁸ and to publish his first novel Plats, he is a professor of architecture. This informs his work and its granularity of description. As much as Plats treats the inside of your head, it’s also a blueprint of Los Angeles in stark but jagged detail, plotless other than the paths a reader beats through it. The text of Massive splits up similarly between backlit schematics and personal psychology, but it’s difficult to keep track of any given object or subject through all of the cut-up and metatextuality.⁹ Here, Massive would benefit proportionally to its scope from ctrl+f / highlight and/or TreeMap functions, unless, of course, wearing back and forth at a book’s spine with a stack of those little highlighter tabs is your idea of a wonderful evening.¹⁰ I would get more out of this book, or get it much sooner, as a hypertext object: Massive is in “contentious conversation with writing that originates beyond the page”¹¹ and contentious full stop with most audiences, too.

If Massive becomes a rare book, I recommend a digital copy.¹² I couldn’t unconditionally recommend a purchase in print. A difficult surface, once you crack it open, often reveals straightforward inconvenience underneath. This loops me back to the critic’s double-bind: I might not want to sell you a copy, but I would like more books like Massive to exist. It’s in my interest as a reader to offer up a rave, but how do you rave about a book without a story that never ends? How am I supposed to recap it, what’s the best way to add to its prestige? Maybe Trefry is right, time and taste have finally collapsed under the weight of information and all that’s left to do is shuffle notepads, perforate, and collate. But life gets shorter one day at a time. Time falls apart and there’s still none of it to waste.

Lucas Mancini

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