Book Review: The Infernal by Mark Doten

The Infernal
A Novel by Mark Doten
Graywolf Press, February 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1555977016
$18, 440 pp.
Reviewed by Susan Thurston

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” is the cautionary warning in Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno, and a similar warning should be offered with Mark Doten’s highly experimental and equally fascinating novel The Infernal. And yes, there are similarities to be drawn between the two many-layered works.

In The Infernal, there isn’t any entry into hell…we’re already there. Doten fills these pages with more than a few snide swipes and sneers at our warring age, and you have the sense the author is delighted with his keen snark in this carnival house of literary mirrors, where contemporary icons of infamy are mashed up with the lesser known. Where Condoleeza Rice is a “(p)hotographer. Invalid. Adopted in early childhood by a wealthy family, together with L. Paul Bemer. Torn to ribbons by a big cat.” Where a character called Mark Doten, no relation to the author, is a bundler, and where Barack Obama is a “friend of bundlers.” Where the truth about the Akkad Boy is sought by using a device called the Omnosyne, which is as terrifying as it sounds. There’s a Green Zone, “cones of power,” and long strings of code.

You feel you have entered a world where The Matrix has been hybridized with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, where one is offered the nightmare of the Cloud and the New City. This isn’t a novel to read necessarily in one sitting; but if you do decide to take it in bits and tolerable pieces, plan for extra time to reconnect the dots and grab onto a few through-lines humming through a cacophony of code, images, and swirling monologues and sometimes inchoate dialogues.

The Infernal is loud and filled with a crowding fury. You will not feel steady or certain at any time while reading it, and eventually you don’t really care. You want to see what Doten does next, and by the end of the novel, you won’t be looking at the contemporary novel in the same way ever again.

 
Susan Thurston writes poetry and prose, with award-winning work published in numerous periodicals and anthologies including The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (American Public Media), Low Down and Coming On (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010), and Open to Interpretation: Water’s Edge (Taylor & O’Neill, 2012). In her novel Sister of Grendel (The Black Hat Press, 2016) she weaves a reconstruction of the Beowulf myth. In addition to LAR, her reviews have also appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She writes about books, writing, and more books at www.susanthurstonwrites.com.